The Man in the Empty Gray Suit

By Will Swaim

Saturday, November 07, 2026

 

Seventy days before California voters would send Xavier Becerra to the general election as the Democratic candidate for governor, the former state legislator, former congressman, former attorney general, and former U.S. secretary of health and human services couldn’t even score an invite to the state’s marquee gubernatorial debate stage.

 

The March 24 forum at the University of Southern California was supposed to be the campaign’s first major televised confrontation in a freewheeling governor’s race. Eight leading Democrats, none of whom you’d likely remember except for the worst of reasons (Eric Swalwell, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer), shivved one another for the right to succeed Gavin Newsom. In pre-debate polling, Becerra languished near the bottom of the field. Democratic officials feared that the crowded field might julienne the party’s vote so thoroughly that two Republicans would advance from California’s open primary.

 

USC and its television partner, ABC7, offered to help solve the Democrats’ problem, producing a candidate-selection process dressed in the recondite language of the academy: “a social scientific candidate-viability formula,” developed by USC professor Christian Grose. So, you know, science. In ordinary English, it simply ranked candidates by polling and fundraising.

 

Six candidates made the cut. Becerra was not among them. And he was furious.

 

He accused USC and ABC7 of rigging the election: Grose’s formula, he claimed, excluded every Democrat of color, whereas one lower-polling white candidate qualified on fundraising alone. “My father used to tell me of the days when he would encounter signs posted outside establishments that read ‘No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans Allowed,’” Becerra wrote in an open letter to USC President Beong-Soo Kim. “USC’s actions may not seem so transparent. But you have deliberately chosen to selectively filter the voters’ view of the field of gubernatorial candidates in what all observers characterize as a wide-open race.” At a news conference, he urged the invited candidates to boycott what he called “a biased process.”

 

The racialized pressure campaign worked — sort of: Members of the state legislature joined the protest, and, when some invited candidates signaled their DEI bona fides and threatened to stay away, USC abandoned the debate altogether. That certainly filtered the voters’ view of the field. A few weeks later, in the June primary, Becerra was the top finisher. And this week, he was elected California’s 41st governor, beating Steve Hilton, the state GOP’s latest solid but sacrificial offering.

 

Somewhere between USC’s conclusion that Becerra wasn’t important enough for a debate stage and the voters’ decision to make him governor lies one of California’s stranger political stories.

 

Xavier Becerra is California’s Zelig, a man who shows up in or near every important event but rarely plays a real part — or, worse, plays a disastrous one. And he rises, Becerra does. For more than 30 years, he has floated through Democratic politics leaving fewer footprints than Bigfoot. After just 18 months in the state legislature, he entered Congress in 1993 and stayed for twelve terms. He left only when Jerry Brown appointed him attorney general after Kamala Harris left that post for a seat in the U.S. Senate. He left the AG’s office when Joe Biden tapped him to run the Department of Health and Human Services during the Covid and migration crises. After all that, as recently as that debate fiasco in March, nearly half of California’s likely primary voters didn’t know enough about Becerra to have an opinion, according to a poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

 

In the Beginning

 

Xavier’s father, Manuel Becerra, was born in Sacramento and raised in Tijuana. He returned to pick vegetables in California’s Central Valley before finding steadier work in construction. However bad California may have been for Manuel, life in El Norte apparently beat the alternative. Despite little formal education, his Mexican-born wife, Maria Teresa, worked as a clerical employee. The couple saved enough cash to build a modest home with their own hands.

 

Xavier was born in Sacramento in 1958, the third of the Becerras’ four children. His recollection of his childhood echoes the biographies of tens of millions of immigrant American families: “We didn’t have much, but we always ate well.” He was the first in his family to attend college. He earned degrees in economics and law from Stanford, where, according to family lore, he applied only after retrieving an application discarded by another high school student. Whether apocryphal or polished by repetition, that story captures a poor family’s ascent from poverty to an American dream. Becerra also emphasizes his Catholicism: “I was raised in a Catholic home, and we would get up early on Sunday mornings to go to Mass,” he has said. “My faith is a big part of who I am today.” When he announced his campaign for governor, he recalled his parents leveraging “little more than hope and determination” and finding “the California Dream” — a place where hard work could buy a home, educate children, and leave the next generation better off than the last.

