Assembly Required

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I don’t like to brag—oh, who’m I kidding? I do like to brag! I like it a lot! And this morning, I will be bragging about the fact that I am what I like to call a “high-information voter.” I can name you seven Supreme Court justices off the top of my head, and all nine if you give me a pencil and a sheet of scratch paper. In fact, I know that there are nine Supreme Court justices, instead of the far more popular uneducated guess of 12! That is how high-information I am!

But, as that sexy old coot Donald Rumsfeld once haiku’d, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”

And that can extend—even for someone as brainy (and fetching) as I am—to the voting booth. I don’t know how the Tea Party decided to include among its orthodoxy the need to repeal the 17th Amendment—that’s us electing United States Senators directly, instead of letting state legislators do it—but I could get behind it if, say, they wanted to preclude us from voting on judges. Admit it—the only thing you have to go on in the voting booth is the sound of their names (and likely racial background), their genders, and what they decided to list as their professions until one of their opponents went to court and made them change it. (Now some spiffy folks in San Diego are making the case that judges should ignore the law and rule by the Bible, being rather louder about it than the silent-but-deadly ways they pioneered packing the school boards ever since Jerry Falwell got all up in ’em in the ’80s. It’s how Steve Rocco got elected to the Orange Unified School District—despite the fact that a pretty damn good case could be made that he was actually Andy Kaufman.)

But it’s all fine and acceptable to bitch about having to vote for judges. What do you do when your candidates for higher offices—say, the state Assembly—might as well be charming and precocious and pre-disaster Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap?

Reggie Jones-Sawyer

We are in the illustrious 47th—a pretty nice little Assembly district if I may say so, and I may, that includes Ladera Heights and Culver City and my little slice of pleasant and peaceful Mid-City neighborhood, and where the demographics are like 30/30/30 and, like, 10 percent Hmong (wait, that was my son’s long-ago Long Beach kindergarten; scratch that, these’uns are Korean instead). And the first piece of mail I got was from one Mr. Reggie Jones-Sawyer, touting his endorsement in the Democratic primary for the 47th AD by the Sierra Club. SOLD!

But the mail kept coming—and a piece by his opponent, Holly J. Mitchell, touted her endorsements by UTLA and United Nurses. In fact, a side-by-side reading of their brochures led to this (look! I made a chart!):

This was getting ridiculous! But at least Jones-Sawyer still had that coolio Sierra Club seal of freshness—until I checked Mitchell’s website and found one from the California League of Conservation Voters. GAH!

And so we were walking to our nasty old Ralphs, for beer and such, when we saw a dude reclining on his lawn, accompanied by the beagle you never knew you needed until you met this one, in front of a Reggie Jones-Sawyer sign. We immediately stopped and asked him why, rattling off all their dueling endorsements and making a sign near our head that warned of its impending explosion.

Holly J. Mitchell

Our new friend Nathan was happy to tell us; he’d known them both for like 20 years, and was able to pinpoint exactly why Watson had endorsed Mitchell (Mitchell had worked for her) and the Sierra Club was backing Jones-Sawyer (because he’d long planned to turn the oil fields at the top of La Brea into a park or something, because who doesn’t want to roll in fields of benzene?).

(You and I are soon going to have a conversation about parks. Next week, I’m thinking. Clear your calendars.)

But Nathan’s main reason for personally backing Jones-Sawyer was one that I cared little about: Jones-Sawyer was a “job creator” as a member of the county Small Business Commission. Some people care about that, like Nathan for instance, but whatever, it’s cool. Mitchell, on the other hand, presides over a children’s nonprofit.

So after all that, I’ve got nothing for you. You should probably vote your gender, or for their occupation as listed on the ballot—unless you’d rather just vote for the person whose campaign called you fewer times (seriously, they are calling a lot). Or you could vote for Ed Nicoletti. He’s a “businessman.” (And a landlord, which his website talks about a lot, because who doesn’t love a landlord? And, also as bragged about on his own website, “Ed has sold mortgages throughout California in all facets of the business from VA loans [MIC Corp] to subprime [Hardwire Corp] to A paper [Horizon and Covenant Corp]. He has financed over 1000 mortgages.”) He’s endorsed by assorted doctors, talent agents, insurance executives, and Tava “Not Tavis” Smiley. And judging by his name, and his picture, I suspect that he’s probably white.

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