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The neighborhood crank had removed the large bunch of Recall Newsom and Elect signs Larry Elder Thursday morning, a bike tour showed.
Not just lawn panels, understand. The roof of his garage had sprouted half a dozen signs, all artfully arranged and lit up at night, like Santa’s sleigh in a Christmas display.
The same guy had treated us with a similar barrage of Trump agit-prop back when it was a thing. Considering how quickly he does away with the incriminated nonsense after the sane people vote, at least he’s not a particularly painful loser.
I live in a California part of California, so there was no other pro-recall sign visible for miles around over the past few crazy months, as the protest vote that was the attempt to impeach the governor s ‘is unfolded in a tragicomic manner.
To protest the results of an overwhelming election three years ago for a man who will be re-elected in less than a year with a special ballot that ended in an even bigger landslide for him. You really got him hooked on Gavin Newsom, didn’t you, rappers?
Protest votes?
Of course, protest votes can be fun.
Like when my anti-war mother didn’t find the other candidates sufficiently anti-war and therefore voted for Benjamin Spock for president in the early 1970s.
Dr Spock was not going to win. Winning is not the point of a protest vote. (Then she turned around and voted for Gerald Ford for president because as a fellow Southerner she didn’t care about the moralizer Jimmy Carter.)
But, seriously, California GOP. Is your chimerical quest to win or to protest?
Because if it’s the first, you’re not going to come up with a fringe candidate with dangerously eccentric views – reparations for slave owners whose “property” has been “taken”, anyone? – as Larry Elder for governor in 2022.
If you wanted to win, Republicans, you’d look to someone who, well, could win. And no, it’s not about going with other Trump supporters like John Cox and Kevin Faulconer. Their day is over.
If you were interested in anything other than the crank part, or threatening to move to Idaho as soon as you can move the beach there as well, you would create a reasonable middle ground in our state’s politics.
This party would recognize the reality and therefore work to solve climate change, not deny it. That wouldn’t give Gavin Newsom an inch on the use of vaccination warrants and mask requirements needed to fend off COVID-19, which has now killed 666,000 Americans – 1 in 500 of us. That would be pro-choice, not just because it’s the right moral position, but because 89% of California women are pro-choice, and you don’t win without them.
Running on the French laundry didn’t work. Your greedy neighbors aspire to eat there. If you wanted to reach out to pragmatic moderates like me, you’d drop the culture war stuff and do everything pre-prop. 187 Pete Wilson and be on the skill rolled up sleeves. About not mocking the unions of prison guards. On the modernization of the perversely backward state bureaucracies, with their old computer systems in the state that invented the computer systems.
And, of course, taking risks about something. For example, I have publicly stated for many decades that I favor a part-time legislature made up of people with other jobs. If I were king, I would abolish teacher unions and give good teachers huge pay raises to encourage excellence and prevent people from becoming lawyers. What about as a platform?
No more mini-Trumps? This is the way to lose out.
Larry Wilson is a member of the editorial board of the Southern California News Group. [email protected].
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