Democrat Julia Brownley launched her first television ad of the fall campaign on Wednesday. It is part of a $56,000 buy with Time-Warner cable franchises in Ventura County, with an ad schedule to run through Sept. 10 -- clearly just the first phase of her TV advertising.

The initial spot plays on what polls show is a Democratic strength in this election cycle, focusing on women's issue. It introduces Brownley as "an advocate for women," stresses her support from Planned Parenthood, and promises that she will "fight to make insurance companies cover women's health care," including contraception and mammograms.

And, just as Republican Tony Strickland did in his initial commercial, the ad squeezes in a quick reference to Medicare. It describes Brownley as "the only candidate you can count on to protect Medicare from the extremists in Congress."

Finally, it seeks to counter Strickland's narrative that she is an out-of-towner ("L.A. liberal") by stressing her support from Ventura County groups, notably associations representing firefighters and teachers.

STRICKLAND DUCKS A TOUGH VOTE -- Now that the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security has issued a directive saying that undocumented individuals who were brought to this country as children and have met other specifications are not subject to deportation -- and, thus, are in the United States legally -- a bill has been proposed to authorize the Department of Motor Vehicles to issue driver's licenses to people who meet those criteria.

It is a familiar issue in the Legislature, where attempts to authorize driver's licenses for illegal immigrants has been a hot-button issue for a decade. The difference is that, in this instance, the people who would benefit are, by definition, legally residing in the United States and in California.

The bill to authorize those driver's licenses came up Wednesday in the Senate, where it passed 25-7 and received support from three Republican senators. During the debate on the measure, Strickland was not on the Senate floor and was not around to cast a vote when the roll was called. He returned to the floor one minute after the roll call vote was closed.

Had he been on the floor, I asked Strickland, would he have cast a vote?

No, he said, he would have abstained even had he been at his desk. He said he listened to the debate from outside the chambers. Strickland said he appreciates the arguments on both sides, and noted, "I've been on both sides of this issue."

The reference was to his vote, during his early years in the Assembly, in support of Assemblyman Gil Cedillo's bill to authorize driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. He voted no on subsequent versions of the bill, but his initial vote has caused him some political grief over the years as conservatives have sought to use it against not only him, but also his wife, Audra, during her tough primary campaign in 2004 to succeed him in the Assembly.

Now that Strickland's in a tough campaign for Congress, no one can accuse him this fall of either supporting the bill or opposing it.

ANALYZING THE PRIMARY VOTE -- As I've written here before, far too much can made of trying to make extrapolations from the results of the June 5 primary, as there will be likely be about two new voters in November for every one that cast a ballot in the primary.

Still, I found some interest in the statement of vote (Page 210) now available on the county registrar's website, which provides a precinct-by-precinct -- and, more interestingly, a city-by-city -- breakdown of the vote. It shows that Strickland, although the only Republican on the ballot, won a majority of the total vote in only two county cities, Camarillo and Moorpark. In all the rest, the combined vote totals of the four Democrats and independent Linda Parks exceeded his.

In only one city, Ojai, did Brownley alone surpass Strickland's total. In Oxnard, the combined votes of the four Democrats and Parks more than doubled Strickland's total.

The most interesting breakdown was in Thousand Oaks, Parks' home base. Parks came in second there, with 7,088 votes to Strickland's 12,163, with Brownley receiving 5,686 and the other three Democrats combined about 1,200.

The question for November, of course, is how many of those 7.088 voters who supported Parks will now side with Strickland, and how many will switch to Brownley.

Strickland started appealing to those Parks' voters early by publicly denouncing the Democratic National Campaign Committee's attacks on Parks. But, as Brownley's campaign will surely point out, just two years ago it had been Audra Strickland and the county Republican Party that had been attacking Parks just as vociferously. In a close contest -- and this one assuredly will be -- how those 7,088 Thousand Oaks voters who backed Parks cast their ballots in November will play a significant role in the outcome.

