David Brooks and the Liberal Media Lament That a Gay-Baiting GOP "Moderate" Mayoral Candidate in California Can't Beat an "orthodox conservative." Who Is, uh, Gay. And Libertarian.

On March 29, New York
Times columnist David Brooks
lamented that a telegenic young veteran and would-be rising
Republican star Nathan Fletcher felt compelled to quit the
California GOP and run as an independent moderate after failing to
gain support from the party in his run for San Diego mayor:

[A]s Scott Lewis of voiceofsandiego.org has detailed, the San
Diego Republican Party has moved sharply right recently. A group of
insurgents have toppled the old city establishment. As Lewis wrote,
"The Republican Party has gone through a fantastically effective
effort to enforce conformity around its principles."
The G.O.P. central committee and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers
Association, an activist group, spurned Fletcher in the mayor's
race, endorsing the more orthodox conservative, Councilman Carl
DeMaio.

That
same day, Huffington Post California-politics columnist
William Bradley wrote
essentially the same column about poor Nathan Fletcher:

He hasn't moved to the left. His party has moved further to the
right, with its endorsed candidate, San Diego City Councilman Carl
DeMaio, helping lead the way. [...]
Fletcher has also backed gay rights, giving an emotional speech
in the Capitol as a decorated Marine veteran opposing the "Don't
Ask/Don't Tell" policy and voting for legislation requiring
curriculum materials to reflect the role of gays and lesbians in
history. And he's an advocate of renewable energy, voting for [Gov.
Jerry] Brown's legislation to require that 33% of all electric
power in California come from renewable sources by the end of 2020.
[...]
Fletcher's move sets up a very intriguing test case for
Republicans who haven't turned their backs on modernity and
governance.

Chimed in John Wildermuth at
Fox & Hounds Daily:

Fletcher ran into some uniquely Republican problems during his
time in Sacramento. He supported gay rights measures, like
Democratic state Sen. Mark Leno's effort to require state textbooks
to recognize the accomplishments of gays and lesbians. Fletcher
voted for environmental legislation. He backed Gov. Jerry Brown's
jobs program and, horror of horrors, had the reputation of being
willing to work with the Democratic leadership in the Assembly.
The party's conservative base was quick to suggest that Fletcher
was a RINO, or Republican in name only. Or even, they said with
gasp, a moderate.

Over at Rachel Maddow's blog that same day, Kent Jones
said this:

Come on out, moderate, goal-oriented Republicans. We know you're
out there.

And four days later, proving once again that the L.A.
Times will make sure to get it wrong and get it last,
Sacramento columnist George Skelton wrote more in that vein, in a

column I cannot read because of the newspaper's new
reader-hating firewall, but which I am told also describes Carl
DeMaio as an "orthodox conservative." Which, it turns out, is
grossly inaccurate. Here's Scott Lewis at
voiceofsandiego.com (where I harvested some of these
links):

One important note about both Brooks' and Skelton's columns.
They label DeMaio an "orthodox conservative," but that's hardly the
case.

Weird, right? He seems like such a knuckle-dragger compared to
the enlightened, gay-friendly Fletcher, even if?remarkably?none of
the Fletcher-laments linked above ever talk about what makes
Carl DeMaio so conservative.
Former Reason editor Virginia Postrel, from whom I
harvested most of these links, has
much more:

I knew Carl DeMaio slightly when he was barely out of college
and working for the Reason Public Policy Institute. RPPI was a very
wonky place and he didn't seem like a scary guy, but maybe he's
taken on some unsavory positions. I don't know, and you won't know
either if you rely on Brooks or Bradley to tell you. They aren't
interested in the actual candidate's policies, only in using DeMaio
as a symbol of evil right-wing crazies. [...]
My friend Cosmo Wenman, who lives in the San Diego metro area
[...] points out that Carl DeMaio is San Diego's first
openly gay city councilman, a fact that probably didn't
turn up in the 10 minutes David Brooks spent researching his column
but that Bill Bradley, a veteran California political writer,
surely knows. So why does he mislead readers by emphasizing
Fletcher's pro-gay credentials, leaving us to infer that DeMaio is
a social con?

Not only that, but super-moderate hero Nathan Fletcher has been
accusing DeMaio of
semi-secretly pushing a pro-gay agenda when he's talking to certain
"communities":

Family values: Family values are very important to me. As a
married father of two, I take very seriously my commitment to my
wife and children.  As a Christian of strong faith, I take
seriously my commitment to God. However, I do not believe it is the
role of government to legislate religion and impose our moral
values.  That is the role of the institutions of family and
faith.  We have looked to government for too much intervention
in people's individual freedoms and personal lives.  Please
know and appreciate that I am consistent in this
position?regardless of what community I am speaking to and how it
might affect a scorecard.  I know from conversations with many
of you that Carl Demaio tells you he will never advocate or push
social issues related to sexual orientation.  However, this
doesn't square with the statements and commitments he makes in
other communities.  Like or dislike my positions, I have
always been upfront, honest, and straightforward.

Over at Deseret News, Eric Schulzke
adds:

And DeMaio is not an orthodox conservative on fiscal issues
either. If anything, he is a libertarian, having worked as a policy
analyst for the libertarian Reason Public Policy Institute in the
early 2000s. [...]
[H]ow [David Brooks and William Bradley] oversimplified the
picture this situation so dramatically is a puzzle. Were they
cleverly played by Fletcher allies? Do they actually think that a
gay Republican with libertarian leanings represents a lurch to the
right, an enforcement of conformity, and a return to orthodoxy?

This is what happens when political narrative overrides
journalistic impulse. Imagine how different this story might have
been spun if the dominant opinion-journalism narrative going around
was about how the Republican Party was at long last ditching gay
panic in favor of robust fiscal reform. Brooks
and the rest of 'em ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they
won't be. 
Here Carl DeMaio's author page at
Reason.org. A
search at Reason.com shows a politician sensibly concerned
about the immediate crises (especially in San Diego) of pension
reform and public-sector featherbedding, rather than the far-off
fever dreams of assigning energy-source percentages in the year
2020. And you can watch Reason.tv interviewing DeMaio two years
ago:

lesbian romance lesbian fiction lesbian posters