By Will Swaim
Thursday, August 12, 2021
In 2019, still settling into his new home in the
state’s creepy, gothic governor’s mansion, Gavin Newsom told an Axios interviewer,
“California is what America is going to look like.” Then, perhaps reflecting on
his Hollywood benefactors, he added for emphasis, “California is America’s
coming attraction.”
California has always aspired to be a shining city-state
on a hill. But few Californians expected that the source of the hilltop glow,
the buttery radiance emanating as if from a Thomas Kinkade (“Painter of Light”)
painting, would be Governor Newsom’s — and the state’s — spectacular and deadly
spontaneous combustion.
Mind If We
Smoke?
I write as four Northern California counties are consumed in actual hellish
fire, fire that transforms forests and communities into smoke and ash that rise
over the state’s eastern border and stream across Nevada, Idaho, Utah,
Colorado, and the Midwest, emitting more unlocked carbon than all the carbon
released annually by all the gasoline-powered vehicles registered in
California.
“Summer after summer, California, a global leader in
battling air pollution from vehicles, sends giant clouds of haze filled with
health-damaging particles across the country,” the New York Times reports.
Thanks to California, schools in western states have closed, and masks, only
yesterday a requirement in the battle to stop COVID, are finding new life in
the battle against smoke from the Golden State.
California is a menace to society. It’s not just our
mismanaged forests. It’s a catalogue of state failures stretching back decades.
Now, searching for someone to blame — anyone but
ourselves — we Californians have settled on a kind of death match between Gavin
Newsom and the grassroots activists who organized a long-shot effort to recall
him. On September 14, we’ll wrap up a month of Election Days to determine
whether Newsom stays in the aforementioned haunted house. Whether he does or he
doesn’t, it’s a certainty that California voters will not have learned anything
like a “lesson.” On September 15, whatever the outcome, the inmates will still
be running the asylum.
Just a few weeks ago, polls showed the governor winning
easily. Now those polls suggest a coin toss. What has happened betweentimes is
a summer of COVID numbers ticking up. Teachers’-union leaders are whispering
that the uptick ought to trigger a return to distance-learning schemes that
helped move even Democrats to back the recall.
And then, of course, there’s fire.
“But here’s the bottom line about those polls,” says Jon
Fleischman, a longtime Sacramento observer and conservative political
consultant. “Everybody’s guessing. Turnout is everything, and no one — no one —
knows what the turnout will be.” One thing’s for sure, Fleischman adds: “These
[poll] results clearly help Newsom raise cash.”
Terrified by the new polls, liberal donors have stampeded
to the governor’s side. The latest reports show Newsom’s campaign with a
200-to-one advertising-spending advantage over the recall campaign itself: $5.9
million to $27,500 in July alone. One of the ads purchased with that money
features Elizabeth Warren’s sepulchral mug in a video denouncing the recall
effort as uniquely “Republican” or, worse, Trump-adjacent.
Warren couldn’t spare even one of her 30 seconds to
praise Newsom, nor did she apparently consider the worrisome optics in her
message: Newsom’s campaign fundraising so far depends almost entirely on the
state’s billionaires and leaders of the billion-dollar government unions —
precisely the sort of “lobbyists and billionaires” who Warren has said “try to
buy off politicians during elections.” As reported by the Orange County
Register, the donations include a total of $6.25 million from Reed
Hastings, head of Netflix; George Marcus of real-estate fame; Connie Ballmer,
owner of the Los Angeles Clippers; and hedge-fund investors James Simons, Liz
Simons (daughter of James), and Mark Heising (husband of Liz). And they include
the state’s prison-guards’ union ($1.75 million) and the California Teachers
Association ($1.8 million). Consider it a clear symptom of poll-induced panic
on the left that the Service Employees International Union has written checks
to Newsom totaling a remarkable $5.5 million.
It almost never pays to examine campaign propaganda too
closely — it’s like sending the late, great L.A. food critic Jonathan Gold to
sample the Hooters lunch menu — but Warren’s pitch reveals the Newsom
campaign’s work to link the recall to Donald Trump. So far, the former
president’s most notable contribution to the recall has been his unprecedented
silence. Nevertheless, says Warren, the connection is clear: “We’ve seen Trump
Republicans across the country, attacking election results and the right to
vote. Now they’re coming to grab power in California, abusing the recall
process and costing taxpayers millions.”
