County Assessor defiant in face of calls to resign over "sucking tit" comment

National cancel culture came to Santa Clara County this month, when the local Democratic party, prompted by activist outrage, censured and called for the resignation of its long-time county assessor, Larry Stone. The Assessor had used a barnyard metaphor to describe his potential rival's relationship with unions. Veteran investigative journalist and media expert Mark Lisheron explores in this exclusive report for Opportunity Now.

By Mark Lisheron

Larry Stone knew he had screwed up the moment the words “sucking the tit of the union” came out of his mouth. His bigger mistake was failing to anticipate the reaction from Michele Dauber.

For 43 years Stone, who is now 80, has metronomically won local elections, the last six to hold his post as Santa Clara County Assessor. Now it seems to him Dauber has taken control of the county Democratic Party which he has served so loyally and demanded that he resign. 

Stone says he should have seen it coming, maybe. But he didn’t. 

“Michele Dauber is scary to a lot of elected Democrats because she bullies them,” Stone says. “But I will not be intimidated, bullied or influenced. And I’ll win this election with the support of regular Democrats. Who gives two shits about the progressives running the Democratic machinery?”

Gary Kremen gives at least two shits about those progressives. They are among the party leaders Kremen, the vice chair of the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, knows he must solicit if he makes a run at Stone’s job. Kremen, who describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, says he intends to make his decision formal by July 2. 

Stone says Kremen began last year having coffee with Stone’s deputy, David Ginsborg, encouraging Stone to make 2022 his last year as county assessor. While Kremen has publicly denied directly asking Stone to retire, he says that “after six terms our assessor has gotten complacent.”

When asked why he was running for assessor, Kremen says he first found his property tax bill impenetrable. And when he began to research, Kremen says he found Stone was running an antiquated office. A businessman, a problem solver, he says, is just what the office needs.

In interviews with the local press announcing his serious consideration for a run, Kremen faulted Stone for requiring his employees to work from the office during the early months of the pandemic, something that earned the enmity of their union representatives.

Kremen also knocked Stone for his position on the labor-backed Proposition 15, a rollback of 1978’s famous Proposition 13, which failed last November despite considerable support from Democrats. Stone had made clear that “Something needs to be done, but the ballot question — as it is worded — would be a catastrophic failure for assessors. It would not be difficult for assessors to implement as stated, it would be impossible.”

“I like implementing hard things,” Kremen says.

Solving knotty problems might be a specialty, but Kremen also has some experience in overwhelming otherwise obscure elections. Upset that his water district was not being adequately reimbursed for infrastructure, Kremen took his first shot at elected office in 2014, running for the District 7 seat on the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District.

Kremen, 57, spent well over $400,000, more than 30 times more than the incumbent and easily more than had ever been spent on a county water board race. He won by 900 votes and was reelected handily in 2018.

While it might not be apparent, assessor is a bit of a plum for the politically ambitious in Santa Clara County. It has the lowest profile of the three countywide offices (sheriff and district attorney are the other two). Unlike many elected offices in the state, there are no term limits.

The incumbent enjoys the support of an almost entirely Democratic electorate in a county nearing 2 million people, the sixth most populous county in California. And the pay isn’t bad. In addition to Stone’s $250,000 salary is a benefits package valued at another $75,000.

“I make twice as much money as the mayor of Santa Clara,” Stone says.

Since 1994, the office has unquestioningly belonged to Larry Stone. In 2006, the only time he faced a challenger, Stone got three times as many votes. He says matter-of-factly that his is the best run assessor’s office in California.

Though he faced little opposition himself, Stone made sure along the way to burnish his party credentials. In an email responding to the call for his resignation, Stone reminded his accusers of the years of walking precincts and raising money for Democrats locally and nationally.  In this last presidential election, Stone says he raised $102,000 for the Biden-Harris ticket.

In addition, he wrote, his support for labor unions informed not only his ideology but how he has run the assessor’s office. “My support for Democrats and labor unions is not transactional,” he wrote.

Perhaps because of his unchallenged status, Stone also cultivated an easy relationship with the local press. In all his years in office, Stone says he has never turned down a request for an interview. During those interviews he felt free to speak his mind.

And so it was that he agreed in mid-April to talk to Dan Pulcrano, the owner and publisher of several weekly print and digital news outlets, including San Jose Inside.

