Mayor Sam reports that the Democratic race for California Attorney General is already underway.

Mayor Sam reports that it is ombudsman Jerry Brown versus Los Angeles City Attorney Rockard J. Delgadillo. Jerry Brown has been a mainstay of California politics (as was his father) for decades. What I like about Jerry is that he seems to learn from his mistakes and get better with age. Even though he is a dye-in-the-wool liberal, he has been shown to be tough on crime. Not because he thinks it will win votes (a la Hillary Clinton), but because he knows what getting criminals off of the streets means to a city like Oakland where he is mayor.

So I feel good with his approach to street crime in the state. There is also little question that he’d be aggressive dealing with white collar criminals which he no doubt has great disdain (as do we). However Jerry’s approach to dealing with potential terrorism in the state is a question. California is an extremely influential state on national policy. If the state’s AG goes on an activism streak that runs against the grain of the federal government’s fight against terrorism, it will be at best a distraction.

Besides affecting national policy, California contains several hundred potential terrorism targets. Thus the ability for the state’s ranking law official to lead, and not impede, terrorism investigations becomes even more important–at least to us.

Independent Sources does not particularly like one issue campaigns. But in the case of California AG, fighting terrorism ranks very high on the list.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 at 6:55 am by Insider and is filed under California Schemin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.