Finally, Patricia McKeon appears in public….safely outside the bounds of the SCV and in front of the Simi Valley Tea Party:
The first part of her speech oddly centers around resentment of local media, including the LA Times. She says we only read about the Boy Scouts when the local media is attacking them (za?). She mentions her work for Mayo hospital but says the Times doesn’t bother reporting that about her. Dog whistles to aggrieved American white male continue after that, with Patricia telling the crowd that the true patriots she’s speaking too are often unsung and un-celebrated by liberal media.
Later on, after slamming Wilk for running for Assembly virtually the day after he was re-elected to COC’s Board, she repeats the story of why she decided to run for AD 38: “When I went to check out at the grocery store last summer, they asked me if I’d like to pay $0.10 per bag. Well I thought the environmentalists had gotten rid of them because paper bags were destroying all the trees, which is just not true.”
“I was aghast! I was just furious,” she continues. She said the bag ban, enacted in Los Angeles County, is making “women furious everywhere.”
Next she says she knows that people, including her opponent Scott Wilk and his “blogging friends,” have been mocking her, but that’s the price she’s willing to “run for election.”
She also takes yet another dig at Wilk, accusing him of being a run-of-the-mill government worker who hops from job to job on the public dole. Some people, she says, actually grow up and want to work for the government. Such people “want to regulate us. They want to take money out of our pockets and put it in the government’s pockets. And it’s a terrible thing they’re doing with regulation and legislation.” she says.
The video continues on after that, but you get the gist.
Overall, I give her an A- for the content of the speech. Stoking resentment and bashing media/public sector work/coastal liberals is a sure win with Tea Party folks. If I was a Tea Party person, I’d feel like she understood me and what I was about.
But I give her a C+ for presentation; she needs some practice and comes off a bit whiny. I like that she tells stories about her family; that may make her seem like a lightweight but I think she should play up the pissed-off-grandma-not-going-to-take-it-anymore angle by relaying stories about her family.
Too bad we’ll probably never see her and Wilk go at it in a debate. It would be….memorable. Something for the slim Annals of SCV Political History.
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