The first of what will surely be an onslaught of TV campaign ads in the 26th Congressional District campaign has been launched by Republican Tony Strickland, and the campaign opens on a decidedly negative note.

The ad is a direct attack on Democrat Julia Brownley, one that portrays her as "an L:A. liberal" and the handpicked choice of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, chosen by Pelosi to help her "advance her agenda in Congress."

The ad began airing yesterday on Time-Warner cable franchises in Ventura County. It is part of $300,000 in ad buys that the Strickland campaign has scheduled through Election Day, based on public records data from Time-Warner.

It is not surprising that Strickland would strike first. After having at one time or another in his legislative career represented nearly every portion of the district, and having been engaged just four years ago in an ultra-high profile, $11 million campaign for state Senate, Strickland has much higher name ID in the district. Brownley, who has represented only about a sixth of the district and has never before been involved in a competitive general election campaign, is not particularly well known. So this gives Strickland an opportunity to attempt to define her in the minds of Ventura County voters before she has a chance to do so on her own. The definition he seeks to attach to her is obvious from the opening line of the ad: "Nancy Pelosi recruited Los Angeles liberal Julia Brownley to advance her agenda in Congress... An L.A. liberal for Ventura County? Really?"

The argument is visually presented by portraying head-and-shoulders images of Pelosi and Brownley, side by side, above the Los Angeles skyline.

The timing of the ad is interesting in that it comes as many Republicans in Washington are concerned that GOP vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan's controversial budget plan that would to partly privatize Medicare could hurt GOP congressional candidates across the board. The extent of that concern may have moved up Strickland's timetable for going on the air. It is also obvious in the content of the ad. It picks up on a line of argument used by the Romney-Ryan campaign last week that seeks to turn the Medicare issue against Democrats by focusing on the $700 billion in reduced Medicare spending growth that is part of federal health care reform. And in case anyone misses the point, Strickland closes the ad with: "I'm Tony Strickland. I'll protect Medicare. And I approved this message."

Specifically, the ad asserts Brownley seeks to hide "her plan to cut over $700 billion from Medicare to pay for Pelosi's health plan."

That assertion has been challenged by Democrats and debunked by independent analysts, including PolitiFact in the days since the Romney campaign levied it.

Brownley campaign spokesman Lenny Young seized on that portion to assert the Strickland ad is "full of flat-out lies." He noted that Strickland has said he opposes Ryan's Medicare plan because it affects those now age 54 and younger, while Strickland believes no changes should be made that affect anyone 50 or over. That is the only element he has objected to, and he told me recently he was not familiar enough with other components of the Ryan plan to address them.

Young said the Brownley campaign delivered a copy of the plan to Strickland's office today.

And so it all begins.

Some news about three candidates in tough Ventura County races this fall who are either getting some help, or enlisting others to provide it...

-- 26th Congressional District Democratic candidate Julia Brownley will be getting some significant help from the House Majority PAC, the Super PAC with a mission to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives.

The House Majority PAC announced Friday it has reserved $1 million in cable television advertising time this fall to benefit the Brownley campaign. The ad reservation is part of $22 million in reservations ($18.5 million from House Majority PAC and $3.7 million from the SEIU) in 43 markets across the country.

The announcement should come as no great surprise. This is the same Super PAC that spent $727,000 this spring on positive TV ads promoting Brownley's candidacy in the primary. The independent expenditure was largely responsible for the fact the 26th District generated more independent spending this spring than any congressional district in California. The grand total was just under $1 million.

-- 19th Senate District Republican candidate Mike Stoker, apparently having some difficulty persuading Sacramento-based interest groups to what on paper appears to be a tough campaign, has sent an email to supporters urging them to contact the political action committees of any professional association to which they may belong and ask that they pony up for Stoker.

"Political Action Committees (PACs) in Sacramento that represent various causes and interests can play an incredibly powerful role in helping me get elected," Stoker writes in his email. "They listen to the people they represent in the district. Whether you are a doctor, realtor, banker, contractor, work in or own a restaurant, a farmer, insurance agent, etc., whether you know it our not, you have folks in Sacramento that represent your interests."