 

Becerra said he was running because that dream had vanished. He did not acknowledge his 35-year career in a Democratic political machine that has made California infamous for dysfunction — a state marked by the nation’s highest living costs, heaviest tax burdens, and worst poverty and education results. His diagnosis of the problem emphasizes inequities, attacks on civil rights, and corporate abuses. His prescription, invariably, is more government. Missing are the free markets, faith, thrift, responsibility, and bourgeois virtues that propelled his own family. Becerra proposes to restore California’s lost promise by expanding institutions that have presided over its decline. His parents came seeking opportunity, not government services. Their son seems to believe the two are increasingly the same thing. On Tuesday, it seems California’s voters agreed.

 

The Long March

 

Becerra entered Congress in January 1993. Bill Clinton had just taken office; Ronald Reagan was alive; California Republicans still won statewide elections; Google did not exist; Mark Zuckerberg was eight. Over the next 24 years, Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi became House speakers, America fought two wars, and California cycled through four governors.

 

Like one of those anonymous Soviets who appeared atop Lenin’s Tomb every May 1, Becerra advanced steadily through all of it and left few traces that he was ever there. Yes, he earned a seat on Ways and Means, a House committee that, when mentioned in news reporting, is almost always preceded by the adjective “powerful.” And he chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the late 1990s, at a time when it was still bipartisan; thanks to Becerra, it wasn’t bipartisan for long. In December 1996, he traveled to Cuba for a sit-down with Fidel Castro. During that meeting, Becerra never asked Castro for a meeting with political dissidents or suggested that free elections might be a good idea way for El Comandante to signal his affection for real democracy rather than the uniparty that still runs Cuba. Alarmed by Becerra’s cuddly performance, the caucus’s two Cuban-American Republicans — Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida — resigned. Henry Bonilla of Texas followed within a year. After Becerra, the Latino caucus was cleaved into partisan squads.

 

Besides meeting with Castro and (however unintentionally) purging the Latino caucus of Republicans, Becerra produced just one other political win in Congress. It remains for nearly everyone but Becerra the most memorable moment in his otherwise anodyne congressional tenure.

 

Send Lawyers, Guns, and Xavier Becerra

 

In the early 1990s, Carlos Vignali, the son of a wealthy Los Angeles auto-body entrepreneur and Becerra donor, emerged as (in federal investigators’ description) the financier of a cocaine pipeline supplying Minneapolis. Prosecutors said the operation moved roughly 800 pounds of cocaine from Southern California to Minnesota, where it was cooked into crack and sold on the city’s streets. After a two-year investigation, agents armed with court-authorized wiretaps listened as Vignali and his associates spoke in code, referring to cocaine as “love.” Prosecutors argued that the recordings showed Vignali was not merely associating with traffickers but directing them. The federal jury convicted him on three felony counts, and U.S. District Judge David S. Doty sentenced the then-25-year-old to 15 years and eight months in federal prison.

 

In any similar situation, a parent might have sent the judge a muffin basket and a letter begging for mercy. Instead, Vignali’s father cobbled together one of the most politically connected clemency campaigns of the Clinton years. The roster of supporters read like a directory of California Democratic power: Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, future L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, state legislator Richard Polanco, L.A. County supervisor Gloria Molina, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca — and Congressman Xavier Becerra. By his own account, Becerra first contacted Alejandro Mayorkas, Clinton’s U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, to ask whether this was the sort of case that merited clemency. Mayorkas, in turn, contacted the Minnesota U.S. attorney who had prosecuted Vignali. Prosecutor Todd Jones reportedly warned Mayorkas that Vignali was “a major player” in drug trafficking and said of Becerra’s proposed involvement, “Don’t go there. [Vignali] is bad news.”

 

Becerra persisted, lobbying the White House as late as January 19, 2001, Clinton’s last full day in office. Minnesota prosecutors opposed clemency, and Becerra acknowledged that he had never independently fact-checked the family’s account. He advanced his case for clemency in explicitly racial terms: Clinton’s intervention was necessary because “justice is not yet blind to color in America.” On January 20, Clinton sliced the baby in half, commuting Vignali’s sentence.

