Nail Biter: The Endless Insurance Commissioner GOP Primary

Did you know that they are still counting the votes in the GOP primary for Insurance Commissioner? And, that until a couple days ago, the candidate in the lead was a self-funded dark horse who spent $4,000 on his campaign? You do now: Brian Fitzgerald Is Another Dark Horse In A Photo Finish

In California, an unknown named Brian FitzGerald threatens to defeat a veteran Republican lawmaker for the party's slot in the state insurance-commissioner contest.

Before the June 8 primary vote, most California Republican Party leaders didn't know who Mr. FitzGerald was. They do now.

Ten days after ballots were cast, the race remained too close to call, even though Mr. FitzGerald, a lawyer for the insurance department, spent only $4,000 campaigning. That compares with the $1 million spent by the man who was expected to handily win the nomination: Mike Villines, the charismatic former minority leader of the California Assembly.

As of Friday, Mr. Villines held a lead of 881,305 votes to Mr. FitzGerald's 874,184, a difference of about sixth-tenths of a percentage point. The lead has swung back and forth between the two men, and with hundreds of thousands more votes to count, the outcome may not be settled until the vote-counting deadline of July 6.

That's from the Wall Street Journal, which tars Fitzgerald as being "like" Alvin Greene, Uh, yeah, except Fitzgerald is an attorney who works in the enforcement division of the state agency he seeks to run. Other than that, he's just like the clueless accused felon Greene.

I realize that not many people care about the GOP primary for Insurance Commissioner, but shouldn't this have been a news story covered by the California MSM? The San Francisco Chronicle appears to have run a total of two stories on the tight vote, one a brief blog post and the other an AP wire story. A Yahoo search returns similar scraps.

(Showing Free Will's patented hard-nosed analysis of state races, I described the race as "virtually uncontested" and endorsed Villines because he had the nicest website of any GOP primary candidate. This was after I visited Fitzgerald's own website and was put off by its overly earnest tone. D'oh!)

(In my defense, I did endorse the equally obscure Dave Evans for controller, not that this did him any good.)

Indeed, the results of this race are almost paradigmatic of the political trends in California and nationwide. If you are a member of the political establishment, have supported the sort of tax & debt deals that have been rejected by the voters, and are seen as either a liberal or a moderate squish - and Villines fits each of these to a T - then you are in trouble when you are up against an insurgent campaign, even when that campaign barely seems to exist. You would think journalists would want to cover that sort of story, but those aren't the sort of journalists we have these days.

Villines has taken a hair thin lead in the last few days. In true Al Gore fashion, he is prematurely declaring victory, something Fitzgerald never did during the week when he was in the lead. Here's hoping things work out for Fitzgerald.