Stoker's email includes a link to a list of suggested professional groups, along with contact information for their PACs. It's not a short list; it includes about 70 groups representing such varied interests as insurance agents, pawn shops, pharmaceutical companies, beer distributors, mortgage brokers, apartment owners, car dealers, timber companies and oil companies.

The message makes clear that Stoker believes he needs special-interest support from Sacramento to be competitive. "Underscore the amount of support I have in the district and your belief that our campaign will be successful if it gets the support we deserve from Sacramento," he writes in the plea.

-- First District supervisor candidate Steve Bennett wants his supporters to do a little intelligence-gathering for him. He's asking them to respond to and write down the questions if they get contacted as part of what he says are two polls being conducted by his opponent, Bob Roper.

"As the campaign heats up, it's helpful for us to quickly know what communication is hitting the community," Bennett writes. "If you receive mail, phone calls, or social media contacts supporting Bob Roper or attacking me, it will be helpful if you contact us immediately with that information."

Gov. Jerry Brown, never one to shy from a philosophical argument, publicly engaged in one this morning with Associated Press reporter Juliet Williams. It came as Brown was fielding questions following an event at a Sacramento high school promoting Proposition 30, the tax initiative on the November ballot that Brown is sponsoring.

Williams wanted to know whether the revelation that the state Parks Department had $54 million in hidden funds at a time when state parks were scheduled to be shuttered might feed voters' distrust in government and make them more likely to vote against the initiative.

Brown was obviously eager for the question. He asked Williams (rhetorically, it seemed) what was the alternative if Californians decided against taxes because they didn't trust government to handle everything without error.

"If government can't be trusted, what do we do?" Brown asked. "Do we close the schools, shut down the Highway Patrol, open the prisons?"

The real choice, he said, is either government or anarchy. He acknowledged that he, the Legislature, and those who work in government have foibles and human imperfections.

"If someone has some virtuous group of saints who can come in here, hallelujah," he said.

He asked whether, perhaps, "all the money should go into some fund operated by angels. You're representing an idea that we should somehow escape from representative government."

After my blog post yesterday (below or here), Sen. Tony Strickland called to fully discuss his position on the House Republican budget plan drafted by GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

As I noted in that post, in a pre-primary, April 5 interview, Strickland told me that he gave "a lot credit" to Ryan for attempting to address the longterm solvency of Medicare. He said at the time that he did not believe Medicare rules should be changed for those approaching retirement, but that changes need to be made for "people my age" -- folks in their 20s, 30s and 40s (Strickland is 42).

We did not discuss a specific age where a potential cutoff for any future changes would be. And that, Strickland told me this morning, is where he has a serious disagreement with the Ryan plan. It envisions making an insurance-voucher system (rather than automatic enrollment in the government-run plan) optional for those under 55. Strickland says no changes should be considered for anyone 50 or older.

"Those folks paid into the system for years and planned their future," he said. "You cannot take the rug out from underneath them. I personally oppose any effort to take anything from people 50 and older."

Asked if that meant whether, had he been a member of the House of Representatives when it twice approved the Ryan budget, he would have voted against the plan, Strickland answered directly: "I would have voted no."

That would have put him in a distinct minority among House Republicans. In the April 15, 2011, vote on the plan, only 4 of 241 GOP members voted no (two others did not vote).

The plan includes many other elements, of course, including lowering taxes on the wealthy, cutting Medicaid spending by about a third and dramatically rolling back federal spending on nearly every program except for the military, Social Security and Medicare.

"I haven't gone through the whole Ryan plan," Strickland said when I asked if he had objections to any of its provisions other than the Medicare changes kicking in at age 55.

The Medicare provision is key politically, and Strickland noted that Democrats revealed their campaign playbook in the primary when they zeroed in on the Ryan budget's Medicare provisions in attacks on independent Linda Parks. "They're going to hit on the Medicare issue," he said. "They hit Linda Parks, for goodness sakes. It doesn't have to be true. I believe that was not an honest debate. It wasn't fair, and it wasn't truthful."

