How California’s Top Democrats Paved the Way for a Republican Governor This Fall
Newsom has always been enmeshed with the power of big money. "Gavin Newsom wasn't born to wealth and privilege but as a youngster he was enveloped in it as the surrogate son of billionaire Gordon Getty,” longtime conservative California journalist Dan Walters has pointed out . “Later, Getty's personal trust fund -- managed by Newsom's father -- provided initial financing for business ventures that made Newsom wealthy enough to segue into a political career as a protégé of San Francisco's fabled political mastermind, Willie Brown." In 1996, as mayor, Brown appointed Newsom to the city’s Parking and Traffic Committee. Twenty-five years later, Newsom is chief executive of a state with the world’s fifth-largest economy .
Last November, Newsom dramatized his upper-crust arrogance of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Photos emerged that showed him having dinner with a corporate lobbyist friend among people from several households, all without masks, in a mostly enclosed dining room -- at an extremely expensive Napa Valley restaurant called The French Laundry -- at a time when Gov. Newsom was urging Californians to stay away from public gatherings and to wear masks. The governor’s self-inflicted political wound for hypocrisy badly damaged his image .
After deep-pocketed funders teamed up with the state’s Republican Party to
circulate petitions forcing a recall election, initial liberal
optimism
gladly assumed that the GOP was overplaying its hand. But the recall effort
kept gaining momentum. Now, there’s every indication that Republicans will
vote at a significantly higher rate than Democrats -- a fact that speaks
not only to conservative fervor but also to the chronic detachment of the
state’s Democratic Party from its base.
Newsom’s most fervent boosters include corporate interests, mainline labor
unions and the California Democratic Party. Just about every leader of the
CDP, along with the vast majority of Democrats in the state legislature, is
pleased to call themselves “progressive.” But the label is often a thin
veneer for corporate business as usual.
For instance, the CDP’s platform has long been on record calling for a
single-payer healthcare system in California. Such measures passed the
legislature during the time when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was
governor from 2003 to 2011, and he surprised no one by
vetoing the bills
. But the heavily-Democratic legislature has obliged the latest two
Democratic governors, Jerry Brown and Newsom, by bottling up single-payer
legislation; it’s been well understood that Brown and Newsom wanted to
confine the state party’s support for single-payer to lip service.
In the same vein, the CDP’s current chair, Rusty Hicks, signed a pledge
that the state party would not accept fossil-fuel money. But he went on to
do
exactly that
to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.
As an elected member of the California Democratic Party’s central committee
during the last decade, I’ve often witnessed such top-down maneuvers.
Frequently, the CDP’s most powerful leaders are in a groove of thwarting
the progressive aspirations of the party’s bedrock supporters -- and
blocking measures that would materially improve the lives of millions of
Californians.
“This is what happens when the culture of high-priced consultants and cult
of personality meets a corporate-controlled legislature and party,” said
Karen Bernal, a Sacramento-based activist who chaired the CDP’s large
Progressive Caucus for six years. She told me: “The campaign promises and
vows of support for progressive policy are revealed to be nothing more than
performative, while the hopes and dreams of the party’s progressive base
are sent to die in committee and behind closed doors. The end result is a
noticeable lack of fight when it’s most needed.”
Now, with the recall election barreling down on the state, the routinely
aloof orientation of the state party’s structure is coming back to haunt
it. Overall, the CDP’s actual connections to grassroots activists and core
constituencies are tenuous at best, while Newsom comes across as more
Hollywood and Wall Street than neighborhood and Main Street. No wonder
Democrats statewide are less energized about voting on the recall than
Republicans are.
If Newsom loses the recall, his successor as governor will be determined by
who gets the most votes on “part 2” of the same ballot. In that case, you
might logically ask, isn’t the “part 2” winner a safe bet to be a Democrat
in such a heavily Democratic state? Actually, no.
On the theory that having any prominent Democrat in contention would harm
his chances of surviving the yes/no recall vote on the ballot’s “part 1,”
Newsom and party operatives conveyed to all of the state’s prominent
Democrats: Don’t even think about it.
The intimidation was successful. Not a single Democrat with substantial
name recognition is on “part 2” of the ballot, so no reasonable safety net
contender exists if the recall wins. As a result, Newsom’s replacement
looks as likely to be an ultra-right Republican as a Democrat. And if the
replacement is a Democrat, it would almost certainly be a highly
problematic fellow -- a financial adviser and YouTube star named Kevin
Paffrath, whose grab bag of ideas includes a few that appeal to Democrats
(like marriage equality, higher teacher pay and promotion of solar and wind
farms) but features a lot of pseudo-populist notions that would do
tremendous damage if implemented.
Paffrath’s proposals, as
described
by the Southern California News Group, seek “to make all coronavirus safety
measures optional, to ditch income tax for anyone making less than
$250,000, to use the National Guard to get all unhoused Californians off
the streets and to give trained gun owners more rights.” As a clue to the
inclusivity of the “centrist solutions” that Paffrath says he’s yearning
for, he introduced himself to voters with a video that “features clips from
Fox News and from conservative media host Ben Shapiro.” Recent polling
shows the 29-year-old Paffrath neck and neck with the frontrunning
Republican on the ballot -- bombastic Trumpist talk-show host
Larry Elder
.
Whether Newsom will remain governor past mid-autumn now looks like a coin
flip. And what’s at stake in the recall goes far beyond California -- in
fact, all the way to the nation’s capital.
California’s 88-year-old senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, is widely
understood to be in poor health and
suffering from cognitive decline
as she -- with
increasing difficulty
-- navigates the U.S. Senate, now evenly split between the two parties.
Under state law, if she dies or otherwise leaves her seat vacant, the
governor gets to appoint the replacement. In a worst-case scenario, a
Republican becomes governor when the recall election results are certified
in October and thus for at least 14 months would have the power to select
Feinstein’s replacement, thereby making Mitch McConnell the Senate majority
leader.
Given the looming political dangers, Sen. Feinstein should resign so that
Gov. Newsom could appoint a Democratic replacement. But such a selfless
move by Feinstein is highly unlikely. Despite all the talk about loyalty to
their party and determination to defeat the extremism of the Republican
Party, corporate Democrats like Newsom and Feinstein routinely look out for
number one. That’s how we got into this ominous recall mess in the first
place.
____________________________
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author
of many books including
War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020
Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
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