Christy, three carpetbaggers, and other assorted opportunists
Circus in CA25 follows Katie Hill resignation, brings boys out of the woodwork to seek seat that flipped red-to-blue, male-to-female in 2018
CA25 Democratic Congressional candidate Christy Smith
by Marcy Miroff Rothenberg
When Congresswoman Katie Hill resigned her House seat at the end of October 2019, her constituents in California’s 25thCongressional district waited to learn who would be jumping into the race to replace her.
But no one quite expected the circus that has come to town.
Almost immediately, a Democratic front-runner emerged: Christy Smith, a first-term California Assemblywoman, former Department of Education policy analyst and 9-year Newhall, Calif., school board member. Smith often teamed up with Hill on the 2018 campaign trail, and her supporters regularly canvassed for both women, given the significant overlap in their districts, their natural political alliance, a long list of mutual endorsers, and the eagerness of voters to support women in response to the #MeToo movement.
Smith is the odds-on favorite in CA25. She rapidly amassed key endorsements from pretty much everyone in the state’s Democratic political leadership — Governor Gavin Newsom; Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; a baker’s dozen of U.S. Representatives, including L.A. locals Adam Schiff, Ted Lieu and Brad Sherman; and many dozens of state and local elected officials among them. She’s also been endorsed — in nearly unanimous votes — by multiple Democratic clubs in the geographically far-flung district and by a wide array of political organizations, including Planned Parenthood, Emily’s List, women’s organizations, public education groups, gun violence prevention organizations, environmental associations and numerous workers’ unions.
Despite that groundswell of support from across the Democratic spectrum, Smith now finds herself competing with seven men — three Democrats and four Republicans — in both the special election to send a representative to Washington, D.C., to finish out Hill’s 2019–20 term, and in the primary contest for the November general election for the 2021–22 Congressional term. (Both races are on California’s March 3, 2020 primary ballot, which means CA25 voters will be asked to vote twice for the candidate they prefer.)
Those seven are a motley crew indeed.
Carpetbaggers abound
Three are carpetbaggers — two Democrats and one Republican — who evidently think CA25 needs them to swoop in from afar and rescue us from…what? we do not know.
The best-known Democratic interloper is former conservative Republican-turned independent-turned-ultra-leftist media provocateur Cenk Uygur, who moved recently from Orange County to Santa Monica — still several districts and a good 30 miles from the nearest boundary of CA25.
Uygur kicked off his carpetbagging quest for political power by refusing to talk to local Democratic delegates to the state party’s November convention because, he asserted, they’re “all corrupt.” (I’m one of those delegates. I took umbrage.) Then he scheduled his first volunteer event at a location in the House district to the north of CA25. Neither gaffe has exactly endeared him to local Democratic activists who worked multiple election cycles to finally flip what had always been a GOP district blue last year.
Uygur’s long history of sexist, misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Armenian and just generally deplorable commentary on his show, The Young Turks (whose branding itself has garnered criticism) didn’t stop Bernie Sanders from endorsing him on Dec. 12, saying Uygur was “a voice we need in Congress.” (Uygur often lauds Sanders’ candidacy on the show, so one might logically infer that a quid pro quo had been negotiated.)
A day later, stung by waves of vocal criticism from local Democrats, including many of his own CA25 supporters, Sanders rescinded the endorsement (shortly after Uygur declared he would take no endorsements from outside the district — which likely means his endorsement list will fit on one side of a 2”x2” post-it-note).
The second outside-the-district Democrat is another Sanders acolyte from Eagle Rock, Calif., who has never run for public office and voted just once in the years since he moved to California. It’s hard to figure out why a passive political groupie would suddenly decide he must become a U.S. Congressman…but maybe someone told him it would be really, really funny to confuse voters about the Democrat they want to elect. His name, you see, is Christopher (not Christy) Smith.
The third carpetbagger, a Republican, is a living, breathing exemplar of political irony. He’s never lived in CA25 and fell mute when Smith asked him in a video message to identify the district on a state map. He’s also a convicted felon, having served in prison for lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russians on behalf of the presidential campaign of one Donald John Trump. His name: George Papadopoulos. (FYI, federal election law permits both carpetbaggers and ex-convicts to run for the House.)
The fourth Democrat in the race is Lancaster resident David Rudnick, who had announced he would challenge Hill for the Democratic nod back in September, before the revenge porn incident that forced her resignation. His Democratic bona fides are somewhat in question, however, given his work on Sen. John McCain’s first presidential campaign in 2000 and his self-identification as a “pro-lifer.”
Joining Papadopoulos on the GOP side of the contest are:
- Ousted CA25 Rep. Steve Knight, who lost to Hill by 9 points in 2018, shut down his congressional field offices and halted constituent services for the final two months of his term (while he and his employees continued to take their taxpayer-funded paychecks), and declared he was done with politics. (Interestingly, one of his 2016 campaign staffers, Jennifer Van Laar, is the Red State and Daily Mail contributor who wrote the Katie Hill exposes in which revenge porn photos of Hill were posted.)
- Ex-fighter pilot Mike Garcia, a local resident and novice politician whose campaign had been endorsed by Knight…that is, until the ex-Congressman decided to jump back in to the political arena.
- And Charles Patron, a CA25 Republican who announced back in March and whose campaign is so low-key that media outlets must use a grey-and-white silhouette of a generic male in place of the photo he hasn’t bothered to provide.
Policy matters — but decency matters, too
The supreme irony in the CA25 contest is, of course, the fact that seven, count ’em seven, men — three with zero connection to a district well known for preferring lifelong locals as its candidates — found it necessary to jump in the race after the district’s first-ever female House representative was ousted in a sexually charged political scandal.
Do these guys really think that CA25 voters — particularly the thousands of area women who volunteered on both Hill and Smith’s 2018 campaigns — are interested in going backwards politically? Do they really think that women — primary drivers of the 2018 election — are going to say, oh yeah, sure, we should just step aside and let a boy take over again?
And to be more specific, does Cenk Uygur (the only other candidate attracting much public attention) really think that CA25 voters want him to take Katie Hill’s place in Congress? That we’d want to replace a woman driven from power because of photos of her private, consensual sexual activity (whether she’d have been censured or ousted for violating House ethics rules was never determined) with a man who has repeatedly uttered sexist, misogynistic, condescending and demeaning comments about women? (Just Google his show if you don’t believe me.)
As for voters who might prefer Bernie’s policy positions to those of a more mainstream Democrat (who, by the way, is a better fit for the voters of still-purple CA25 — the district is not the bright blue Bronx of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez): they need to realize something. It’s no more acceptable for them to pooh-pooh criticisms of Uygur’s sexist, misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and otherwise offensive rants “because progressive policy” than it is for Republicans to ignore and excuse and justify Donald Trump’s hate-and-fear-filled rants “because right-wing policy.”
I have a word for people who try to minimize or rationalize or dismiss bad behavior because the person doing the behaving espouses policies with which one agrees — whether one is a right-wing hater or a left-wing ideologue.
The word is deplorable.
Blogger Marcy Miroff Rothenberg writes on politics and women’s issues. Her book, Ms. Nice Guy Lost — Here’s How Women Can Win, offers a comprehensive recap of the attacks waged on American women’s rights and opportunities by Trump and the GOP since 2016, and a to-do list for fighting back. It’s available from store.bookbaby.comand at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and Goodreads.com.
