Kamala Harris Will Win Attorney General Race in Photo Finish…Literally

As of this writing, Kamala Harris is ahead by about 34,000 votes with 300,000 left to count.  She will win.  We’re not surprised, we actually predicted her victory back in 2008.

Actually, we shouldn’t be that smug. If we had the energy to blog about the 2010 elections before they actually happened, we would have endorsed Ms. Harris but we would have secretly thought that Steve Cooley was going to win.    By October, we knew Jerry Brown would walk away with it and figured Gavin Newsom would win Lt. Governor, but we thought people would want a more conservative type as AG to balance the whole thing out and we we’re almost correct. Although even though nobody knows what the Attorney General does, it does have the words “Attorney” and “General” in it so we thought California voters would want an old white Republican in the gig under the mistaken belief that it was the AG’s job to keep an eye on Jerry and Gavin in case they wanted to legalize ecstasy and force paroled sex-offenders to live in our garages rent-free.  But somehow, California elected  three San Francisco liberals as our top elected officials.

So how did Cooley lose this close of an election?  Well the truth is, there’s really not a whole lot of difference between Harris and Cooley. They’re both career prosecutors, they run DA offices in counties with big city problems, they are both thoughtful and careful when it comes to tough criminal justice issues like three strikes, sex offender residency restrictions, and victims rights.  The differences, some may say, are cosmetic.  We think the difference in this election literally came down to cosmetic issues, namely – Cooley’s campaign photo.  Check it out:

On the left is the official photograph on his campaign website and the website of the LA county DA’s Office presumably shot when Cooley was first elected LA County DA 10 years ago.

On the right, is a photo of Cooley taken about a month ago.

This is going to sound harsh, but these really look like “before” and “after” photos from some kind of cautionary tale.  We here at Johnny California are kind of shocked that his campaign was OK with this sort of inconsistent branding.  This is the kind of thing that gets corporate marketing executives fired.

Even worse, was the website situation.  Cooley’s official campaign website had a photo of him sitting at a desk doing something boring. Yeah, we know that his campaign advisors thought it made him look like he was a grown-up doing the hard work for the people of California, but it really just made him look like a geriatric bureaucrat who was having a hard time staying awake.   The website for the Kamala Harris campaign presents a homepage slideshow of her out and about – talking to people, seemingly on the move in front of government buildings, looking serious and professional but dynamic.  She looks like she’s getting shit done, which is really what Californians want in their government these days.

We’re glad that Kamala Harris won, but Steve Cooley really deserved better from his own campaign.