Looking to November - The Big Blue Wave by Eric C. Bauman

Eric Bauman - 2008 Rep. George Brown Awards Dinner

Looking to November

-The Big Blue Wave

by Eric C. Bauman

May 30, 2008

If you look out over the coming weeks and months, there is a huge dust storm brewing. Actually, it's not really a dust storm -- it's a big blue wave about to hit our state and our nation, from sea to shining sea.

One would need to ignore reality and suspend disbelief to imagine that the American public believes the Republican Party stands for fiscal responsibility, has genuine moral authority to preach about right and wrong or is the party of national security.

Americans have watched as President Bush, John McCain and others have led us into a recession, plundered the national treasury and created the largest national debt in world history. Rather than shrinking the size of government, there are now more people on the federal payroll than ever. Mike, there is not enough room here to detail the many acts that have undermined your party's claim to moral righteousness and superiority.

And then there's the Iraq war.

More than five years, untold billions of dollars, 4,000-plus American lives lost and thousands more with long-term injuries (to say nothing of Iraqis killed), the war keeps rolling on. And McCain fully embraces it, having said that U.S. forces could have a presence in Iraq for another 100 years!

When Democrats won the Illinois seat held by former Republican House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, you had to sit up and take notice. When we snatched a decades-long GOP House seat in Louisiana, one had to wonder what was going on. But when Democrats picked up a seat in the heart of red Mississippi -- even after Dick Cheney and McCain campaigned there -- you know this is not just a coincidence. The American people are rejecting the GOP brand and no longer believe its bromides and fairy tales.

The architects of the GOP revolution in the 1990s told us to give them control of Congress and they would reform it and make it work; they would cut waste, fraud and abuse and shrink government. They said for us to give them the White House and they would end international interventionism and lead a small, fiscally and socially conservative government that would transform our nation and create a permanent GOP majority. Now, after years of GOP control of the White House and Congress, the only things growing red in Washington are the government's account balances and the hemorrhaging of former Republican voters.

In California, the evidence of the big blue wave grows with every report of voter registration. Since the first of the year, Ventura, Stanislaus and Alpine counties have swung from red to blue. The spread between Democrats and Republicans in Fresno County is below 3%; in San Diego County it's less than 2%; and in San Bernardino County it's below 1%. Here in Los Angeles, there are now more than 2 million registered Democrats, a number that exceeds 50% of all voters in the county for the first time in many years.

With Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unable to find the billions in waste he claimed he would save, his unwillingness to cut up the state's credit cards, and last week's San Francisco Chronicle report that state government has grown exponentially under him, the voters are not happy.

Voters have tired of the lecturing, pontificating, holier-than-thou, me-first, save-yourself conservative nostrums of recent years. They are rejecting the politics of division and subtraction and responding to the Democratic message of progress and inclusion, built on a positive belief in hope, opportunity and possibility. It is the Democratic Party's approach of addition and multiplication that will replace the divide-and-conquer mentality of Karl Rove we had come to know.

Mike, the big blue wave is so strong that the L.A. County Democratic Party is running a full-bore, fully-funded "red zone" program to try to turn L.A.'s Republican areas blue. We are working with our colleagues in the Inland Empire, the Central Valley and the rural north to build for the future and transform these areas from red to purple and eventually to blue. We Democrats learned an important lesson from former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich: We must invest time and resources in every part of our state if we are to achieve a long-lasting blue majority. We're not there yet, but make no mistake, that dust cloud you see hanging around November is really a big blue wave of change.

Eric C. Bauman is the chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party. He can be reached at ericbauman@lacdp.org.