CA-04: A Day on the Trail with Charlie Brown

One of the things I like best about our Orange to Blue list of candidates is the number of them that are '06 alumni. It's not because they didn't win the first time around, but because this core group of candidates from the last battle--Eric Massa, Dan Seals, Darcy Burner, Gary Trauner, and Charlie Brown--has such a commitment to bringing progressive change to Congress that woke up on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 and said, "I'm not done."

Charlie Brown isn't done. In 2006 he came incredibly close--about three points--from knocking out an entrenched incumbent. He was ready to take on the corrupt Doolittle again, except that the Abramoff scandal got in the way, and Doolittle is retiring. Up stepped notorious California carpetbagger Tom McClintock (who proposes to represent northeastern California, despite the fact that he lives in Thousand Oaks). That, and any number of factors about McClintock, are combining to mean Charlie is running even stronger.

It's that kind of tenacity that made Charlie the second candidate to be added to the 2008 Blue Majority and Orange to Blue lists. Here's what Markos wrote when he announced Charlie's addition to the list:

Meanwhile, Charlie Brown's grassroots army continues to grow. And Northern California activists, fresh from helping topple Richard Pombo in CA-11 in 2006, are taking a close look at shifting resources to this race. Sure, Rep. Jerry McNerney (one of our candidates last cycle) will face a tough reelection fight, but activists are hungry to cleanse Northern California of Republicans who'd rather pad their pockets (literally) than represent their lobbyist-free constituents.

Brown bucked his districts Republican leanings to come inches from the huge upset. He hasn't stopped running since Election Day 2006. His grassroots army continues to grow, the GOP brand continues to disintegrate, people are abandoning the GOP in droves (including in rural districts like this one), Iraq continues to drag Republicans down, and Doolittle's ethical problems multiply by the week.

Obviously Doolittle's no longer a factor, but the rest of that summation holds true. The grassroots army Charlie put together in 2006 expanded to the degree that some of them are running for local offices. Even though it's California, you still hear a refrain that seems more common to Idaho or Wyoming--people who used to think they were the only Democrats in town, afraid to speak out about their political views with their neighbors, until Charlie Brown showed up at their door, running as a Democrat. He brought a lot of Dems out of the woodwork, and those Dems started getting to work.

And organize they have. Here's some of the crew showed up in the campaign's Roseville office Saturday, ready to canvass and phonebank.

The campaign has seven offices across the nine counties in the huge district, one of the most beautiful in the country, spanning the Sierras. With four regional field directors, seven organizers and 25 paid canvassers, the campaign has knocked on more than 120,000 doors and made over 300,000 phone calls. Hundreds of new Democrats have been registered. This is the kind of retail politics that allows Democrats to win in Republican districts, in fact it's about the only way to run successfully in a tough district. McClintock, by contrast, has basically no field operation.

But it's more than just being organized, it's being such a compelling candidate. Anyone who's met Charlie knows that he is authentic, decent, and committed. I spent about four hours in his Prius with him and his campaign manager on Saturday, a great chance to talk with him about just about everything under the sun--the Iraq war, the failure of our intelligence services, the politicization of our intelligence services, alternative energy development, water rights and water politics, and the history and geology of the region. The campaign staff jokes about his "lectures" on things like the Pelton wheel and the Sutter Buttes (the world's smallest mountain range), but it makes him a great car trip companion. Not to mention an extremely knowledgable booster of the district.

Charlie is a compelling and progressive candidate. He has a deep understanding of the key issues for his district, a district that has been poorly represented for so many years. That message, like the one he delivered to a crowd at a barbeque in South Lake Tahoe, resonates.

But on nothing is Charlie more serious than in speaking about the issue that brought him to the race in 2006, the Iraq debacle. Here he talks about the travesty that is defense contracting:

Charlie Brown is a serious candidate at perhaps the most serious time in our nation's history. We were focusing in 2006 on "more" Democrats. Having Charlie on the Orange to Blue list in 2008 is a testament to the fact that he's also a "better" Dem.