Your Anti-Endorsements for California’s Statewide Offices
[guest post by JVW]
This time of year, no matter where you live, you are undoubtedly blanketed with endorsements for the midterm elections. Newspapers, to be sure, have traditionally published a full list of how they believe the tuned-in citizen — and in the case of the Dog Trainer, the non-citizen (I kid, I kid) — should mark his or her ballot, but others have gotten in on the act as well, from PACs to vapid celebrities, all of them deigning to explain to us unwashed rubes how we should interpret the character and promises of the various candidates.
But my lot in life is to be a grumpy right-winger in a state where the solid majority of my fellow voters desires entirely different outcomes than I do. So be it. For this election cycle I don’t want to tell my fellow Californians how to vote; I will instead implore you how not to vote. What I am expressing here are the ways you should definitely not mark your ballot twelve days from now (or, in the age of vote-whenever-the-hell-you-want, yesterday). Please understand that just because I beg of you not to vote for candidate X doesn’t mean that I wish you to vote for his or her opponent, candidate Y. The sane move in some cases may be to make no choice between candidates. I’ll leave that determination to your good judgement. With that, here’s how you should not vote in California:
U.S. Senate
Do not vote for Dianne Feinstein, the definition of a politician who has overstayed her welcome. She somehow cultivated a reputation through the years as a moderate Democrat, but that seems entirely based upon the fact that she would support tax cuts for her wealthy constituents while favoring lavish defense budgets which helped her state’s economy and enriched her husband. Beyond that her most notable achievements in a half-century of — ahem, ahem — “public service” have been her “assault weapons” ban which did virtually nothing to stem gun violence, and her leadership as an unstinting cheerleader for abortion. And, as we discussed last month, her behavior in the Kavanaugh confirmation process suggests either a unethical politician who is trying to reinvent herself as a committed leftist in order to placate the critics in her caucus or a senile geezer whose office is entirely run by her staff. Do not allow this old biddy to shuffle around Washington for another six years.
Governor
Gavin Newsom is what you would get if you could somehow combine the ethical sleaziness of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the glib banalities of Barack Obama, and the progressive white male privilege of Ted Kennedy. A while back I promised a full post on his odiousness, and I still plan to cobble it together in the next few days. Suffice to say, he has run a campaign in which California’s manifest governing problems (massive levels of poverty, a shaky budget foundation, a looming pension disaster) take a back-seat to virtue-signaling on twee environmental causes (“I’m fighting Trump on offshore drilling!”) and the sort of monomaniacal social issues that set progressive hearts aflutter. This guy is a clown, and not worthy of your support.
Attorney General
When Kamala Harris left this office to ascend to her Senate seat in Washington where she will likely chill for four years before becoming her party’s Presidential nominee in 2020 (I’m still standing by this prediction I made on election night two years ago), an unaccomplished twelve-term Congressman named Xavier Becerra was appointed by Governor Brown to take her place. Becerra appears to be one of those down-the-line leftists who has spared himself the indignity of working in the dreaded private sector: his career is law school to a nonprofit providing legal aid to the poor to serving as staff for a state senator to deputy state attorney general to being elected to the state assembly to winning a seat in Congress. All along the way, he has never failed to note the instances where he is “the first Latino” to attain some position. As the state attorney general, his priorities appear to be trying to extort settlement money out of corporations and conspicuously battling the Trump Administration at every opportunity. Despite having a $216 million budget and 4100 employees at his disposal, he sees fit to waste $25,000 per month to retain the services of failed ex-Attorney General Eric Holder. A vote for Xavier Becerra is a vote for weaponizing law enforcement on behalf of the Democrat party and left-wing interest groups, and I urge everyone not to vote for him.
Superintendent of Schools
Tony Thurmond strikes me as the typical political lifer who is giving up what I presume to be a safe state assembly seat (annual pay: $104,118) eight years before he would be term-limited out in order to run for this statewide office (annual pay: $175,182). He’s a Democrat, endorsed by the state’s education blob dominated by teacher’s unions, and has been blessed by the full range of left-wing activists from Kamala Harris down to Planned Parenthood. The teacher’s unions are desperate to tamp-down any enthusiasm for charter schools, and since Gavin Newsom has now disavowed his earlier support for charters, the education blob is hoping that a Newsom-Thurmond axis will strangle them in the crib. Unless you think that the public employee left is a responsible steward of our state’s school system, you should keep your blue or black-ink pen away from the Thurmond oval on your ballot.
There are naturally other offices up for consideration, but I’m going to leave my anti-endorsements with these four. I’ll let you know what I think about the various ballot initiatives sometime next week.
– JVW
