Recall, if you can, the stir in 1984 when a campaigning Ronald Reagan serenely embraced the acid ironies of Bruce Springsteen's working-man song "Born in the USA."
Here we go again. Ex-GOP Rep. Bob Dornan, trying to regain his former seat in Orange County, has put on his Web site a song called "Tubthumping," an angry, working-class anthem by the English Midlands group Chumbawamba.
Dornan evidently likes the refrain, "I get knocked down, but I get up again. You're never gonna keep me down." Oh, but keep listening. The song is a working-man's table-pounding pub anthem. And the band itself, says its publicist, is anarchistic, pro-gay and pro-choice. and Band members have given money to striking dockworkers, shouted out on the Letterman show about freeing a death row prisoner and recorded "Homophobia," an anti-gay-bashing ballad.
Dornan might be better off with the comfortably Republican Frank Sinatra and his lyric: "Each time I find myself flat on my face, I pick myself up and get back in the race."
That's Bob.
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Barn raising: As art lover and antiquarian, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst could be as absent-minded as he was acquisitive. He once coveted some objet he saw in a magazine, and sent his buyer on a months-long quest for the item, which ended only when the buyer found that Hearst himself had already bought the thing years before and forgotten that he had.
Hearst bought whole buildings, had them dismantled, shipped and rebuilt. Now the Telegram-Tribune in San Luis Obispo says an English barn built barely 75 years after the Norman Conquest and brought here by Hearst in 1928 could be heading home.
Hearst bought Bradenstoke's priory and the barn that belonged to it, shipped the priory to his Welsh castle and sent the barn on to California. The barn, still in 109 marked and labeled packing crates, was bought in 1960 by Alex Madonna, of Madonna Inn fame, but never reassembled. Now he is talking with the townspeople of Bradenstoke, in Wiltshire, about selling it back. Bradenstoke has named its campaign Return Our Barn--ROB.
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Voter Turnout in Primaries
The percentage of registered voters turning out for California primary elections declined sharply after 1976, and since 1982 has not been above 50%.
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