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Yup, that's our Issa. Before the recall, in which he was the central figure, which means, he did the money raising, which in turn means probably money from rich Republicans from Texas---likely Big Oil---maybe Tom Delay's crowd with links to Enron and the rolling black outs....
Besides all that, Issa's other claim to fame was attacking bi-lingual education, with English only in California public education. I forgotten all the chaos and reactionary racist stink he caused with propositions...
Except for getting rid of Gray Davis, Issa doesn't have much of a success record. He has a follow through problem. I hope this continues. The basic profile is lots of stink and mess, but little action.
His English only campaign started off under the deception that making English mandatory was for the benefit of immigrants, because it helped them adapt to an english language culture or something like that. So there was a slightly plausible argument. But it soon became clear this was nothing more than an attack on Latinos. Once that became clear, the proposition actually helped mobilize the large Mexican Amercian communities in California, especially students and younger workers, who were largely responsible for defeating the proposition.
In effect Issa's earlier career represented a turn in California political history where, from then on the state's Latino communities and other immigrant groups were going to be a political force with a predominantly liberal agenda.
This turn I think has a lot of repercussions in national politics, especially on issues like immigration reform, DHL policies on the Mexican border, the drug wars, prison reforms, public education, healthcare ... just about everything, including foreign policy especially with Latin America.
But I suspect there is a giant problem that isn't getting through most of these communities, and that is the neoliberal economics that are the foundation of all the social issues that get more focus.
It looks like Brazil's new president Dilma Rousseff might become the icon of this problem. I sure hope not.
During Christmas dinner, where I made everything except the tamales (which was some fun cooking), I had a hell of time trying to convince my daughter-in-law that most of her family's struggles and fear in Nuevo Laredo over the drug wars and US border bullshit where due to the economics---which could probably be solved by de-criminalizing drugs, combined with much more progressive economic developments in meso-america. The latter was a term that Carlos Fuentes coined for the borderlands of the US southwest and northern Mexican states. (Which reminds me, I should read some of his novels, and not just some essays...)
I can't stop believing, perhaps dreaming, that there shouldn't even be a border there at all.
Like all borders it seems, it is a manifestation of economics. I am not sure how many anglos and latinos even realize that the divisions they face are the result of commerically driven colonial wars onward, i.e. imperialism.
I just finished a couple of essays by Seamus Heaney (who grew up in Northern Ireland) where the central theme was (is) a border, a terminus. At first as a boy growing up in one of these border areas between poor Catholics and better off Protestants, with other divisions between cattle herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution---and then he moves on to the weirdness of languages (and their admixtures), identity and history, and some of the more subtle dimensions, in something called Englands of the Mind.
Anyway, they are good reading even if they are probably not part of the official marxist canon. It's pretty easy to re-enscript his poetic insights, back into more concrete economic realities, and to transfer his thoughts into different histories, much nearer to California and its very complex mix of anglo and latin basis, histories, identities.
CG