LAT's Morrison: Blindly Fighting for the Right to Lose

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Blindly Fighting for the Right to Lose
Patt Morrison

June 22, 2005

Heard the one about the man holding a gun to his own head and hollering, "Don't come any closer, or I'll shoot"?

It's funnier as a political joke — just fill in your favorite self-destructive entity. Today's is the California Republican Assembly, a grass-roots group that makes a habit of holding a gun to its own head, and the national Republicans, who evidently want to be just like it.

The CRA is the bemuscled bouncer of California GOP politics. You want the nomination, or even an endorsement? You go through the CRA. By the time a candidate staggers out the far end of its conservative purity-test grinder, there's not much electable meat left on his bones. The CRA would rather be right than president, or senator, or water commissioner. Californians are mixed nuts politically — pro-choice, pro-death penalty, pro-gun control — but the CRA has launched candidate after candidate who wows 'em in the primary but crashes and burns in November.

If minoxidil sells well in California, it's because Republicans are always tearing their hair out, wailing that its candidates "can't even beat Boxer." Barbara Boxer, who California Republicans have made into their Hillary Clinton, has bested every candidate the GOP has thrown at her, partly because most of them are further right than she is left.

The capper came in 2002, when all eight Republican candidates lost every single statewide office to Democrats, which hadn't happened since Chester Arthur was president. Matters were so wretched that George W. Bush — hardly a squishy moderate — sent out an apparatchik to try to hose down the CRA.

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Patt Morrison's e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.