A funny thing happened on the way to the (Kia) Forum. The media has begun to take notice of the results emerging from decades of Democrat rule in the Golden State. And suddenly, California dreaming looks a lot more like California screaming – and even the lockstep media can’t ignore it.
Democrats have only themselves to blame, not just for the disaster they have made of the state but also in providing the catalyst for the national spotlight on it. In the gubernatorial race, a flood of high-profile Democrats jumped into the jungle primary – also a Democrat innovation – while Republicans had more discipline and kept it to two main candidates, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco. The possibility and near-probability of a vote split on the Left made the potential for a Hilton-Bianco runoff so novel and interesting that the national media couldn’t resist it. And with that spotlight on California comes scrutiny over just how badly Gavin Newsom and two generations of Democrat-only leadership have ruined the state.
Today, Axios takes particular notice of what it calls “the ultimate paradox of Democratic rule,” which the rest of us would call the utterly predictable results. Axios also links the high-profile mayoral race in Los Angeles, with the context of failures in every aspect of governance:
The two most consequential races in California have devolved into twin spectacles, with years of visible dysfunction hollowing out Democrats’ case for competent leadership.
Why it matters: California is the ultimate paradox of Democratic rule. A state of immense wealth, innovation and cultural power is increasingly unable to deliver the basics of housing, public safety and disaster response.
The big picture: Those failures have been building for years.
- But COVID and last year’s catastrophic fires have transformed long-simmering frustration with California governance into a visceral public indictment of the people running the state — one now playing out in the races for governor and Los Angeles mayor.
These failures have indeed been building for years, but the national media has never given it much notice until now. The Protection Racket Media has given Gavin Newsom in particular a pass for it despite his antics as an absentee governor. The media loves to feature him as a Temu Trump and a podcaster while almost literally playing Nero while Los Angeles burned last year. Newsom’s COVID policies turned out to be disastrous, too, so bad in fact that he got caught several times violating them for his own personal desires.
Unsurprisingly, the Axios report doesn’t dwell much on Newsom’s role in these disasters. It does note that those will “shadow his march to the White House,” but provides no details on why. Perhaps they feel that is res ipsa loquitur, and for those who don’t rely on the Protection Racket Media for the truth, it is.
Still, it’s impossible to deny that the multiple layers of disaster in California have begun to get a lot more attention thanks to this election cycle. Part of that comes from the Democrat infighting, and some of the sheer scale of incompetence in state leadership. Bill Maher’s evisceration of Newsom over the now-$231 billion high-speed rail system that has yet to lay a single track of high-speed rail after 18 years has made it impossible to ignore.
There’s more to it than that, though. Other blue states have track records just as bad, like Minnesota and Illinois, but neither of them are getting the close level of scrutiny we’re beginning to see for California. The Golden State’s mythic status as the American paradise likely has something to do with it, because it provides such a compelling contrast to the results of Democratic dominance. No one expects much from Illinois or Minnesota, but Calfornia has everything – great weather, vast agricultural potential, unending natural beauty, ecomomic potential that should be nearly unlimited, and decades of being a destination for both retirees and career-minded men and women on the rise.
One really has to work hard to screw that up. In three decades of one-party rule, Democrats have managed to do the impossible. They have turned Califormia into a failed state, unable to generate enough energy to reliably power a shrinking economy, producing a regulatory and tax environment so pernicious that California is now losing net population for the first time since, well … ever. It may lose as many as five House seats in the next reapportionment, a stunning comedown and an outcome directly and solely attributable to the corrupt and incompetent administration of Democrats.
California is the cautionary tale for the rest of America rather than its aspriational narrative. And now not even the Protection Racket Media can avoid it.
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