By Will Swaim
Sunday, October 30, 2022
There’s an old joke about a Good Samaritan walking down a nighttime city street when he discerns something in the gloom just ahead — not, as he’d first thought, a couple of dogs wrestling beneath a blanket on the curb, but a drunk outside a bar, on his knees in a cone of light emanating weakly from a streetlamp overhead.
He asks the drunk what he’s doing. “I’m looking for my keys,” says the drunk.
Meaning to help, the Good Samaritan gets down on all fours and asks, “So you lost them right here, you think?”
“Oh, no,” the drunk replies. “I lost them inside the bar. But the light’s better out here.”
Last Sunday’s California gubernatorial debate was like that. Scheduled during a midday NFL game featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, the broadcast brought rehab-grad Governor Gavin Newsom face-to-face with state senator Brian Dahle, Newsom’s feckless but earnest opponent in the November 8 race. When the lights blazed in KQED’s San Francisco studio, Newsom was searching for answers in all the wrong places, and Dahle (pronounced “dolly”) was on his knees helping him. Dahle remained in that defenseless posture for the hour-long conversation, surrendering arguments on first principles in order to accommodate Newsom’s preference for grand government programs that will remedy — for the first time in human history, it seems — whatever ails you.
The debate captured what’s so frustrating about this contest. Even in this favorable midterm climate, we few California conservatives harbor no illusions that our state is a prime pickup opportunity. But the Republican nominee is hardly providing a choice, unlike Lee Zeldin in New York, who, as Dan McLaughlin wrote earlier in the week, has made a real race of his challenge to Governor Kathy Hochul, including with his debate performance. Here, Dahle is down double digits and isn’t doing much to change it.
At the debate, when the governor declared that abortion rights are “foundational, the core values of the state of California and something that I enthusiastically support,” Dahle objected as a technocrat might. He would have vetoed roughly $200 million for abortion-care providers in the state budget, he said.
Note to Dahle: When your opponent tells you that killing unborn people is “foundational” and one of his “core values,” you don’t argue about line items in the state budget. You spit-take. You ask your opponent if he’s unwell. You look off camera and call for a doctor in the house because it’s apparent that this guy right here belongs to a death cult. Healthy people celebrate births. Count on people like Gavin Newsom to bring cake and candles to an abortion.
Dahle did none of this. Instead, he paused, and so, like a well-trained high-school debater, Newsom seized his advantage.
“With respect, you’re not pro-life,” he asserted. “You’re pro-government-mandated birth. If you were pro-life, you would support our efforts to provide support for childcare and preschool and prenatal programs.”
This age-old, progressive sleight of hand — that allows for no solutions to public problems outside of government initiative — is what’s truly foundational for Gavin Newsom. If, like Dahle, your answer is that many problems are the products of government intervention and that life is best left to individuals (who act in their own best interests alone or through family, faith community, voluntary secular organization, or private business), then you are, in the progressive’s eyes, a do-nothing. You hate people, especially poor people, and especially poor people of color.
Dahle should have been prepared for this — both on the facts and the philosophy — because Newsom has repeatedly made similar claims. Just this week, for example, we learned (again) that California is among the nation’s worst states for public education, continuing a long, slow slide that began with the rise in the late 1970s of the powerful California Teachers Association. We learned this (Dahle ought to have said) despite Newsom’s attempt to delay the release of the catastrophic state test results until after Election Day. When the bad news emerged, Newsom ignored it — but managed to issue a press release celebrating the state’s marginally less-awful results on a different national test. His headline? “California Outperforms Most States in Minimizing Learning Loss in National Student Assessment.”
When the governor told Dahle, “I blame you for not having one imaginative idea except for those that were promoted by [former education secretary] Betsy DeVos,” Dahle might have responded that Newsom already takes advantage of DeVos’s most-prized solution, school choice: Newsom’s children attend a private school. But making that point was left to KQED moderator Marisa Lagos. Caught by this surprise attack from normally obsequious media, Newsom sputtered.
