I just had an interesting conversation with an individual whom I met and became friendly with at the recent Renaissance Weekend. I’ll share some interesting aspects of our discussion.

The fellow is the wealthy retired CEO of a Fortune 500 company living in Palo Alto, and a mainstream liberal Democratic activist, quite close to Alan Cranston, Common Cause, and various World Government and disarmament organizations. He’s been giving me a little help on my campaign finance reform initiative.

While we were discussing McCain’s position on campaign finance, I happened to mention that I was hoping to get him to take a public stand against bilingual education, which I felt would improve his electoral prospects enormously, but had so far had no luck with him or any other significant national Republican. The liberal CEO was quite surprised since he strongly supports English in the schools, and can’t imagine why the Republican politicians don’t as well.

Then I mentioned my unsuccessful efforts to get Giuliani to back a 227-type initiative in NYC, despite my polling showing a gigantic boost to Giuliani’s prospects if he did so, including a net swing to Giuliani of SIXTY-SIX POINTS(!!!) among New York Democrats. The CEO said those numbers scarcely surprised him since he was originally from New York and every Democrat he knew there would vote for English. He also said that he expected Giuliani to have a very difficult time against Hillary otherwise, since he’d seen Giuliani on the Sunday public affairs shows a few days ago, and his positions on nearly every issue were those of typical liberal Democrat and indistinguishable from those of Hillary, giving conservatives no real reason to vote for him.

Finally, the CEO mentioned that he serves on a University of California task force charged with improving minority admissions in the wake of Prop. 209’s outlawing of affirmative action. He suggested that the huge rise in Latino test scores because of Prop. 227 (as documented in the San Jose Mercury News) might represent the solution which his task force had been searching for, and perhaps he could persuade the other members that pushing for strict implementation of Prop. 227 throughout all California’s school districts was the best means of countacting the harmful effects of Prop. 209 upon Latinos.

I wished him the best of luck in his efforts, and suggested that if he ever decided to switch parties and become a Republican, he would probably have a good shot at winning the presidential nomination based on his views.