Governor & Gubernatorial race 17 Oct 2006 11:42 pm
Governor’s race fireworks
The biggest fireworks in the governor’s race today: Phil Angelides spoke at St. Andrews African Methodist Episcopal Church in Sacramento and dropped the following bombshell in his remarks: “There have been news reports that have indicated the governor might have made comments defending apartheid. Now, you can make a judgment about those.”
Robert Salladay, who covers the story on the Los Angeles Times Political Muscle blog, surmises that Angelides was making a reference to a controversial remark that the governor was alleged to have made in an informal conversation with an acquaintance about the apartheid regime in South Africa. The governor’s office retorted that the Angelides campaign had become “untethered from reality.”
This suddenly aggressive Angelides posture is the subject of debate in numerous newspaper columns and in the California political blogopshere. Is Angelides being newly aggressive, or has he been this way all along and just been lying dormant for the past couple of months?
If that wasn’t enough, Angelides was also roundly ridiculed in blogs and news articles for saying in an Associated Press interview published yesterday, “I mean, thank God I’m in this race. It’s the only reason we’ve gotten three months of any kind of action from this governor that makes sense for Californians.”