 

Becerra would likely prefer that he be remembered for his legislative work. He introduced 121 bills and resolutions in the House, mostly immigration proposals and commemorative measures. His first, in 1993, proposed a commission to investigate civil rights abuses by immigration agents along the Mexican border — an early expression of his party’s current zeal for policing the immigration police. The following year, he joined other state and congressional Democrats to oppose Proposition 187, California’s voter-approved initiative that would have denied many public benefits to illegal immigrants. (Democrats’ thinking about the issue has changed over time: In the 1990s, liberals depicted California’s Proposition 187 as an illegal state intrusion into immigration policy, a purely federal responsibility. These days, as California pursues its own immigration goals, Democrats want us to understand that it’s the state’s Tenth Amendment right to deal with illegal immigrants in whatever way it chooses.) Only one of Becerra’s bills became law: naming a Los Angeles post office after Nat King Cole.

 

He went to Washington hoping to change the country. After nearly a quarter century, Becerra had won a commutation for a convicted coke trafficker and changed a post office sign — the latter thanks to a Republican, President George W. Bush.

 

‘Intellect, Knowledge, and Temperament’

 

When California Attorney General Kamala Harris left Sacramento for the U.S. Senate in 2016, Governor Jerry Brown chose Becerra to replace her. But the “intellect, knowledge, and temperament” for which Brown praised his appointment led Becerra onto a different political path. As California’s attorney general, he found his true calling: suing Donald Trump. He was like one of those six-armed Hindu gods: By the time Trump left office, Becerra’s Justice Department had filed more than 120 lawsuits against the administration. Some raised substantial constitutional questions about immigration, but even those looked like evidence that Becerra’s real goal was to make federal immigration enforcement as difficult as the law would permit. Becerra’s position was remarkably consistent: Immigration enforcement deserved greater scrutiny, deportation deserved greater resistance, and the federal government had no business asking prospective immigrants whether they could support themselves in the United States.

 

Other anti-Trump lawsuits were voyages into the mundane. Surfing the liberal anxiety about climate change, Becerra sued to block the administration’s relaxation of Obama-era federal standards on light bulbs and dishwashers. On the final full day of Trump’s first term, Becerra was filing lawsuits to block the sale of faster washing machines and dryers. The president was leaving Washington; California’s attorney general wanted to make sure Americans couldn’t leave the laundry room.

 

Trump, Trump, Trump

 

Suing Trump left AG Becerra with no time to address instances of high-profile corruption emerging closer to home. The state’s top cop ignored the impact of Harris’s enthusiasm for the kind of social justice projects embodied in Proposition 47. That statewide ballot initiative, passed by California voters in 2014, reduced many felonies to misdemeanors. By the time Becerra was in office, the bitter fruit was evident everywhere. In the before times, vagrants arrested for drug possession might have been given a choice between rehab and prison; following Proposition 47, in the absence of a threat of imprisonment, they chose a short jail stint followed by release onto the streets where they engaged again and again in the thievery that kept them alive, if only just enough. Homelessness exploded, but Becerra ignored the scale of fraud in the government programs intended to help. A state audit could not track the $24 billion that Governor Newsom had spent while Becerra was suing Trump. Only recently — and, ironically, because of Trump’s rigor on the issue — has the state admitted the shame of widespread fraud in its lavish welfare programs.

 

Those same state auditors had also warned that California’s unemployment system was uniquely vulnerable to fraud. Along with all other state leaders, Becerra ignored them. During Covid, criminals exploited the system’s weaknesses on an enormous scale. An estimate by California’s Employment Development Department later put what it called “ineligible payments” as high as $55 billion. Most of that money disappeared into the bank accounts of international crime gangs tied to foreign adversaries — including Russia, China, and Iran.

