Brian, face it, your argument just doesn’t hold up, especially when you consider conservative governor candidates in 2006 getting beaten badly in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Ohio, and elsewhere.

My blog is The World According to Greg and can be found at http://envirojustice.org/gregsworld but I really don’t post as often as I should. One of my New Year’s resolutions has been to get much more involved in my own blogging.

JMJ

McClintock sells his shtick like my latest representative, Ginny Brown-Waite. Why is it that the farther I get from home, the less likely I am to be represented by someone with whom I agre? Oh yeah. Duh.

And Greg, you are so right on. McClintock is a lock on his current, and probably endless, state senate seat, but he can’t win a bigger race because he is an establishment conservative. No one is pleased with that crowd, save for the most narrow, local interests.

Chris Smith is a rep from Jersey - wanna guess how many Jerseyites agree with that screwball, Brian?

Look, if it makes you conservatives feel any better, I don’t think the people are any more comfortable with status quo Democrats either. I know there are lots of divisive issues out there, but with a balanced government, perhaps we can get as close to progress as we can. If we go all one party or the other, we’ll probably be disappointed with the results.

JMJ

I don’t know how long threads here stay alive; I don’t hang around too long on stuff as I have a lot of other threads on other blogs and columns active. Further, I’m not by nature one who will respond to every nit someone wants to pick. I’m a Macro, not a Micro, kind of guy.

Jersey, not only CAN I differentiate between the type of statewide race, but I do. Are you telling me people look at the State Comptroller, or State Insurance Commissioner, the same way they do the State Governor or President?

If so, you need some re-education.

Greg, I did respond to that issue, and I don’t feel inclined to repeat myself. Further, you can simply read what I wrote to Jersey.

Enough of this. If one looks hard enough at anything, one can find exceptions. When I was in engineering school, I learned how to mathematically prove bumblebees couldn’t possibly fly.

And yet…. they insist on doing it.

Also, I’m not sure what this adds to the discussion but California has a long history of ticket splitting in the governor and lt. governor positions. If a Republican holds one office, it has often been a Democrat in the other, and that goes back many years.

C’mon, you can’t just negate statewide races just because they’re not “executive.” Senators run just as governors do, with the same demographics and voters in mind. I think you just don’t want to confront an uncomfortable reality here - running as a “conservative” will get you nowhere in statewide of national races these days.

JMJ

This is why we very often see Congress and the Presidency controlled by opposing parties.

Further, I can’t comment on all those senatorial names, because I don’t know the issues they were addressing, or anything about them personally. I know a little bit about Santorum, and that’s it.

I stand by my assessment.

And Greg’s right. The examples I used were all powerful, incumbant, conservative GOP senators. Conrad Burns had been around forever - John Tester, a Dem populist beat him. in Montana, of all places, George Allen had been pegged by the GOP establishment to run for president in ‘08. He’s nowhere to be seen now - and that was in super-red Virginia. Mike DeWine suffered from GOP scandals in Ohio, so perhaps he wasn’t the finest example, but he had been a very powerful senator. Jim Talent was caught up in the Delay scandal, and though Missouri is notoriously hard to call, he had been a GOP rising star until his loss to Claire McCaskill.

But all these senators had one thing in common - the were all establishment “conservatives” who ran as such and lost in ‘06 in statewide races.

I don’t follow all the gubenatorial elections, but I did follow the Jindahl race, if only because I was curious to see if a Punjabi could win a statewide office in the South. Seeing him win was actually quite a boost to my faith in humanity. But Jindahl was already a popular figure in LA and mostly thanks to a multibillion dollar tobacco settlement that he was able to play around with to fix some government programs there, and he had been a popular figure in the state for some years. His opponents were all unknowns and the race was cluttered with relatively strong third party candidates. But again, even though he is a consumate conservative, I can’t help but note that LA was in such bad shape, so dilapidated and screwed up, so infamously corrupt for so long, that any one other than a Democrat would have won that election. I’m surprised David Duke didn’t go for it! The people of LA were just plain embarrassed and wanted a change. I just don’t see him as a good example, whereas the examples I gave were conservatives from conservative states who were thrown out not because of local despair, but because the people of those states were sick of the conservative GOP status quo.

JMJ

If Arnold had not run it is likely Gray Davis would have survived the recall altogether. McClintock ran for Lt. Gov in the last election and lost. He placed a very very distant third in the 2003 recall election (18 points behind the 2nd place finisher) and has also lost elections for state controller twice and the House.