What a great topic for me to open my inaugural post on Red County...the 2010 race for the 48th Congressional seat.  It seems like only yesterday that I was having my infamous blog joust on this subject a few years ago with the proprietor of this fine blog Matt Cunningham.

The current occupant of the 48th Congressional seat is John Campbell.  He has had a few years to get some experience under his belt back in DC.  During that time he has mostly been a good conservative vote for smaller limited government with the major exception of course of his yea vote to authorize the $700 billion dollar TARP bailout last year which was supposed to stabilize the financial markets.  How's that one working out so far Congressman?  We'll come back to the repercussions of that vote in a later posting.

Enter the former Mayor of Irvine and current councilwoman Beth Krom.  She has announced that she will run for the 48th CD seat.  Her chances of winning this seat are slim and none, but that doesn't mean the Congressman should take this race lightly next year.  He shouldn't and better not.  I see a lot of similarities between this race and the race last year for the 46th CD between Dana Rohrabacher and Debbie Cook.  Krom, like Cook, has good name ID in the biggest city in the district, Irvine, but is not well known in the rest of the district.  This doesn't mean she won't be able to get her message out though.  She will most likely have access to the donors that have given to Larry Agran's corrupt machine over the last few years.  It won't be enough to overcompensate for the Republican registration advantage in the district, but it should make for an interesting race to spill copious amounts of electronic ink on.