Talk about Republicans eating their own. On Tuesday, Mike Gin won election as mayor of Redondo Beach, CA, in a landslide despite an attempt by an outside GOP extremist group to throw the election to his opponent, another Republican.
Gin, a two-term city Redondo Beach councilman and member of the Log Cabin Republicans, received 61 percent of the vote among voters in the beach town of 65,000 south of Los Angeles.
An Orange County based wingnut organization calling itself the California Republican Assembly sent a mailer to voters in the Los Angeles County city noting that Gin took donations from a national gay group and accusing him of having a stealth agenda of promoting gay marriage.
News of the contents of the mailer late last week apparently turned tide in the election toward Gin. His opponent, another Republican city councilman, Gerard Bisignano, tried to disavow himself from the hate-filled Republican mailer.
“I’m extremely disappointed that CRA would do an anti-Mike Gin mailer that by inference would be pro-Gerard Bisignano,” he said. “I was frankly disgusted with it.”
Leaving aside our puzzlement that anyone – gay or straight – would want to be a member of group that despised them, we can rack this one up as another defeat for the Talibani’s attempts at hand-to-hand combat in the political battles here in California.