Several thousand words into Mark Leibovich's 8,000-word New York Times Magazine piece titled “Who Can Possibly Govern California?” our own superstar Latina of Congress pops up briefly.
Recently I called Loretta Sanchez,
the outspoken and increasingly visible Democratic congresswoman from
Orange County, who had been mentioned as a possible candidate if
[Los Angeles Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa did not run. She described a “hypothetical” candidate who
happened to sound a lot like Loretta Sanchez.
“I'm pretty sure
you would agree,” she told me, “that a person who is from the south,
who is viewed as more moderate than Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, who is a woman, and who might have an ethnicity, let's say, of Hispanic, probably would, on paper, be a very good candidate.”
That sure sounds as if she has found a race to spend those dollars raised by People for Loretta 2010, the exploratory committee Sanchez opened in November 2005. Or maybe not. Just last month she indicated she will run for reelection, something some pundits figured she might avoid given the rise of Vietnamese-American Republican candidates in her Garden Grove-based district.
Not that Loretta is totally shutting the door to Sacramento.
After
volunteering that her “phone has been ringing off the hook” with calls
from donors since Villaraigosa announced his decision, Sanchez told me
that there is about a 20 percent chance she will run, and then
qualified even that by noting that “things can change.”
Well, ain't she the coy one!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.
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