 

Other governors, too, shut down their states during Covid, but Newsom did it with zeal — and with Becerra’s essential assistance. Having repeatedly challenged Trump’s exercise of executive authority, Becerra proved enthusiastic about executive power when Newsom wielded it. He defended Newsom’s sweeping restrictions on churches, schools, businesses, and even beaches and parks, arguing that public health justified extraordinary limits on constitutional freedoms. “No one is entitled to endanger the life of someone else,” Becerra declared in April 2020. His lawyers defended California’s prohibition on indoor worship until the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, in February 2021. In San Diego, Team Becerra persuaded an appellate court to reverse a judge’s order allowing restaurants to reopen. Yet when thousands gathered in California’s streets that summer during the George Floyd protests — often defying those public health restrictions amid rioting and looting — Becerra made no effort to charge them. Instead, he turned his attention to investigating police. The contrast was extraordinary. A congregation gathering to pray posed a public health threat demanding state intervention; thousands gathering to protest police misconduct prompted an investigation of the police. Becerra’s conception of civil liberties appeared to depend less on the liberties at stake than on whose liberties needed defending.

 

What to Do with Xavier?

 

Joe Biden airlifted Becerra out of Sacramento in March 2021, just when California’s attorney general most needed rescuing. After four years of making headlines by suing Trump, Becerra landed one of Washington’s biggest jobs: secretary of health and human services, with an enormous budget, some 80,000 employees, and responsibility for helping steer the nation through Covid. The appointment, announced three months earlier, came as a surprise to almost everyone, including, it seems, to the president himself. Biden’s preferred candidates had fallen away, and the incoming president was so unfamiliar with Becerra that he mangled his name — “Ba-CAR-ee-ah,” which sounds like a lettuce-borne stomach illness. Despite the fact that Becerra had no experience running a public health agency, the Senate confirmed him on March 18, by a vote of 50 to 49.

 

Within months, his new Democratic colleagues were wondering what to do with him. By January 2022, senior Biden administration officials were privately discussing replacing him. The Washington Post, relying on interviews with 28 administration officials, advisers, and experts, reported that Becerra had failed to coordinate the government’s pandemic response. One senior administration official complained that he was taking “too passive a role” in the administration’s defining crisis. Dr. Eric Topol, a prominent Covid researcher, said he was “like a ghost” and demanded that he “step up or step aside.” The White House worked around Becerra, transferring pandemic management to Jeff Zients, who dealt directly with Anthony Fauci and other officials nominally under Becerra’s supervision. The health secretary had become a spectator at — a specter in — his own department.

 

The administration’s immigration crisis proved even more humiliating. Biden’s border policies produced an influx of unaccompanied migrant children, overwhelming the shelters that Becerra’s department was supposed to supervise. White House Domestic Policy Adviser Susan Rice demanded faster action. Becerra resisted changes that he considered risky and reportedly demanded written presidential authorization. Rice grew increasingly frustrated. According to a February 2024 Axios investigation, she privately called Becerra an “idiot” and a “bitch-ass.” During one cabinet meeting in which Biden himself was berating Becerra, Rice reportedly slipped a note to Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, the man who had served as Becerra’s go-between in l’affaire Vignali: “Don’t save him.” (Rice’s spokesperson denied the account.)

 

But it would be unfair to suggest that Becerra accomplished nothing at HHS. He helped New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier win the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. Beating Secretary Becerra like bongo drums, Dreier found that more than 250,000 unaccompanied migrant children had entered the country over two years, that Becerra’s HHS had been unable to reach more than 85,000 of them in follow-ups, and that children as young as twelve were found working in slaughterhouses, food-processing plants, auto-parts factories, and on roofing crews. Worse, Dreier documented repeated warnings about the problem that had reached Becerra’s department — and, in some cases, Becerra himself. When Representative David Kustoff confronted Becerra with the 85,000 figure at a congressional hearing, the secretary disputed the Times’ characterization. Becerra might have blamed his boss, the president, for flooding the nation with hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, including those children. Instead, he explained — in terms familiar to anyone who has ever visited the Department of Motor Vehicles — that HHS was not responsible for migrant children once it handed those kids over to sponsors.

 

Becerra’s liberal critics nearly lost their minds when reporting revealed that HHS entrusted children to sponsors it had inadequately vetted. The HHS inspector general found that safety checks were never carried out, sponsor records were often incomplete, and follow-up calls weren’t made on time. Agency employees had warned that pressure to clear shelters — pressure from someone higher up the HHS org chart — compromised children’s safety. When Senator John Cornyn of Texas asked Becerra for an explanation, the secretary — defender of the poor, the tired, the huddled masses — responded, “We do not have jurisdiction. We cannot spend money on things we do not have jurisdiction over.” Translation: Once Becerra’s department handed over a child, what happened next was somebody else’s problem.

