The neighborhood crank had taken down the big bouquet of Recall Newsom and Elect Larry Elder signs by Thursday morning, a bike tour showed.
Not just lawn signs, understand. His garage roof had sprouted half a dozen of the placards, all craftily arranged and lit up at night, like Santa’s sleigh in a Christmas display.
The same fellow had treated us to a similar barrage of Trump agit-prop back when that was a thing. Given the swiftness with which he removes the offending nonsense after sensible people vote, at least he’s not a particularly sore loser.
I live in a California part of California, so there were no other pro-recall signs visible for miles around over the past few nutty months as the protest vote that was the attempt to remove the governor played out in tragi-comic ways.
Protesting the results of a landslide election three years ago for a fellow who will be up for re-election in less than a year with a special polling that ended up in an even greater landslide for him. Really socked it to Gavin Newsom, didn’t you, recallers?
Protest votes?
Sure, protest votes can be fun.
Like when my anti-war mother didn’t find the other candidates to be sufficiently anti-war and so voted for Benjamin Spock for president in the early 1970s.
Dr. Spock was not going to win. Winning is not the point of a protest vote. (Then she turned around and voted for Gerald Ford for president because as a fellow Southerner she didn’t care for sanctimonious Jimmy Carter.)
But, seriously, California GOP. Is your quixotic quest about winning, or is it about protesting?
Because if it’s the former, you’re not going to put forward a fringe candidate with dangerously eccentric views — reparations for slave owners whose “property” was “taken,” anyone? — such as Larry Elder for governor in 2022.
If you were about winning, Republicans, you’d pivot to someone who, well, could win. And no, it’s not about going with other Trump supporters such as John Cox and Kevin Faulconer. Their day is done.
If you were interested in anything but the crank part, or about threatening to move to Idaho as soon as you can also move the beach there, you’d create a sensible middle in our state’s politics.
That party would acknowledge reality, and so would work to solve climate change, not to deny it. It would not cede Gavin Newsom a centimeter on using vaccine mandates and mask requirements as needed to beat back COVID-19, which now has killed 666,000 Americans — 1 in 500 of us. It would be pro-choice, not just because that’s the right moral stance, but because 89% of California women are pro-choice, and you’re not winning without them.
Running on the French Laundry didn’t work. Your foodie neighbors aspire to eat there. If you wanted to reach practical moderates such as me, you’d drop the culture war stuff and go all pre-Prop. 187 Pete Wilson and be about rolled-up sleeve competence. About not toadying to prison guard unions. About modernizing the perversely backward state bureaucracies, with their ancient computer systems in the state that invented computer systems.
And, sure, go out on a limb about something. I, for instance, am on the record over many decades favoring a part-time Legislature made up of people with other jobs. If I were king, I’d abolish teacher unions and then give good teachers huge pay raises to encourage excellence and stop people from having to become lawyers. How about that as a platform?
More mini-Trumps? That’s the way to stay losers.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
"Stop" - Google News
September 19, 2021 at 10:01PM
https://ift.tt/3lVEzjR
Stop with the mini-Trumps, California Republicans - The Pasadena Star-News
"Stop" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2KQiYae
https://ift.tt/2WhNuz0
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Stop with the mini-Trumps, California Republicans - The Pasadena Star-News"
Post a Comment