THANK GOD SOLORIO PUT ALL OF HIS EFFORTS INTO PASSING PROP 41!!!

By
Greg Diamond
– June 5, 2014Posted in: "The OC", Campaign Retardation 101, Fresh Juice, janet nguyen, jose solorio

Pedroza tells us that Jose Solorio has a message out to his supporters explaining how he lost so badly yesterday.

Dear Friends and Supporters,

I would like to thank everyone who has been a part of our campaign journey this year. Both our Solorio for Senate and Vote for Vets campaigns have been high-visibility, positive and well-received.

We’re glad we won our top-two primary spot, but we’re especially excited that we helped Proposition 41 receive so many votes in Orange County with our Vote for Vets campaign. We dedicated our resources in June to support Proposition 41 and will now focus on winning again in November.

We’ve known from local and statewide history that Democratic turnout is always low in June. We look forward to running a robust campaign, using our 2 to 1 fundraising advantage over our opponent, to win in November when Democratic turnout will increase significantly.

Our current State Senator Lou Correa, and supporter of ours, has always shared his campaign war stories, including how Democratic voter registration is stronger today than when he won on Election Day in November eight years ago. Also, even for his re-election in 2010, he lost the June primary to Anaheim Councilwoman Lucille Kring, but went on to win the November general election by 30 percentage points.

Our path to another win in November begins today! Thank you for being a part of it.

Sincerely,

Jose Solorio

I don’t even know where to begin.  He expects us to believe that he gallantly and selflessly chose to focus on Prop 41 in the primary rather than his own campaign?  WELL THANK GOD FOR THAT!  Let’s look at the statewide results map and see how his efforts helped us to avert a disaster!

Prop 41 Statewide Results Map

Just IMAGINE what this election results map would look like had Solorio not sacrificed his own interests to help pass Prop 41!

The truth, Jose.  Just tell the truth.  It looks something like this:

“We were confident of making the runoff even without a vigorous campaign and so chose to save our resources [including our 2:1 fundraising advantage, if that’s really true] for the November election.”

Now set aside that if Solorio really had a 2:1 fundraising advantage that he expected to carry into November, this was a really poor strategy.  It risked the sort of 20-point primary loss that could lead major funders, including the California Democratic Party upon whose largesse he depends, to reassess their priorities.  And it missed the chance for the sort of “dress rehearsal for November GOTV” that the Nguyen campaign has clearly been planning — and that went off wonderfully.  And most importantly from my perspective, if his claim is true, then Solorio’s intentionally failing to devote resources to the primary as the leading candidate in the region was probably the deciding factor in the narrow defeat of Jim Moreno in the overlapping Supervisor’s race, because Moreno needed that GOTV machine to be working NOW!

Luckily, Solorio is surely lying that he decided — completely unnecessarily, when it came to the affecting that already certain outcome — to devote all of his resources in the primary to Prop 41, presumably in order to get some of that sweet “respect for veterans” smell on his cheeks.  (If that’s what he wanted, he could have joined those of us working for a veterans’ cemetery in Irvine — the operative word not being “supporting,” but “WORKING.”)   “I was busy supporting Prop 41” just a face-saving excuse.  That’s OK, in principle — face-saving excuses have their role.  The problem here is that it’s a face-saving excuse so loopy, so patently dishonest, that it insults the reader’s intelligence.  And Solorio can’t afford to do that.

Solorio’s problem within the Democratic Party is that he is seen as self-serving and dishonest.  People who know what he did to foster business interests when holding the gavel on Assembly Committees have reason to fear what he’d do in the State Senate.  Unless he’s chairing a committee where supporting Democratic policies would pay off for him, handing him the gavel would be like writing off that committee’s entire docket for years.  His task is to convince potential volunteers that he won’t do that.  I don’t know what would accomplish that other than his having to wear a shock collar that any one of 50 people in the party could activate, but nevertheless, that’s his task.  The alternative is to hope that Janet Nguyen goes to jail before Halloween.

Disingenuous messages like this — he’s “glad” that he made the top two, but “exicited” (!) that he helped pass Prop 41 by putting up some reputation-burnishing signs — do not help him.  Telling the unvarnished truth — and acting in such a way that telling the truth about himself doesn’t hurt him — is what helps him.  And wrapping himself in the embrace of Lou Correa, who fought Lyin’ Lucy Kring to a virtual draw in the 2010 primary before squashing her hapless carapace in November, is a dangerous gambit because many people speculate that Correa would be happy to see Nguyen win because he still needs somewhere to land her victory it would open up the 1st District Supervisor seat for him.  But sure, we’ll play along — and we’ll see how often Correa appears with Solorio and how hard he slams Nguyen.

The biggest problem that Solorio has right now is that the Latinos in the district didn’t come out to vote — and that is largely a function of the fact that energizing Latino leadership in the district is lacking.  (Loretta does what she can, but she’s in DC.)  Having a Latino State Assembly representative would have helped to change that — and it would be someone with whom Solorio could negotiate — but no one did more to ensure that the 69th District seat would be held by Tom Daly rather than a Latino than Solorio himself.

As for Pedroza’s own commentary:

I know for a fact that Solorio did not attack Nguyen in the Primary because he wanted her to advance to the General Election but now she has a mountain of momentum despite her corrupt ways.

No, you don’t “know that for a fact.”  Long Pham was not going to beat Janet unless she was in jail; Solorio no more had to intercede in that choice than he did in the Prop 41 race.  Vern notes that Solorio and Pham are friends — and thinks that Solorio himself may have recruited Pham into the race.  Why?  Because it was important to hold Janet below 50% in the primary — not that you’d know it from the above letter.  And, of course, that didn’t happen.

To all of Solorio’s supporters — and I have been one, even if uncomfortably, for the past half-year — if you let him think that sending out obviously insincere (despite the “sincerely” signature, which is a nice touch) public letters like this helps him, then you are contributing to what will be, unless the FBI rides to his rescue, his defeat.  Be straight with him about the need to be straight with you.  (And if any of you can get a good deal on a shock collar in his size, please let me know and I’ll head to Kickstarter.)

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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)