Tired Californians are ready to send California Gov. Gavin Newsom to the Andrew M. Cuomo Memorial House for incurable politicians.
Democrat faces runoff election in September after 1.3 million Californians, including hundreds of thousands of registered Democrats, signed a withdrawal petition condemning his performance in everything from illegal immigrants to to water use policies up to taxes.
Right now, Newsom has three different sets of problems.
His first set of problems can be presented in “Gavin Newsom is not very good at politics.”
Newsom became a figure of contempt when, in the midst of the closure of COVID-19, he ruthlessly ordered and policed, he and his fellow lobbyists, medical lobbyists. – discarded the masks he had ordered for the peasantry and sat down to a splendid meal at the French Laundry, arguably the most froufrou restaurant in America, with a $ 12,000 token for wine alone.
Governor Newsom called it a “bad mistake,” as if he had simply entered a $ 2,800 bottle of François Raveneau’s domain.
After this comic portrayal, the California Democrats probably wanted to forget that he was one of them, which Governor Newsom apparently did. The incumbent Democratic governor of California will not be listed as a Democrat in the withdrawal vote because he did not file documentation identifying himself as a member of his party before the deadline. In a state where Democrats have a big numerical advantage, this is a critical strategic failure.
The second set of problems lies in an even larger file called “Gavin Newsom is not very good at being governor.” Newsom’s plutocratic getaways might have been fun if California thrived in general, but it’s not. California still looks golden for people who dine at the French laundromat, but for those who don’t, the road is hard: crime rises, the cost of living is impossible for people who aren’t big kahunes in Silicon Valley or Beverly Hills celebrities, you can see wandering camps everywhere, the streets of many California cities are Third World-style begging gloves.
And it will get worse: while booming stock prices provided California with a single $ 15 billion budget surplus, Newsom and its Democratic allies in Sacramento have put the state on track for a series of multimillion-dollar deficits which will begin in two years. This would mean higher taxes or service cuts, none of which would be welcome.
Newsom’s third problem is Larry Elder.
The popular black talk show host and columnist from downtown Los Angeles is the top candidate to replace Newsom in the withdrawal effort.
In addition, the usual Democratic book will attack some obstacles against Elder, a conservative who is virtually designed to break down a self-employed progressive in the Bay Area. It will be fun to see a rich white man named “Gavin” mock a black man from South Los Angeles as a friend of the white nationalist hooligan. It will be positively amusing to hear that a graduate of Crenshaw High School is denounced as an instrument of the ultra-rich by a San Francisco aristocrat educated – in French, no more and no less – at the Notre Dame Des Victoires School, something like this. your family can afford it when your dad is a Getty Oil legal advisor.
He is the sage of South Central versus the schmuck of French Laundry.
Newsom will pretend to run against the ghost of Donald Trump, economic injustice and climate change. But what is lacking in California are not utopian and progressive crusading visions spanning the world: it is ordinary competition for internal governors: crime, budgets, taxes, education, housing, roads. Of course, the French laundry scandal won’t help: like Cuomo, Newsom may end up being dragged down by hubris when only incompetence would have been a reason to withdraw him.
Newsom can survive. Polls right now suggest he will go on to squeak on an embarrassingly close call. But if he goes the other way, he would not be the first Democratic governor to sink into a great blue state overthrown by arrogance, vanity, and self-indulgence.
Damn, I wouldn’t even be the first to retire this summer.
Kevin D. Williamson is the author of “Big White Ghetto: Dead Broken, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the ‘Real America.”