Will she or won’t she?
That’s the big question surrounding not only whether Rep. Loretta Sanchez will run for U.S. Senate, but whether or not she’ll announce her candidacy at the Santa Ana train depot tomorrow morning.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Even before California Democrats gather in Anaheim on Friday for their annual convention, they’ve got plenty to talk about — a political stumble by U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who can’t seem to decide whether she’s running for the U.S. Senate or not.
Sanchez political adviser Bill Carrick said Wednesday that the 10-termDemocratic House member plans a “significant political announcement” Thursday morning at the Santa Ana train station — not far from the Anaheim Convention Center, where 3,000 state Democrats will attend the party’s largest gathering of the year.
Carrick wouldn’t say what she would announce, but his statement came less than 24 hours after it was reported that Sanchez had sent e-mails Tuesday formally announcing the kickoff of her U.S. Senate campaign.
But when the Orange County congresswoman was asked later about the e-mail, she said she hadn’t yet made up her mind whether to make the run against fellow Democrat Kamala Harris in the race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Such a race would pit two high-profile Democratic women against each other in a contest that could become an expensive test of the state’s top-two primary system, putting both of them in the general election. And it would represent a competition between major factions of the Democratic ethnic vote — Harris is both Indian American and African American, and Sanchez is Latina.
Still Sanchez’s on-again, off-again stance had even California political veterans shaking their heads.
You can read comments by head-shaking political veterans (and the rest of the article) by clicking here.
Here’s the new e-mail:
This flub is a minor one, and has only received this much media attention because there’s little else to write about regarding this campaign right now. It’s inside baseball that will be forgotten if Sanchez officially jumps into the race – unless she runs an incompetent campaign, in which case it becomes part of a “plagued by incompetence from the start” narrative.
In related news, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff from Pasadena has ruled out running for the seat of retiring incumbent U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer:
Earlier Tuesday, Rep. Adam Schiff became the latest high-profile state Democrat to nix a bid for the post. Schiff said that his responsibilities as the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took precedence, because it gives him a chance to contribute to the nation’s security.
“Having only recently achieved this position, I was very reluctant to leave it,” Schiff said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’ll have a good opportunity to continue to work on the issues that I care most about.”
