On Tuesday I took an eight hour drive from San Diego back to Sacramento. I made myself one promise the Monday before – that I would NOT be stuck going over the hill on the 405 looking at the Getty Center at 5pm. That I would plan to avoid one of the worst bottlenecks in the state by leaving on time from San Diego at 1:30 or 2:00. Instead I left at 3:00 and found myself, you guessed it, looking right up at the Getty Center at 5pm.

I’ve now made the drive back and forth probably 100 times in the last ten years, and based on this experience I am going to state some rules of thumb for statewide campaigns on the road, since my experience is everyone’s estimates are different. Assuming light or no traffic and averaging 75 miles per hour on the parts of the road that are not totally urban, it is three hours from downtown San Diego to downtown Bakersfield. It is an hour and a half from Bakersfield to Fresno. And generally two and one half hours from Fresno to Sacramento. I’m driving down again in a month and a half and will relay the time from Sacramento to Stockton to Modesto to Fresno to Bakersfield to downtown LA to Irvine to Carlsbad to downtown San Diego.

I was not back in Sacramento three hours when I was cornered and asked about 77th Assembly District Jack Dale, twice. It was the same topic, twice. It appears that as Santee Mayor, Dale had a run-in of some sort with the off-roading industry, and that they are now chomping at the bit to return the favor in kind. It’s always good for an industry or organization to take a scalp from time to time, just so office holders or office seekers are aware that they can do so (see CCPOA and private prisons or CDA with the Emmerson campaign). But this usually means generating the cash needed for independent expenditures on a pretty big scale so observers note the industry in question actually made the difference. The off-road industry and its various members and affiliates certainly has the capability of rising to the challenge and raising the cash, although they have not done so in the past for various reasons. It remains to be seen how far this will go, but like my grandfather always said – if you are going to point a gun at a man, you better pull the trigger.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.