The AARP is attempting to arrange a "tele-town hall" discussion with Strickland and Democrat Juilia Brownley next month. It is one of only two districts in California in which it hopes to auto-dial all its members and give them an opportunity to listen in as their candidates for the House discuss issues of importance to seniors. If the AARP is succesful in pulling that off, expect Medicare to be Topic A in the discussion.

Much has been said, written and speculated about on what the political effects on the presidential race will be of Mitt Romney's selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan to be the Republican vice presidential nominee. Because of Ryan's leadership role in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, however, it is likely that his high-profile role on the national ticket will have a substantial effect on congressional races this fall as well.

As a story in Politico this morning put it, "The reality is that Ryan is now every Republicans' running mate whether they like it or not."

Ryan, of course, is the author of the much-debated "Ryan budget" that House Republicans have twice approved -- a budget plan that most controversially proposes to offer healthcare vouchers to seniors who choose them to pay private insurance premiums rather than use Medicare insurance (the original version made the voucher provision mandatory).

Democrats have made no secret of their intent to use the Ryan budget as a campaign issue, especially against incumbent House Republicans who are on the record voting for it. Polling shows the Medicare provision is highly unpopular among voters.

The importance Democrats attach to the issue was well demonstrated in Ventura County's 26th Congressional District primary campaign, when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sought to tie the Ryan budget around Supervisor Linda Parks, a former Republican who was running as an independent.

Although Parks had been publicly critical of the Medicare provisions, the DCCC mailers alleged that Parks would join other Republicans in Congress "to end Medicare as we know it." In fact, Parks had written on Facebook in response to a query about the Ryan budget that she was concerned it "would leave vulnerable senior citizens without health care."

But she stopped short of assailing it with the kind of partisan zeal that Democrats have attached to it, and called discussion of the Ryan budget "a moot point" because it was "a one-sided proposal" that was "dead in the water."

With Parks having been eliminated in the primary, Democrats will now turn their attacks on the Ryan budget and seek to use them against GOP candidate Tony Strickland. Unlike incumbent Republican House members, Strickland does not have a record of voting for the Ryan budget, but in an interview with me this spring he expressed strong support for what the Ryan plan seeks to accomplish.

"I give a lot of credit to Paul Ryan for coming up with ways to reform Medicare," Strickland told me. "There's no question that actuarially it's not sound. If we do nothing right now. Medicare and Social Security will be 100 percent of the budget."

Democrat Julia Brownley lost little time in seeking to tie Ryan and his budget plans to Strickland. Within hours of the announcement of the Ryan pick Saturday morning, the campaign issued this statement from Brownley: "The Ryan budget puts millionaires and billionaires ahead of seniors, women and the middle class by turning Medicare into a voucher system, raising the age of eligibility to 67, and making devastating cuts for women's health and education. This would be a disastrous plan for Ventura County and the nation, and it's clear that Tony Strickland would be another rubber-stamp vote in Congress for the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan agenda."

The end result may be that voters in Ventura County this fall will get a chance to hear a full debate about the future of Medicare -- both the question of whether cutting costs and/or raising revenues is a national imperative and whether the cuts proposed by Ryan and House Republicans go too far. That will mean that the 26th CD campaign will be nationalized to a level that it probably wouldn't have been had Romney chosen some other VP nominee.

Perhaps had Assemblyman Jeff Gorell of Camarillo not been on military deployment in Afghanistan this winter, he might have been persuaded to run for state Senate against Sen. Fran Pavley of Agoura Hills in a district in which Republican Party leaders had to scramble to find a candidate. But instead, of course, Gorell is running for re-election to the Assembly.

But that doesn't mean he isn't playing a role in the 27th Senate District race. In addition to giving a modest $1.150 directly to the campaign of L.A. County prosecutor Todd Zink, who is running against Pavley, Gorell this spring contributed $20,000 to the San Luis Obispo County Republican Party.