 

Go West, Old Man

 

Becerra left Washington in January 2025, his tenure marked by White House infighting, the migrant-child crisis, and blistering reviews from fellow Democrats. Then came a campaign-finance scandal that might have derailed someone without Becerra’s invisibility cloak.

 

Between February 2022 and September 2024, three longtime Democratic insiders siphoned roughly $225,000 from one of Becerra’s dormant campaign accounts. These insides were Sean McCluskie, Becerra’s longtime chief of staff; Dana Williamson, a former Becerra campaign adviser who became Governor Newsom’s chief of staff; and Sacramento lobbyist Greg Campbell. According to federal prosecutors, the three routed the money through consulting firms and disguised the payments as compensation to McCluskie’s wife for a job she never performed. The money helped make up for the pay cut that McCluskie had taken to follow Becerra to Washington. All three have pleaded guilty.

 

Prosecutors have consistently treated Becerra as a victim, not a conspirator. But the case took an intriguing turn when Williamson’s attorney, former U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, told reporters that McCluskie had repeatedly assured Williamson that he had discussed the arrangement with “his boss.” Scott said Williamson believed that Becerra had approved it, while acknowledging that he had no idea whether McCluskie was telling the truth. Prosecutors have never alleged that Becerra knew about the fraud. Indeed, their filings describe McCluskie and his accomplices misleading him about the payments.

 

How could three close associates siphon nearly a quarter of a million dollars from Becerra’s account over two years without his knowledge? Becerra says he thought the payments were for legitimate account maintenance. But California’s governor oversees a bureaucracy vastly larger than a dormant campaign committee. Voters might expect him to know where money goes, what trusted aides do, and when someone steals from him.

 

California once produced governors who transformed the state. Pat Brown built dams, aqueducts, highways, and universities. Ronald Reagan reshaped American conservatism itself. Jerry Brown repeatedly reinvented himself and California’s government. Even Newsom, whatever you think of his malignant policies, has pursued an ambitious and unmistakable vision of what California ought to become.

 

Becerra’s vision, despite his three decades in government, is hard to identify. As a candidate for governor, he offered a program of almost heroic mediocrity. Californians pay the nation’s second-highest electricity rates; Becerra proposed a “power hour,” giving “qualifying households” two hours of free electricity in the middle of the day, when solar power is plentiful. Steve Hilton rightly called it “disqualifyingly stupid.” California regulations have strangled housing supply, making housing costs the nation’s highest; Becerra promised to build 40,000 stalled homes but, when pressed for specifics, said, “I would prefer not to run on inflated promises.” California’s high-speed-rail project is tens of billions over budget, years beyond its deadline, and just lost its executive director; always believing that the problem belongs to someone else, candidate Becerra promised to sue the Trump administration — even though the state already sued Washington for more federal money before abandoning the court case as a sure loser. And to ensure that Californians share in the AI boom, he floated the idea of having the state buy shares in technology companies — then seemed to wish he could swallow his words, offering unenthusiastically that his proposal “wouldn’t be totally far-fetched.” After 35 years in government, Becerra’s governing philosophy remains unchanged: Give government another chance, preferably with more money.

 

He has built no institutions, advanced no distinctive governing philosophy, and left little bearing his signature. His talent is to occupy institutions built by others, adapt, and move on. That proved enough to make him governor. In a state where Democrats enjoy an overwhelming electoral advantage, Becerra won the highest office without ever having inspired much enthusiasm or even name ID, even within his own party.

 

Such a victory tells us something about California’s political monoculture. A system that rewards party loyalty over accomplishment, longevity over leadership, and ideological reliability over imagination will eventually produce candidates who have perfected those virtues. Xavier Becerra did not create that system. He has simply mastered it. And today, after a majority of California pulled the lever for Becerra, he looks like — what’s his name? That guy atop Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow on any May Day in the 1980s? That guy in the gray greatcoat with just a bit of cheek visible beneath the gray ushanka? Becerra’s that fella.