While being asked about the recent scrapes with the union, a nettled Stone told Pulcrano, “Gary Kremen is sucking the tit of the union. That’s what the whole race will be about.” 

Both Pulcrano and Stone understood the importance of what he had just said. While he didn’t ask Pulcrano not to use the quote, he hoped he wouldn’t. Pulcrano added to his story that Stone regretted having replied that way. Pulcrano had no regrets about spending his money quote.

“Put popcorn in the microwave and pull up a chair for next year’s political show of the season,” was Pulcrano’s lead.

Stone’s first political mistake was his candor with a journalist who happens to be a friend of your opponent. His second was in attempting to explain to Pulcrano what he meant by what he said.

In a story from May 7, San Jose Inside seemed to be enjoying Stone’s flailing attempt to explain that he had been referring to a century-old phrase “sucking hind tit,” the fate of the runt in a sow’s litter.

“Digging himself deeper,” the story said, “the assessor continued breaking the metaphor down ‘as an idiom meaning to get a raw deal or the short end of the stick. It is derived from barnyard pigs in which the weakest pig is forced to nurse on the mother pig’s nipple furthest back and therefore gets the least amount of milk.’”

This was just the beginning of the parsing. On April 19 the members of the Silicon Valley Democratic Club voted first to send a letter of censure asking that Stone retract and apologize for the statement. A second much closer vote directed that the letter include a demand that Stone resign. That letter was drafted by Michele Dauber.

Email correspondence obtained by Opportunity Now shows how reaction to Stone’s gaffe escalated. On the afternoon of April 20, Stone contacts Jennie Hutchinson, president of the Silicon Valley Democratic Club and writes, “While I genuinely regret making the statement to San Jose Inside, my comment had absolutely nothing to do with women,” and a little later, “While my use of the term was politically stupid, I did not intend to offend anyone.” And, “I do not take a backseat to anyone in support of women(‘s) rights.”

“I will not be bullied,” he says in closing,  “and I have no intention of resigning.”

A few hours later, it’s Dauber who responds by email to Stone. “I find your analogy of organized labor to ‘barnyard pigs’ to be highly disturbing. Unions made this country great. Union members are the backbone of the middle class and the mainstay of the Democratic Party. If anyone is a pig in this situation, it is not labor.

“Next, you claim that you ‘do not take a backseat to anyone in support of women’s rights.’ I disagree. In addition to your offensive comments for which you were censured, your own list of endorsers shows a marked lack of support among women.”

On May 3 in an email to county Democrats, Stone pumps up his level of contrition. “I want to express unequivocally to the members of the Democratic Central Committee it was never my intent to disparage women or labor. It was just a miserable and insensitive way to express my frustration at that moment.”

On the same day to those same Democrats, Dauber makes clear she’s having none of it. “I will leave Democrats to draw their own conclusions on the sincerity of Larry Stone's contrition in today's 5/3/21 email,” Dauber wrote. “I know what I think based on the emails quoted above, on which Stone copied County Party Chair Bill James, presumably because he thought his ramblings about mother pig nipples would somehow make him look good to the Chair.”

Curiously, the demand of the Democratic leadership in Santa Clara County for the resignation of one of the county’s most powerful and longest serving Democratic 

officials has not been noted by the region’s biggest newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. San Jose Spotlight, which first reported Kremen’s possible candidacy has so far not followed up on the biggest local political spat in years.

Stone, who says he has not been contacted by the Merc, speculated the paper simply doesn’t have the staff to cover a county story, even a consequential one. When asked why the Spotlight hasn’t asked for his opinion about the Stone comments, Kremen said he isn’t sure, but he’s disappointed. “It hurts my feelings,” he says, not altogether seriously.

San Jose Inside, despite owning the story, has had very little to say about Dauber’s role in all of this, although she’s following a pattern that brought her national attention in 2018 when she led only the third successful recall of a judge in state history.

Opportunity Now contacted Dauber by email for comment on the Stone standoff. She has not yet replied. 

Dauber unrepentantly drove a wedge between members of the state Democratic party by organizing and raising $1 million to put the recall of Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky on a countywide ballot June 5, 2018. Like Stone, Persky made a point of showcasing his Democratic Party credentials.

