That's how Lawrence O'Donnell pitched this segment on his special show yesterday. And it makes a fair amount of sense. California Democrats have some pretty strong younger statewide candidates, and Kamala Harris is definitely a stand-out:
But here's the thing O'Donnell didn't look at that I think he should have: the rather blatant hypocritical record of death penalty politics in California. Specifically, in 1986, an avalanche of conservative business interest poured money into the state to remove Chief Justice Rose Bird from the bench, along with associate justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin. The campaigns against them were based on their rulings against the death penalty... but it was almost six years after that before the first execution in California, and there have only been thirteen California executions altogether since then.
This a far cry from Texas, where they execute people by the truckload. There is no great bloodlust here in California on a regular basis, but it can be drummed up, with enough money, when the need arises. Afterward, however, no one at all seems to have any interest in try to sustain it. It's about as transparently phoney as death penalty politics gets anywhere in the US.
And that's what Karl Rove is trying to use in this race.
