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Last week's suggestion by former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco mayor Willie Brown that Antonio Villaraigosa just sort of let AG Kamala Harris have the U.S. seat in 2016 continues to reverberate. Southern California Latino leaders have been especially perturbed by Brown's attempted power play on behalf of his friend and protege, and now the Sacramento Bee has an editorial taking Brown to task. Excerpt:
People are allowed to support anyone they like in a race, and Harris is an impressive and eloquent candidate. What’s not fine at all, however, is for Harris’ supporters to shut down other viable candidates before they are even candidates.
That’s why we are more than a little offended at the suggestion by former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown that former Assembly Speaker and Los Angeles Mayor (and, perhaps now, former friend) Antonio Villaraigosa ought to sit out the Senate race. Brown is supporting Harris….Yes, we know political machines seek to manipulate the process, selecting candidates and deciding whose turn it is in any given race, and we know that the Bay Area politicos pull many of the strings of that political machine.
But surely someone realizes that dismissing the state’s politically and demographically ascendant Latinos and populous Southern California is the wrong way to achieve Democratic party unity.
