Tim Goodrich - Not Your Everyday City Council Candidate

by David Dayen [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

It's pretty rare when a fundraiser for a candidate for Torrance City Council attracts the likes of Martin Sheen, Rep. Maxine Waters, multiple elected officials and major donors.  But Tim Goodrich is a pretty rare candidate, and his campaign ought to be a model for how we build a progressive movement in California from the bottom up.

A native of Buffalo, New York, Goodrich spent four years of active duty in the Air Force from 1998 to 2002, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan and one guarding the no-fly zone in southern Iraq in 2002.  During that time, he saw the bombing runs increase and the destruction spread even before the Iraq invasion, when the President was promising to exhaust all diplomatic options.  Rotating out of active duty, Goodrich came out against the war and traveled to Baghdad as a civilian to see the country first-hand.  He eventually co-founded Iraq Veterans Against the War, which started with 8 veterans and now numbers over a thousand.

Goodrich saw the need for electoral politics in the progressive movement, and was inspired by Paul Wellstone's belief that change must come from outside Washington.  After working on a number of campaigns, including Jerry McNerney's successful effort in 2006 (as part of a targeted effort from his veterans groups to flip seats), he entered the arena as a candidate himself because he saw a need for leadership.  And instead of "preaching to the choir," as he put it, he moved to Torrance, a city of 140,000 or so in the South Bay between LA and Long Beach.  It's a more Republican seat than its counterparts in the area.  So why would someone with such a promising resume and bright future take a chance in this City Council race?

The answer is simply that progressives must work to participate in these nonpartisan elections and take back seats in untraditional areas.  It's part of the 50-state, 58-county strategy, and it also will provide a meaningful alternative to business as usual.  Conservatives built a bottom-up movement by taking over seats and councils just like this, and unless we compete, we give up the ability to change the mindset around all sorts of policies.  It's not like Torrance doesn't have major challenges that are exacerbated by laissez-faire, business-friendly Republican "leadership".  There is an Exxon Mobil refinery within the city limits that provides a good portion of the gasoline for the Southern California area, and groundwater tests have revealed substantial contamination, particularly in the lower-income, underserved areas of the city.  There's a sanitation district plant that wants to flare gas and cause all sorts of new environmental hazards.  Like the rest of the state, substantial education cuts are in the offing, with 87 teaching positions potentially downsized, and the schools themselves are suffering from a lack of infrastructure improvements.

Goodrich is one of 14 candidates running for 4 seats on the council.  He's already knocked on over 3,500 doors with a couple months to go until the June 3 election (he joked that "some of the othr city council members are not happy with me because they're not usually so accountable.")  He is running on environmental restoration, a bottom-up call for healthcare reform, smart growth and governmental transparency.  Rep. Waters nailed it when she spoke about Tim, saying that we need more progressives to run downticket and take back the state and the nation piece by piece.  If we had more people willing to serve and get involved in the electoral side of things, places like Torrance would be better off.