It’s not officially campaign season in California—that’ll begin in full force once the date for the gubernatorial recall vote is officially set—but already it’s open season for odd political spin.
Case in point: the recent news that California’s population fell by more than 182,000 people last year—an overall difference of 0.46 percent in a state with nearly forty million residents. Among the culprits cited: a lower birth rate coupled with a spike in COVID-19-related deaths.
And … Donald Trump.
The spin? The Trump administration’s decision to stop issuing new visas prompted a negative international migration in 2020.
Forget about exorbitant housing costs, a year’s worth of frustration over closed public schools, and a new, virtual workforce giving California-based employees (and employers) a ready-made excuse to flee the Golden State. When in doubt, blame Trump.
Our second bit of shade comes from John Burton, a former state senator and chair of the California Democratic Party, who passed along this gem to a Politico reporter in defending Gov. Gavin Newsom, the object of this year’s recall referendum (I’ll leave the expletives to your imagination):
“No one has come into office with a bigger bag of sh-- than Gavin did … When you leave here, have one thing in common: beat the recall, keep Gavin Newsom in office, and give the Republicans the message that they can't f--- with us.”
If Burton is to be believed, then Newsom was deep in fecal matter once he took office in January 2019.
But just how deep?
During the course of his first year as California’s chief executive, Newsom did have to contend with the state’s largest electrical utility filing for bankruptcy only three weeks into his tenure, a pair of mid-summer earthquakes in a remote part of the state, plus a mass shooting at a garlic festival and “a relatively mild fire season” (7,860 fires burning a total of nearly 260,000 acres).
But Newsom’s 2019 also included:
- Inheriting a $21.5 billion budget surplus that enabled the new governor to play Santa Claus in delivering a wish-list of progressive goodies (expanded health-insurance subsidies, child-care services, and full-day kindergarten)
- Presiding over the fourth-best state economy, per one personal finance website’s ranking (points were deducted for California’s poverty and foreclosure rates and uninsured population)
- Becoming a very public face of the anti-Trump “resistance” (pre-COVID-19, Newsom arguably was on a clearer path to the White House than future Vice President Kamala Harris)
- And, last but not least, testing well with voters: this November 2019 poll by the Public Policy Institute of California showed Newsom enjoying more popularity than his predecessor, Jerry Brown, at the same point in 2011, Brown’s first year in his second go-round as California’s governor
What that adds up to: a 2019 in which Newsom faced the occasional obstacle but otherwise had the political wind in his sails.
As such, it’s a far cry from two other California governors’ troubled first years.
That includes the aforementioned Jerry Brown, who inherited not a surplus but a $25.4 billion budget shortfall. Whereas Newsom got to play Santa Claus in his first year, Brown was a budgetary Grinch: among the spending cuts he approved (cuts that are anathema to the Democratic existence) were some that included targeting school libraries and services for the elderly and disabled.
The other California governor who found himself awash in political doodoo upon taking office: my former boss, Pete Wilson.
In 1991 and amid California’s worst recession since the Great Depression, Wilson inherited a fiscal train wreck—a $14.3 billion hole in a $43 billon budget. Wilson’s remedy: a package of tax increases and spending cuts that antagonized both the Left (they hated the spending cuts) and the Right (obviously not fans of the tax hike).
But that was just the Sacramento version of Wilson’s first-year woes. California in 1991 also suffered through a drought that cost the state at least $1 billion in agricultural losses and increases in energy costs and environmental damages, a firestorm in Oakland that erased nearly 3,500 homes, plus the heaviest rains in five years in parts of Southern California that prompted mudslides.
The purpose of this exercise isn’t to belittle Newsom for how relatively good he had it in 2019 or to deify Brown or Wilson for more traumatic beginnings to their first terms. All are politicians. As such, and as California governors, each had his virtues and liabilities.
Rather, what’s important here is the notion of revisionist history as we get closer to an actual recall launch. And, if Burton’s spin is any indication, it will include the notion that Newsom has faced trial and tribulation since the moment he succeeded Jerry Brown (just how long Brown tolerates the revisionism will be one of many recall subplots to watch).
That harrowing tale of woe is applicable to Newsom’s second year in office, when COVID-19 brought California to a standstill. But it’s a complicated narrative. The record of Newsom as a sophomore governor also includes a “sophomore slump” (too many unforced errors on the governor’s part, such as a secretive $1 billion deal to purchase protective masks from a Chinese electric-car maker) and sophomoric behavior. (Ignoring his own COVID-19 stay-at-home importuning and dining with lobbyists at the swank French Laundry restaurant was not an adult decision.)
What other recall-related spin to expect in the months ahead? I’ll offer three:
- The recall is a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money (I’ll leave to some intrepid reporter to explain why the current $400 million estimate is six times greater than the $66 million estimate back in 2003).
- Newsom was courageous, not careening, in his decision to issue the first-in-the-nation statewide stay-at-home order (critics will claim the lockdown was more effective in crushing the economy than the virus).
- Any and all Republican recall candidates challenging the Democratic governor are Trump acolytes (the campaigns of John Cox and Caitlyn Jenner do indeed have Trump DNA – more so than former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who’s earned the wrath of the former president’s namesake son for ducking the question of whether the recall candidate would accept a Trump endorsement).
If you find such spin dizzying, fear not. Should there be a recall vote later this year, it won’t be until the fall.
Call it the quiet before the sh-- storm.
