It was only 8:15 this morning, but U.S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Culver City) was enormously energized when she stepped to the microphone at a Get Out the Vote rally in Exposition Park and withered veteran flowers two miles away with a unrelieved assault on her dreaded Republican rivals in Washington.
Like sprinting barefoot across a football field of burning coals, Ms. Bass reached deep into her roomy bag of incendiary descriptions and spent 20 minutes lobbing inflammatory accusations against the GOP, mainly for being biased against minorities.
Hoping to arouse the 125 persons in the Urban Issues Breakfast Forum audience at the African American Museum, Ms. Bass – curiously – spoke only of reasons to vote against Republicans, heavily because of alleged voter suppression. She eschewed reasons for supporting members of her party.
No on Two Propositions
With a strong turnout of SEIU union members in the room, she and state Sen. Curren Price (D-Culver City), who is running for the Los Angeles City Council in the March 5 primary, urged a no vote on Prop. 32, and a yes on Gov. Brown’s Prop. 30 for school funding.
Completing her first of likely numerous terms in Congress, Ms. Bass’s harsh, take-no-prisoners rhetoric has become her main form of identification, as a hatchet-shlepping speaker.
Not as polished as she is voluble, the Congresswoman started softly before elevating, and fierily inserting a dagger a moment later.
“People feel Mitt Romney has taken the lead in the Presidential race, that he has the momentum,” she said. “But we are doing okay. The President is doing okay. He is still leading in the battleground states. Millions of people already have voted. I don’t think this means we can go home and say we have this in the bag because we never know what tricks (Republicans) will pull.
“We need to make sure we hold the Senate and win back the House.
“Let me say that if we were to lose the Senate and not get back the House, the only thing President Obama could do in his second term would be to sign Republican bills.
“When he was first elected, a lot of us were under the illusion that the President was a lot more than the President of the United States. We thought of him as a Messiah who could do all of these things.
“What is at stake in this election? The Supreme Court, for God’s sake. I shudder to think what Romney would do (with appointments).”
Gridlock Guaranteed
Ms. Bass, who does not claim to be bipartisan, quivered another time. “If Democrats don’t win back the House or retain their edge in the Senate, we will have more gridlock, just like the last two years.”
It is time for Republicans to confront reality, she scolded. “They need to acknowledge that they have failed in their No. 1 objective, to make President Obama a one-term President. They set out to undermine every initiative the President put forward, and there they won.”
Ms. Bass said the Republicans’ goal is “to take over our country. They are talking about taking back the country. They really mean that.
“What they did in (the) 2010 (off-year elections), while we were concentrating on healthcare reform, they ran candidates all across the country and took over a number of statehouses,” a key factor in a much broader, subtle strategy to deny Democrats from making any meaningful inroads – in states or nationally.
Not the Same Country
“What they did not take into consideration was that our country has changed demographically,” meaning that minorities (traditionally anti-Republican) are growing into majorities.
Ms. Bass repeatedly returned to the theme of what she called voter suppression.
GOP campaigns across the country are studies in insidiousness, she charged. “They have passed a whole slew of laws to suppress our (minority) vote,” referring to photo identification.
Echoing a popular Democratic accusation, the Congresswoman said that while implementation of the voter ID laws has been delayed in a number of states, it has been applied elsewhere and must be recognized as horribly damaging.
One of the strongest reasons to vote against Republicans, Ms. Bass said, is because a President Romney and Vice President Paul Ryan would privatize Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
“Those three areas alone would change our country,” she said.
Ms. Bass closed by saying that defeating Prop. 30, Gov. Brown’s tax scheme to gain fresh funding for schools and social services, is part of the Republicans’ Take Over the Country plan.
“We absolutely have to pass 30,” she said.
Why is killing Prop. 30 so vital to Republicans?
Even though conservatives steadily rail against government spending, Ms. Bass asserted that “they don’t really have a problem spending government money. They are only opposed to spending it on us.”
