Midterm Congressional Elections

Let’s try to sort this out. There was (ultra) column-left pundit Alexander Cockburn (Commentary, Nov. 12) discussing the silver lining aspects of a Republican real estate developer beating the moderate Democratic incumbent in California’s congressional District 1. Cockburn states that this was because a third candidate, a Peace and Freedom type, siphoned off votes from the moderate Democrat.

Cockburn then proceeds to lay the victory and foundation for a new political movement on the doorstep of an anarchistic weekly newspaper in Mendocino County that has, at the most, a few thousand subscribers (many out of the region) and a publisher whose recent acts of journalism include punching out a school superintendent because he dared to disagree with publisher’s views. (Cockburn fails to reveal that his column has run in the Mendocino weekly for years and that he is good friends with the publisher.)

Mendocino County has always been known for its fringe political movements, whether animal rights issues, get-out-the-vote for Jesse Jackson or feeble attempts to organize a Green Party.

What Cockburn fails to admit is that the radicals of whom he is so proud played right into the hands of the conservatives, and now a real estate developer will hold the seat held by a Democrat whose only crime was that he waffled occasionally.

Silver lining? Hardly.

GEORGE ROSE

Los Angeles