Dauber helped whip up a public furor, contending that Persky had essentially sided with a Stanford University student for sentencing him to six months in jail for the sexual assault and attempted rape of a 22-year-old woman outdoors on campus. Nearly 62 percent of the voters agreed with Dauber, and Persky became the first judge in nearly 90 years to be recalled.

What drew the attention of national publications like Huffington Post and Vogue, however, was Dauber’s uncompromising divisiveness, particularly in the state’s legal community. The Santa Clara County Bar Association, the California Judges Association, 90 California law professors and more than 400 public defenders and attorneys publicly came out against the recall, according to the Huffington Post story.

“Robert Weisberg, who teaches criminal law and describes himself as a progressive feminist, grew visibly angry when he spoke about Dauber,” the story says. “The recall, he argued, was ‘a gratuitous and vindictive campaign’ and ‘an exploitation of the Me Too movement.’”

“I welcome their hate,” Dauber told the Merc a few days after the recall.

A few months later, Dauber announced that she had set up a super-PAC, the Enough is Enough Voter Project. The super-PAC raised more than $162,000 in the 2020 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org and on its website takes credit for helping to defeat at least five elected officials nationally who failed to take the issue of violence against women seriously enough.

Closer to home, Dauber has made it her mission to help defeat candidates running for office who supported Judge Persky. Ann Ravel, a rising star in the progressive wing of the party who had been appointed by President Barack Obama to the Federal Election Commission, made her first electoral bid to succeed outgoing State Senator Jim Beall last year.

During her campaign she was made to renounce her support for Persky during a face-to-face with Dauber and other members of the new leadership of the Silicon Valley Democratic Club. San Jose Inside described it as “an impassioned two-hour conversation with recall proponents Thursday night that at times brought her to tears.”

The story quoted Dauber the next morning. “We are glad that Ann, as a woman who wants to serve this county, now understands how much hurt this inflicted on women voters.”

Weeks before the vote, after the Merc endorsed Ravel and decried “the sleazy smear suggesting that because she opposed Judge Aaron Persky’s recall that she wouldn’t fight for sexual assault survivors,” Dauber tweeted that she still could not support Ravel.

“Ann Ravel was Aaron Persky's most prominent endorser,” Dauber said in the tweet dated Oct. 22, 2020. “She stood mute while Persky's campaign which was run by a Trump operative shamed and blamed Brock Turner's victim. Ann can't be trusted to protect survivors.”

Ravel lost the vote, 54 percent to 46 percent to Dave Cortese, a longtime member of  the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

On March 16, 10 days after Kremen first floated his bid for county assessor, Dauber tweeted that she hadn’t finished with her Persky purge. “The Santa Clara County Bar Association will never wipe away the stain of having stood with Persky instead of with survivors,” she wrote. “It cost Ann Ravel her election. It's going to cost Larry Stone his election. Judges are not above the law. The people have right and duty to address bias.”

However involved she might be in costing Stone his job, Dauber and her coterie in the new Democratic leadership have so far not contacted Kremen, he says. Should he formally announce he’s running, Kremen says he will most certainly solicit their endorsement.

“Right now, it’s about him (Stone). I wish it were about me, but it’s not right now. They haven’t endorsed me.”

Stone wonders just how vindictive his fellow Democrats have to be to go after him for a comment he regrets, but believes has been distorted. Stone donated $500 to Persky during the recall campaign, but the two had never spoken until Persky called him after he had lost to thank Stone for his donation.

Stone has also never spoken to Dauber. “This attack is out of the blue,” he says. Local political observer Terry Chistensen told the the Spotlight in March that Stone might surprise some people who don’t know the kind of political animal he is.

“He loves campaigning. He’ll work hard. He can raise money and he probably has more political connections than anybody in the Valley,” Christensen told the Spotlight. Kremen used lots of money to oust a water district incumbent. “But I doubt that it can be done with Larry Stone,” he said.

Stone acknowledges the shadow Dauber has cast has caused some old allies in the Democratic Party to remain very quiet. And he finds it disorienting to plan for a campaign that could very well be fought on two fronts, opponent and fundraising headhunter.

“She’s a bully. A classic, classic bully,” Stone says. “But I have a lot of personal support. I have very little concern about losing this election.”

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