ICK FACTOR: With friends like Santa Barbara’s Republican Central Committee, 5th District supervisorial candidate Maribel Aguilera won’t lack for fresh enemies. Conversely, with enemies like the Central Committee, 5th District candidate Ricardo Valencia just made a whole lot of new friends.
This past weekend, the Central Committee demonstrated why people of a certain age — which would also happen to be mine — should not mess around with AI. Hint: It’s the same reason people shouldn’t drink and drive.
Hit pieces are the porn of politics. We all say we hate it, but clearly somebody’s watching. Based on the AI nasti-gram the Central Committee just pinged out to unsuspecting cell phone users in Santa Maria and Guadalupe — the area encompassed by the pivotal Fifth District ― you might think Valencia — a loud and proud progressive school board member and high school teacher — was the second coming of the Joker and the Insane Clown Posse rolled into one.
You might think Valencia — who tells an earnest, up-from-the-bootstraps, child-of-undocumented-immigrants, went-to–UC Berkeley–and-Tufts origin story — has singlehandedly transformed Santa Maria into a Gotham City apocalypse populated by hordes of non-white urban zombies standing in ominously long food lines. (What, were human brains on the menu?) The black smoke of urban riot fires billows in the video’s background as homeless tents flap desolately in the breeze.
Not good, in other words. Valencia bad.
A Republican friend of mine objected that the ad makers got their civics all wrong. Valencia couldn’t possibly have screwed up downtown so bad, he complained. As a school board member, Valencia has no jurisdictional reach over such city matters. Ironically, it’s Maribel Aguilera — the very candidate the Republicans are energetically backing but technically “not endorsing” — who actually serves on the Santa Maria City Council and before that on the city’s planning commission. As such, she could legitimately be held responsible for the festering rot depicted.
Ninety-nine percent of politics is knowing who to blame. The other one percent is knowing where the money is.
The Democrats were less ironic and legalistic in their response. This past weekend, the Democratic Party Mod Squad ― Congressmember Salud Carbajal, State Senate leader Monique Limón, and Assemblymember Gregg Hart — summoned their collective moral outrage and denounced the ad as racist. The narrator of the ad, they pointed out, speaks with a throaty Spanish accent; all the background zombies were conspicuously of the non-Caucasian denomination. No doubt, they were genuinely offended. But mostly, I suspect, it gave the three Democrat heavyweights an open shot to rile up the overwhelmingly Latino 5th District electorate on behalf of Valencia, the only Democrat in the race.
It’s striking in this day and age that neither of the other two candidates — Maribel Aguilera and Cory Bantilan — claim any political party. At any other time, they’d both be Republicans. In fact, for most of his life, Bantilan — who, for 15 years, has served as outgoing Supervisor Steve Lavagnino’s right-hand man ― was a loud-and-proud, card-carrying Republican. In some ways, he and Steve epitomized the future of the Republican Party in local politics. But having hearts as well as brains, Bantilan and Lavagnino both jumped ship during Donald Trump’s first incarnation. As Lavagnino explained it at the time, he got tired of being asked whether he was a racist and a homophobe at family gatherings.
While Aguilera is clearly the candidate of choice for the Republican Central Committee, she also takes pains not to claim any party affiliation, leaving it to observers to guess where on the spectrum of purple she lands. From the outside looking in, this seems both coy and strategically smart. Aguilera tells a life story that makes it hard for people to pigeonhole her easily. Her parents are immigrants; she picked strawberries at age 5; she worked stints with Rape Crisis Center and Legal Aid. But she also did real estate law for oil companies. It’s an interesting portfolio. When a Sable Offshore representative gave her campaign a check for $1,000, Aguilera sent it back. But the Big Ag and Big Money interests in North County — as personified by the Jobs and Opportunity PAC and the Leadership PAC — are rolling the dice big on Aguilera.
But to be clear, the Republican Central Committee has not “technically” endorsed Aguilera. But in very clear ways, it has done so. Yes, the party demonized Valencia as a hair-on-fire left-wing radical — close enough, I suppose, for government cheese — but it also sent out mailers urging party members not to vote for former Republican candidate Cory Bantilan. Why? Either because Bantilan is a party apostate — he is — or because after 15 years working on the fourth floor of county government, he represents the Deep State of county government. He does. Or maybe it’s because he’s just smarter than they are. And he is.
Once upon a time, the letter “R” was not the scarlet letter among sane members of society. We had Brooks Firestone representing us in Sacramento and the Board of Supervisors, for example. We would disagree, but Firestone was never a nut. It was a Republican supervisor — David Yager — who bravely cast the decisive swing vote requiring Exxon to clean up the onshore impacts of its offshore air pollution that, back in the early 1990s, triggered World War III between the oil company and the county supervisors. The supervisors, by the way, won that one.
Now, to be a Republican, it seems you have to agree to entertain no thoughts other than what Donald Trump says you should have. And of course, Joe Biden and his hordes of illegal immigrants stole the 2020 election.
It’s a sad day that in local races Republican voters now find themselves forced to infer which candidate their party actually endorses via this oblique and obscure process of elimination. Thanks to Trump, Republicans have become like closeted gay people back in the bad old days when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was still the operative policy. To my Republican friends, I say only this: Please come out of the closet. And stay the hell away from AI.
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