By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, June 08, 2022
Do you want a reason to smile this morning? Voters in San
Francisco — Nancy Pelosi’s backyard! Arguably the most progressive and
hard-left big city in America! — overwhelmingly supported the recall of Chesa Boudin, the
city’s radical district attorney, two years after he was elected on a platform
that emphasized reducing the jail population and prioritizing “restorative
justice.” The vote wasn’t even close — 59.98 percent for recall, 40.02 percent against.
Here’s a quick refresher, from the National Review editorial calling for Boudin’s
ouster:
For those in need of an
introduction, Boudin is left-wing royalty. When he was 14 months old, his
parents were arrested and convicted of murder for their role in the Brink’s
armored-car robbery of 1981, which killed two cops and a Brink’s guard. They
were members of the left-wing Weather Underground. He was raised by fellow
Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Boudin temporarily
served as a translator in the Venezuela Presidential Palace under Hugo Chávez.
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn! And you thought you
would stop hearing about them after Obama left office. They are truly the radical
Left’s gift that keeps on giving. NR’s editorial continues:
In 2019, with the backing of George
Soros, he ran for district attorney on a platform of ending mass incarceration
and cash bail, as well as paralyzing police under the guise of aggressively
hunting for evidence of police misconduct. Upon taking office, he unveiled an
even more radical agenda of de-emphasizing the prosecution of drug cases and
property offenses. In the first year, he reduced San Francisco’s jail
population by 25 percent. . . .
Boudin’s record reflects his
deepest views. He sees the criminal-justice system and the police as the
problem in the lives of criminals, and he views the public’s impatience with
crime and its demands for justice and good public order as the cause of more
evil than good. He is not just bad at the job, but unfit for office. His recall
is a necessary precondition for improving life in San Francisco.
As
Jeff Blehar acidly observed, “Alas, poor Chesa Boudin. I hear they’re
hiring Brinks truck drivers, though.”
Politico summarized why this wasn’t just another
district-attorney recall:
The result is likely to reverberate
far beyond San Francisco. Opponents of criminal justice reform and Republicans
seeking to depict Democrats as weak on public safety will likely cite Boudin’s
rejection in a deeply liberal city as evidence that voters are balking at
efforts to ease sentencing and reduce incarceration.
Progressive district attorneys took a fundamentally
anti-policing stance on crime in America’s biggest cities, and even the most
sympathetic populations of voters are concluding that it is failing them. At
least on this issue, sweeping change is coming to America, even to its most
progressive corners. I guess you could say that you don’t have to be a
weatherman to know which way the wind — eh, you get the idea.
A little further down the coast, billionaire developer
and relatively right-of-center voice Rick Caruso did not win the Los
Angeles mayor’s race outright, but he got the most votes. As of this writing —
with a frustratingly low 34 percent of precincts reporting — Caruso won 42
percent of the votes counted, while Representative Karen Bass, his
Democratic-establishment-backed opponent, has won just under 37 percent.
Some political analysts on the West Coast foresee a
simple Bass victory from here — she’ll emphasize that she’s the true Democrat
in the race, paint Caruso as a not-so-secret Republican, and coast to victory
on the strength of the city’s traditional liberalism. But I’m not so sure that
the traditional Democratic playbook will be as effective in an anti-status-quo
political environment, where long-simmering frustration is about ready to boil
over. Caruso’s not a lock in November, but he’s got the advantage of the
largest base of support right now, momentum, near-unlimited financial
resources, and a very simple, resonant message: change vs. more of the same.
Meanwhile, competitive statewide races in California are
rarer than hen’s teeth, and competitive statewide races that feature
Republicans are rarer still. But yesterday in the state-controller race, the
candidate with the most votes was . . . Republican Lanhee Chen, who has
won 36.7 percent of the votes counted so far, and will now advance to a runoff
against Democrat Malia Cohen, who’s won 21.4 percent. (The California state controller oversees and runs the state’s
finances and conducts audits of how state agencies spend their money.) Chen
is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a former adviser to Mitt Romney and
Marco Rubio, was a loud advocate for reopening schools during the Covid-19
pandemic, and has written
for National Review a few times. Chen still faces an
uphill climb, but in at least one statewide race this year, Democrats won’t
have an automatic win.
Finally, in the last bit of good news for the right,
there’s going to be a Republican Senate candidate on California’s
general-election ballot this year in Mark Meuser. Don’t get your hopes up,as the
governor-appointed incumbent, Democrat Alex Padilla, will still likely keep his
Senate seat until he retires, dies, or goes senile — if Dianne Feinstein is any
precedent, perhaps long after that last option. But under California’s
jungle-primary system, the two candidates with the most votes, regardless of
primary, go on to the general election. And there hasn’t been a Republican
Senate candidate on the general-election ballot since Elizabeth Emken in 2012.
Ironically, the Post’s Woke Narcissists
Could Use Some Collectivism
Are you ready for a dose of irony? The slow-motion
car wreck going on over at the Washington Post — all spurred
by a dumb joke that amounted to, “Women! They’re crazy, am I right, fellas?” —
is driven by woke progressive staffers who are, by a certain measure,
excessively individualist and insufficiently collectivist.
When you go to work for a company, you are signing on to
accomplish a certain task, and agreeing to prioritize that task. If it’s the
Acme Widget Company, your job is to help make widgets. If it’s the Washington
Post, it’s to help cover news. Your employer is not running a therapy
session. Ensuring that you feel good about your coworkers is not the company’s
priority or mission. It has an interest in ensuring there’s no harassment,
abuse, or behavior that is genuinely harmful to employees and disruptive to the
company’s objectives. But it is not interested in making sure you’re friends
with all your coworkers and every day is a virtual campfire gathering of
holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.”
Sometimes, your coworker is going to say or do something
that you think is stupid or offensive or irritating. When that happens, your
job as an employee is to suck it up and focus on the task at hand or work it
out yourselves, and if it becomes intolerable and irreconcilable, you’re free
to move on to another employer. Almost every great achievement by a group —
from Lincoln’s “team of rivals” to military special-forces units to innovative
designers and engineers to championship sports teams — involves individuals on a
team putting aside their differences, disagreements, and personality conflicts
and focusing on the common goal. Teammates don’t need to love or even like one
another, but they do need to respect one another.
You have to prioritize the mission over how you feel each
day. That’s not repression or workaholism, that’s just human civilization.
Narcissism and collectivism don’t work well together; in
fact, neither works well with much of anything, and some of us would argue that
large-scale collectivism doesn’t work at all.
Josh Barro offered a funny and spot-on essay about this,
asking if there are any adults left at the Post and observing
that, “Airing internal workplace disputes in public like this is not
okay, even when you are right on the merits. My statement isn’t
just obvious, it’s how almost all organizations work. If you think your
coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you
disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the
public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at
each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.”
What we’re seeing at the Post is several
employees who are incapable of prioritizing the organization’s running smoothly
over venting their spleen at every opportunity; in some cases, the behavior
genuinely appears to be obsessive or compulsive.
A key question for employers is: If a potential hire
gives off even the slightest whiff of this kind of uncontrollable exhibitionist
narcissism and a desire to hash out all differences in the public square on
social media . . . is it work the risk of bringing this person into your
organization?
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