TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2002 — Today is primary day in California. Three candidates — former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, Secretary of State Bill Jones, and businessman Bill Simon — are all vying for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Riordan, a left-leaning millionaire, was the early frontrunner (with a 40 point lead in the polls!), but he has slipped dramatically, thanks mainly to ads run by Governor Gray Davis. Simon, for whom New York mayor Rudy Giuliani campaigned, has now taken the lead.

But Riordan also has himself to blame for his precipitous decline in the polls: he mishandled a hot-potato issue in California — bilingual education. Here’s the background. Riordan has always been an extremely moderate, some would say liberal, Republican. Over the years he has committed a number of sins, from the point of view of his party's right wing. He forgot to include Ronald Reagan on his list of favorite Republican governors, for example, a no-no in a state where Reagan is still a Republican icon. And he was openly critical of Republican governor George Deukmejian. So during the campaign, in an attempt to curry favor with the right, Riordan came down on bilingual education — hard. "It’s worse than nonsense. It’s downright evil," Riordan said. (For a glimpse about how conservatives feel about this, see http://www.nationalreview.com/daily/nr022502.shtml.)

Forget about debate over the merits of bilingual education for a moment. Even if you oppose bilingual education as a costly and inefficient means of educating children, Riordan’s comments made no sense. At a time when President Bush has labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an "axis of evil" and America is fighting the "evil" of terrorism, Riordan inadvertently equated bilingual education with terrorism — a bone-headed blunder. Rather than underlining his commitment to educating students, Riordan’s comments amounted to trivializing the War on Terrorism.

Riordan’s statement is significant in another way. It underscores just how much Massachusetts still differs politically from other parts of the country. While Riordan’s one play to the right was on bilingual education, Republican governor Jane Swift worked to preserve the practice: she sought a compromise allowing individual districts to decide whether or not they want to uphold the policy. Swift’s announcement received exactly one day of press coverage — it being the only thing her aides leaked to the press on the day of her State of the State address, and nary a word has been said of it since. Many might want to think that immigrant-related issues matter in the Commonwealth, but the truth is that they barely register on the political radar.

Certainly, nothing in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Massachusetts compares to that California or, say, Texas, where the two leading candidates conducted their first debate in Spanish. The reason Swift was able to forge her bilingual-education compromise with such ease is that it’s just not a hot issue here — even if the statewide referendum in favor of bilingual education pushed by Ron Unz passes, as many suspect it will. And don’t expect any major debates in Spanish in this year’s governor’s race, either.