Warren may hate California’s recall process — many
conservatives do, too — but it’s been in the state constitution for 110 years,
and the only “abuse” has been the governor’s. Like a British prime minister
calling a snap election, Newsom bet that speeding up the election would deprive
recall supporters — primarily grassroots activists — of time they need to raise
cash for the campaign against him. California secretary of state Shirley Weber
(whom Newsom appointed to replace Alex Padilla, whom he had appointed to
replace Kamala Harris) agreed to the September 14 filing. If that seems
autocratic, Newsom next leveraged emergency powers he granted himself during
the COVID pandemic and ordered ballots mailed to all registered California
voters.
As for Warren’s complaint about the recall’s cost —
projected to be about $215 million — well, that’s a fraction of the cost of the
many blunders for which Newsom could be recalled.
The popular notion is that the recall is driven by
Republicans upset about the governor’s ham-fisted COVID response, including
(maybe especially) his decision to attend a pandemic-year birthday party with
lobbyists, unmasked, at the fabulous restaurant French Laundry. That one had
even his most liberal admirers gasping. “Gavin Newsom: What were you thinking?”
a New York Times opinion writer asked. As if in response, a
CNN opinion writer offered, “Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry scandal is no reason
to toss him out.”
But the reasons to toss him out are legion, and each is
more costly than an expensive recall. A foul-up at the state’s Employment
Development Division sent $31 billion to fraudulent applicants, including
inmates in the state’s prison system. During COVID, a CapRadio investigation
found “at least a half-dozen companies that made substantial contributions to
Newsom and received no-bid contracts from the state, influential appointments,
or other opportunities related to the state’s pandemic response”: “The
contributions range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The contracts range from $2 million to over $1 billion — including the one
awarded to Blue Shield for vaccine distribution . . . worth up to $15 million.”
Then there’s Newsom’s insistence on building a high-speed rail system in which
the greatest feature is indeed speed, but not of the trains: The project cost
has moved with mind-boggling velocity from $33 billion in 2008 to a projected
$100 billion today. It still goes from nowhere to nowhere. In July, Newsom
bailed out the Biden administration’s immigration catastrophe at the state’s
border with Mexico, signing into law an expansion of state health insurance to
cover 235,000 undocumented migrants over 50 years of age. There was much focus
on the cost of health insurance to those migrants, but almost none on the cost
to the state’s taxpayers.
Some costs are harder to calculate, such as Newsom’s
reliance on financial support from the state’s teachers’ unions. In 2019, he
signed into law a series of bills written by the California Teachers
Association, carried by a former CTA executive-turned-legislator, and designed
to kill public charter schools. In California, if you’re poor and trapped in a
failing school, a charter — publicly funded but independently managed and
typically non-union — may be your only alternative. How do you measure the cost
of protecting a failed state monopoly in K–12 education? Similarly, his pandemic-motivated
shutdown of the state’s schools, driven by teachers’-union leaders and
activists, hurt California’s poorest most grievously.
Remember
Greenville
Not wishing to diminish anything else in this résumé of failure, let’s return
to wildfires.
California’s wildfires illuminate — though they have not
yet burned — everything rotten in the state’s progressive politics. Two summers
ago, Newsom asserted that massive wildfires had been caused by the failure of
Pacific Gas & Electric to maintain its equipment.
“It’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate
change. It’s about corporate greed meeting climate change,” he roared.
The fact is that state officials run California’s
utilities via the state’s powerful Public Utilities Commission. The PUC board
comprises political appointees to whom you would not entrust a small box of
matches, and yet the PUC determines the management of Pacific Gas &
Electric in such exacting detail that the utility hardly qualifies as a private
enterprise. For years, the PUC has steered California’s utilities away from
fire safety and toward a menu of green initiatives, lucrative but wasteful
overbuilding, and the vulnerable, long-distance transmission of electricity
from states where it’s easier to build plants and still legal to burn fossil
fuels to generate electricity.
The political appointees at the PUC have merged with
environmentalists who’ve made it impossible to manage state and national
forests. Seemingly taking their science cues from the Na’vi humanoids of
Pandora (thanks, James Cameron!), these forest advocates see every tree as a
conscious being, every stick-frame house as something like a murder scene.
They’ve killed the sawmills that once employed tens of thousands. They’ve shut
down fire-access roads. The result is densely packed tinder piling up beneath a
network of long-distance interstate high-power transmission lines.
This highly political regulatory environment — not some
unhinged, slick-haired, coke-snorting Wall Street madman — is the real source
of our troubles.