And what is the San Luis Obispo County GOP doing with its money? On Wednesday, it dropped a cool $70,000 into Zink's campaign.Last we checked, San Luis Obispo is a very long way from eastern Ventura County, where Zink and Pavley will be squaring off.

Mitt Romney is not the only political candidate in America who may get a little uncomfortable when the issue of his personal income taxes is raised. There are at least two others -- both running for Congress in the 24th Congressional District, which includes a coastal sliver of Ventura County as well as the counties of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.

For months, the campaign of Democratic incumbent Lois Capps has been hammering Republican Abel Maldonado on the issue of his taxes -- specifically, more than $4 million in underpayments alleged by the IRS based on disputed deductions claimed over a period years by Maldonado and his family's farming company.

But this week the tables were turned when it was revealed Capps had to file amended tax returns to reflect the fact that she had failed to report rental income from a staff member who rented living quarters at Capps' home in Santa Barbara. She was cumulatively paid about $41,000 in rent from 2001 to 2005 and did not report the income until this year.

Both campaigns were furuously trying to spin the issue yesterday and today, with Capps pressing her call that Maldonado release his income tax returns for every year he has held public office, as she has done. Today, she posted on her campaign website 465 pages of tax court documents detailing the IRS complaints against Maldonado and his family's company.

Later in the day, the Capps campaign recirculated an email to reporters that had been originally sent from the Maldonado camp to call their attention stories about the Capps tax issue. However, the Capps email included the full stories, noting that Maldonado's campaign had deleted all the references to Maldonado's tax issues from the stories it had circulated.

In the end, all this would appear to be a net plus for Maldonado because it should help him defuse an issue that had been a clear liability. All most voters will take from this is that both candidates have tax issues with the IRS, and are not likely to make a distinction between $42,000 in income dating back a decade for which taxes and penalities have been paid and $4 million in alleged underpayments that are still being contested.

To cite a low-brow source, Wikipedia defines "synergy" as "two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable." For Democrats and Republicans alike, there may be an opportunity to produce desirable, synergistic results this fall by leveraging the presence of two very competitive congressional districts that are side-by-side in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

On paper, both districts appear to be very competitive and there have been two private polls released over the last few weeks that suggest that voters are in fact closely divided. As I posted here last week, Democrat Julia Brownley's campaign released an internal poll that shows her leading slightly, within the margin of error, in Ventura County's 26th Congressional District. Yesterday, the campaign of Republican Abel Maldonado recirculated a July 23 memo from the GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies that shows him trailing by 2 points, but also within the margin of error, in his race against Democrat Lois Capps in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties' 24th Congressional District.

First, let it be said that it's hard to assess the credibility of these internal polls. After Maldonado first released his poll last month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released its own private poll to The Hill newspaper. It showed Capps leading 51 percent to 40 percent. Similarly, I hear rumblings from Republican sources that GOP-sponsored polling shows Republican Tony Strickland leading Brownley by more than the margin of error in the 26th.

Still, there is the strong possibility that there will be two very competitive congressional races in neighboring districts this fall -- or, at the very least, there will be the perception of two very close races. That being the case, it would seem natural that the national parties will be looking for ways to maximize their bang for the buck. Could we see, for instance, Bill Clinton or Michelle Obama making a California visit that would include, say, a stop in Oxnard in the morning and an evening fundraiser in Santa Barbara? Might we see Ann Romney or whoever her husband picks to be his running mate, doing a public event in Goleta followed by a fundraiser in Westlake Village?

It's hardly out of the question.

And what about the Super PACs? There will be opportunities to maximize their efforts with media buys in neighboring, and to some degree, overlapping media markets.

There is, in short, an opportunity to have two campaign-related events functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable. In other words, an opportunity for political synergy on the Ventura-Santa Barbara County coast.

In my column in The Star this week I wrote about a nationwide effort to increase Latino voter turnout this fall, and the role of Eliseo Medina, secretary-treasurer of SEIU International, in that effort.

