Matt Cunningham at the Red State OC Blog posted a very short video clip of Todd Spitzer accepting the Legislator of the Year award from the Republican Party of Orange County.
While it is totally unremarkable that Spitzer got the award (he is an excellent legislator, a Moderate, a Republican, from Orange County, and helped to spearhead the criminal justice reforms we saw last year especially in regards to sex offenders), his acceptance speech is notable. Specifically, Spitzer speaks briefly on the Governor's inaugural address in which he called for Post-Partisanship.
Spitzer seems to agree that we all need to work together. He has definitely had a history of working across the party line and some consider him to have straddled it too closely on occasion. Nonetheless, the moderate Assemblyman pandered to his GOP supporters by explaining that the reason for all the successes California has seen can be credited to the hard work of the party.
This highlights the subject of some of my earlier posts regarding the reason that the California GOP is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Instead of proclaiming how far right they are, California's Republican legislators should be following Arnold a little more closely. Schwarzenegger has popularity because he is a centrist, moderate, post-partisan Republican. Most GOP candidates are unpopular because they are perceived as right-wing nuts. I would have expected Spitzer to recognize this as he has modeled himself as a thoughtful, right-leaning centrist and gained enormous popularity in his district for doing so.
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