Critics know this. Researchers at the University of
California, Berkeley, have concluded that California’s diabolical fire seasons
are largely the result of years of environmentalist excess on the part of state
regulators, that “protecting our forests” actually means storing up kindling
for a future conflagration. Before the onset of this year’s fire season,
perhaps hearing that call and deciding to genuflect, Newsom announced that his
executive order had carved out fuel breaks and prescribed burns on 90,000
acres. But in June, a public-radio reporter discovered that “the state’s own
data show the actual number [of acres treated] is 11,399.” Newsom had
overstated his impact by 690 percent.
But even 90,000 acres was a chump’s con. As I write this,
the Dixie Fire has been burning through four Northern California counties for a
month, incinerating 490,000 acres, or 765 square miles. Still just 21 percent
contained, it is already the second-largest wildfire in California history, and
state fire officials say they no longer know when they’ll stop it.
Somewhere in those numbers was the 5,120-acre town of
Greenville, a gold-rush-era mountain town consumed by fire in half an hour on
August 4. Few wildfire stories from the summer of 2021 can compete with the
vivid terror of its 1,100 residents, who have fled, and the absurdity of the
governor’s stomping through its remains three days later for obliging
reporters. In a tweet featuring a photo of his glamorous self against the
wreckage, the governor said, “Greenville — though this moment may seem
insurmountable, we’ll be there to help you rebuild.”
Three days earlier, on the day Greenville burned down,
four candidates vying to replace Newsom debated his failures at the Nixon
Library in Orange County. Newsom chose counter-programming — a press conference
on the edge of a burn scar from the 2020 August Complex Fire, for the moment
the largest fire in state history. The state’s fire authority helpfully
provided the backdrop, one of its highly polished institutional-green trucks.
Newsom took the mic and then handed it to U.S. secretary of agriculture Tom
Vilsack.
Vilsack was there to represent the transition in
California’s relationship with Washington, D.C. While Trump was in office,
California sued the federal government more than 100 times; Newsom ridiculed
the president’s claim that California’s forest mismanagement, not climate
change, is the primary cause of its wildfires. But with Joe Biden in the White
House, Vilsack could say what we know to be true — what Trump himself had said
only a year ago: “We need more boots on the ground. We need to do more forest
management to reduce the risk of fire.”
Of course, Vilsack was also there to demand more money
for the men and women in those boots, members of the state’s powerful and
left-leaning firefighters’ union. More significantly, he was there to plug the
Biden administration’s massive, trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. Newsom
made the requisite promises: Despite his provable lies about his past efforts
in this area — misrepresentations he says he regrets, but which we cannot
forget — Newsom assured us that wise practices are forthcoming.
Fade to Blackout
They can’t come soon enough. Along with summer heat and fires come blackouts —
and blackouts, as Newsom knows, drove Gray Davis from the governor’s mansion in
2003, in the state’s only other recall.
On July 8, as temperatures spiked throughout the Canadian
and American West, the PUC begged state residents to cut back on electricity
consumption. But by then, officials had already concluded that voluntary
compliance would not be enough to rescue the state from the PUC’s green-energy
policies. Then, in an act the Los Angeles Times called “a
cruel twist of the climate era” (but which you and I might call “irony”),
Newsom issued an emergency proclamation that ordered state regulators to crank
up every available source of power generation, including those that run on
fossil fuels.
When Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519, he ordered
his men to burn their ships, barring any retreat in the face of what terrors
might befall them during their conquest. Similarly, Newsom and Jerry Brown
before him have systematically dismantled electricity generation from fossil
fuels. That has left the state reliant on the unreliable — electricity from the
sun and wind, or from states where clean-air politics haven’t yet supplanted
reality.
But the heat wave threatened to kill those out-of-state
sources even as it drove up energy demand in California. And the sun, she
refused to shine at night. So, Newsom reversed course. He commanded cargo ships
tied up in the state’s major ports to continue running their diesel engines
rather than plug into dockside electricity hookups. More spectacularly, the
governor’s order directed regulators to switch on the very gas-fired power
generators the governor’s team had scheduled for permanent shutdown a year ago.
Agency officials broke the emergency glass and flipped the switches. California
was saved by oil, natural gas, and coal.
You don’t have to be a Republican or even a conservative
to see why thousands of Californians volunteered to gather more than 1.5
million signatures to qualify this recall for the ballot. You don’t have to
like Donald Trump to get why millions more will vote to remove the governor.
You don’t even have to like the idea of recalls. But when you think about what
Gavin Newsom has cost ordinary Californians — never mind California’s neighbors
— you can understand.
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