After taking a minute to read the top story on the Drudgeport, where Vice President Cheney apparently accidentally unloaded some buckshot into a buddy while out hunting, I made my way on an afternoon tour of some of the politic blog sites. I came across a great entry by LA Weekly columnist Bill Bradley on his New West Notes site.
Bradley talks about Assembly Democrats meeting in Monterey at their retreat – and about the power of the Democrats "Anchor Tenent" – the California Teachers Assocation.
His post begins like this:
Dems: The “Anchor Tenant” Speakers, Er, Speaks
Willie Brown, the legendary wheeling-and-dealing former California Assembly speaker and ex-San Francisco mayor whose record-setting 15-year tenure as speaker triggered the successful term limits movement, used to say that a Democratic leader always had to pay a great deal of attention to the party’s “anchor tenants.” Because they’re the ones who pay the mortgage on the property.
Sometimes paying attention to the anchor tenants looks like one of the most famous logos in history, the old RCA logo “His master’s voice,” in which the nice dog edges up right next to the trumpet of the Victrola to make sure he hears the song right.
These days, there is no bigger “anchor tenant” for the Democrats than the huge teachers union, the California Teachers Association. They laid out an astonishing $58 million last year to gun down the Terminator and his ill-starred “Year of Reform” special election agenda. Top gun consultant Gale Kaufman was chief strategist for the teachers union and the other members of the Alliance for a Better California labor coalition that led the charge against Schwarzenegger. She and her team did a great job.
Her assessments of the election last year were on-target throughout, in sharp contrast to the — oh, how to put this diplomatically — errant nonsense being spewed forth by Team Schwarzenegger. Which is why I was struck by what she told me after the election. “It’s all about education,” she said, speaking of the “message” sent by voters in the special election. Really?
The rest of Bradley’s post is found here.