California s Recall Is a Blow to Democratic Change

Newsom s odds of holding his seat in September s special election have been narrow: recent polling has the Governor ahead, 50.6 per cent to 46.3 per cent, according to a late-August analysis by FiveThirtyEight. The offenses that necessitate his removal, as the recall s mostly Republican ringmasters tell it, are various and somewhat vague. Newsom is said to have been insufficiently supportive of business during the pandemic. Many residents find California s taxes and unemployment too high and its housing supply too small. Some consider his wildfire response weak; some resent his decision to release state prisoners at the tail end of their terms or with serious health risks, to stem the spread of COVID-19 in overcrowded facilities. And there s l affaire French Laundry, in which, last fall, the Governor ignored his own pandemic guidelines and went to a birthday party at a super-fancy Napa restaurant. (Let them eat ramps!) These are formidable complaints the kind that accrue to every official at the end of every term, when citizens choose whether to vote the bums back in or boot them out.

What they aren t is a leadership emergency. We know, more than ever now, what gross incompetence or personal abuse looks like in executive roles. Newsom displays no evidence of either, and his tenure hasn t been empty of feats. He finally put a moratorium on death-row executions in California, and committed an unprecedented twelve billion dollars to homelessness-alleviation projects (with another ten billion for affordable housing tacked on). In the earliest days of the pandemic, California dodged the fate of states such as New York, in part because Newsom was the first governor to declare shelter-in-place. The business costs of such restrictions? In a bad year nationally, it s hard to claim they were inordinate, given the nearly seventy-six-billion-dollar budget surplus Newsom says California pulled in this year, much of it from taxes. Even at its worst, his record has been the best a politician can hope for: mixed.

via outline.com

This is richer than the pate de foi gras at the French Laundry.