Like many of his generation of Latino political and union activists, Medina's first involvement in that arena came at the side of Cesar Chavez. Medina was raised in Delano, the starting point of the 1965 grape strike that thrust Chavez and the plight of farm workers into national prominence. He worked with Chavez and the United Farmworkers Union in Delano, in Oxnard, and in farming communities across California.

Given Medina's background, I was curious about an SEIU press release about the Latino voter outreach effort that mentioned the need for organizers to move beyond invoking Chavez' legacy in mobilizing Latino voters. I asked Medina what was meant by that.

"César was an important historical figure," he told me. "But there's a huge new generation of Latinos in this country who've never heard of him. We need to talk to them about the challenges of today. We need to tell them that this election coming up is about you, it's about your families, it's about your future.

"While many younger Latinos respect and honor Cesar's legacy, it's not going to motivate them to go out to the polls."

It's also true that while Latino immigrants still dominate the workforce in U.S. agricultural fields, an increasing percentage of them live in urban areas and work in other industries, such as food service, hotels, construction and landscaping. The symbol of the farmworker, hard-working and dignified, remains a powerful image, but Medina is likely correct in assessing that it is time for organizers to broaden their political messages to Latino immigrant voters.

Still, the power of Chavez and the UFW continues to be a political organizing tool. This spring in Ventura County's 26th Congressional District, perhaps the most effective outreach to Spanish-speaking voters by Democratic candidate Julia Brownley was an automated telephone call on her behalf from Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the UFW with Chavez.

In today's Star, I wrote about the campaign finance reports filed yesterday by candidates in state and county races this fall.

As always, there were some interesting tidbits that didn't quite make the cut for the story that was published on expensive newsprint. For instance...

A SIGN OF STRENGTH, OR WEAKNESS?: My colleague Kathleen Wilson, who covers the county beat, reports that the newly filed documents show that incumbent Supervisor Steve Bennett far outspent retired county fire chief Bob Roper in the June primary. Roper finished second, and the two are competing in the fall runoff for the Ventura-based seat.

The reports show that Bennett spent about $175,000 to Roper's $86,000.

One could interpret that as a sign of strength, because Bennett had sufficient campaign funds to spend near the maximum of $186,000 allowed for the primary -- and still has enough left over to also spend the maximum in the fall.

"We wanted to best communicate with the voters in June and prepare the voters to support me in November," Bennett told Wilson.

Others suggested it was a sign of weakness that the incumbent could spend that much and still fall short of capturing a majority. He finished with 44 percent, to Roper's 28 percent in a four-candidate field. Cal Lutheran University political scientist Herb Gooch told Wilson that the spending suggests Bennett might be running "a little bit scared," and Roper consultant Chris Collier said Bennet's falling short of a majority after having spent that much money "shows we're in good shape."
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EVERYBODY LOVES A LIKELY WINNER: One measure of how conventional wisdom assesses the chances of a candidate is if he or she begins to attract campaign contributions from donors who typically give to candidates of the other party. When that happens, it means everyone expects that candidate to win.

It happened in late May and June for incumbent assemblymen Jeff Gorell of Camarillo and Das Williams of Santa Barbara. Gorell, the only Republican Assembly candidate endorsed by the California Labor Federation, received three significant union contributions -- $2,000 apeice from the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters and the Association of Highway Patrolmen, and $1,500 from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the prison guards' union.

In addition, Gorell received $3,000 from Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, who is a major donor to Democrats (including Sen. Fran Pavley of Agoura Hills, who received $3,000 from both Doerr and his wife, Ann).,

More surprising was a contribution to Williams, a Democrat who in his work prior to being elected to the Assembly was a community organizer in Ventura County whose projects included organizing opposition to Walmart's efforts to build in Ventura. But now Walmart has written a $7,800 check to his Assembly re-election campaign. Williams was also the recipient of several contributions from the insurance industry, typically a large funder of Republicans. He received $1,000 contributions from Farmers Group, Blue Shield, the California Association of Professional Liability Insurers PAC, HealthNet and the Personal Insurance Federation.