“My kids are going to school right behind our house, a Waldorf School, which is about creativity and critical thinking and the kinds of things that we’re advancing in our public education system,” he replied breathlessly. “And the approach we’ve taken is to provide that same kind of choice and opportunity that my kids are afforded for every single one of our 6 million Californians going to public schools.”
So, there you have it: The Wealthy Guy chose a private school both for its proximity (right behind his house!) and its curriculum. But because the WG is also governor, he forces poorer people to attend the failing neighborhood school assigned to them. But one day — one day! — the WG will “provide that same kind of choice and opportunity” to everybody.
Dahle remained silent, unable or unwilling to underscore Newsom’s towering hypocrisy.
Stealing a tactic from Newsom, Dahle might then have motor-mouthed a catalogue of similar Newsom hypocrisies — such as when Newsom, at the height of the Covid pandemic, violated his own state lockdown protocols to dine with lobbyists at the fabulous French Laundry restaurant. Or when he traveled with California police to states California government has banned for official travel, such as Texas and Montana. Or when the governor talks about the danger of “Republican extremism” even as he completes his third full year of emergency Covid authority. Or when he takes advantage of that emergency authority to award no-bid contracts to his corporate campaign supporters. Or when he brags about California’s job growth but uses as his baseline the joblessness he created during the pandemic.
Dahle made a game effort to bring up the costs of inflation, pointing frequently to the state’s record gasoline prices. He even offered the right policy prescription — eliminate the state’s gas taxes. But the challenger seemed unprepared for what everyone knew Newsom would say next: The reason for California’s punishing gasoline prices isn’t taxes or regulation. It’s that oil “companies are ripping you off and ripping us off. And that’s why I want to move forward with a price-gouging penalty to address this abuse.”
Any Californian chosen at random knows that higher taxes produce higher prices, even when you call those taxes “a price-gouging penalty.” But Newsom didn’t pause for breath. It’s like he has a third lung and a soprano’s diaphragmatic, costal-breathing control. He pounced and bit again and again, demanding to know why Dahle believed Bad Oil wouldn’t simply pocket a tax cut rather than push the savings to consumers. After all, Newsom said, he has talked to “leading economists” and they say a tax cut is “nothing more than a gimmick.”
Dahle answered meekly that he would “make sure that they do it through their taxes that we push down.”
It’s hard to know what that means, but it sure sounds like a technocrat’s play. The correct answer is that the free market is the best guarantee that oil companies will pass along savings — and that California’s regulations have created a boutique fuel market in which only a few major refiners can afford to operate. You can trust the evidence of your own eyes: Look at the American Automobile Association’s daily ranking of gas prices, which shows California prices are highest — higher even than Hawaii which imports all of its gasoline. The only relevant differences between the states are taxes and regulation, which are worst in California.
If you really wanted to cut the price of fuel in California, you don’t need government to do more. You need it to do less. You need it to trust the marketplace.
On point after point, Dahle surrendered the philosophical debate over freedom in favor of public-policy nuance. Instead of explaining his faith in ordered liberty — and pointing to our species’ remarkable capacity to innovate itself out of “shortages” — the challenger engaged in the technocratic knob-twisting and lever-pulling for which Newsom is rightly infamous. No one spits government solutions like Newsom.
The fact that those solutions are unworkable is self-evident. Dahle might have taken this rare opportunity to explain why: Like most progressives, Gavin Newsom does not trust people to make rational decisions for themselves, despises businesses and institutions he does not control, does not understand the wisdom of the U.S. Constitution, and believes in few freedoms — except, of course, for the regulatory state’s freedom to grow at the expense of working Californians.
It’s not likely that such a conversation would have altered the course of this election. But speaking about first principles might have made a race of it and laid the groundwork for the next one.
That would have been a step towards what should be a national project: saving California. Left to follow its own dark impulses, California will weaken the U.S., which will have dire consequences for the world. As Ronald Reagan said in another context, “If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”
Then there’s this important fact: Any debate on first principles would have been more entertaining.
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