Perhaps it’s a function of being surrounded by too many likeminded sycophants or what comes after a long day of travel, but there’s something about being on California soil that makes national Democratic candidates say things better left unsaid.
One such example: Barack Obama, dropping by a fundraiser in San Francisco in April 2008 and voicing his frustration with voters in a very different pocket of America.
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them,” Obama explained.
He then editorialized, in words better suited to a bubble-thought: “And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Fast-forward to earlier this month and vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz reportedly saying the following at a gathering at the Sacramento residence of governor Gavin Newsom: “I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need, we need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in. So we need to win Beaver County, Pennsylvania. We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada, and win.”
In Obama’s case, his condescending remarks carried a price—a few days after he dumped on Pennsylvania’s electorate, the voters in the Keystone State handed Hillary Clinton a resounding primary victory (Clinton going as far as downing whiskey shots to prove she was more folksy than Obama).
Time will tell if Walz’s comments prove harmful in the nation’s half-dozen-or-so battleground states, which play an outsized role in national elections thanks to the nuances of the Electoral College (some polling shows a majority of Americans in favor of letting the popular vote decide presidential elections).
So far in this election, the Golden State has not been the site of any major rhetorical gaffes (in this contest, at least) by Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s seeking to be the third American president to hail from California. But that doesn’t mean California hasn’t had an impact on how Harris has gone about seeking that job.
Here, let’s turn to a recent column by Politico’s Jonathan Martin, who advised that Harris take a less Bay Area-progressive approach to winning four years in the White House. His suggestion: “Shoot the Glock. Frack some oil. Go to the border with [Oklahoma senator and immigration-hawk James] Lankford. Tell college kids your pronouns start with mudda and ends with ah. Eat ribs at a tailgate and decry the soft rules protecting QB’s. Basically burn your SF/CA card to earn one representing ‘Merica.”
To which National Review’s Jim Geraghty offered this response:
“For almost her entire adult life, most of the people that Kamala Harris has interacted with have been progressives, people who carry that San Francisco card. They’ve probably not only never shot a Glock, they’ve never held a firearm; they either oppose fracking or find it terribly controversial . . . have special pronouns, are vegan, and think football itself should probably be banned because of the risk of concussions.”
Geraghty added: “Why won’t Harris metaphorically ‘burn her San Francisco card’? Because that’s who she is! If Harris were inclined to go to the gun range, dismiss special pronouns, and talk up fracking, she would be a centrist—not a “centrist by San Francisco standards,” but a genuine, indisputable centrist.”
Geraghty raises a fair point. In recent weeks, the Trump campaign and its allies have spent millions flooding the airwaves with this ad claiming that Harris championed prison sex-change operations while she was California’s state attorney general. Harris’s response? Rather than altering her position, which wouldn’t play well back in San Francisco but might be what skeptical Rust Belt voters want to hear, her campaign instead pointed out that the federal Bureau of Prisons allowed gender-affirming treatments for select inmates during the Trump presidency.
It’s worth noting that the same question of California affiliation as a liability didn’t arise when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon sought the presidency (Nixon in 1960, 1968, and 1972; Reagan in 1976, 1980, and 1984). Granted, Nixon and Reagan were born or resided in the southern half of the state, so neither was much influenced by San Francisco’s political culture. Moreover, as Republicans, neither had to quiet the doubters when it came to comfort with firearms or football (Nixon and Reagan, by the way, were both college football linemen).
But it’s also the two former presidents’ California journeys that are in stark contrast with that of Harris.
Let’s begin with Nixon, who grew up amid personal and financial hardship in a modest house built by his father in Yorba Linda. Nixon lost two brothers growing up; his father’s ranch failed when the future president was only nine years old, with the family moving to nearby Whittier where the father would run a gas station (many an amateur psychologist has posited that a childhood of economic instability fed the paranoia that ultimately would prove to be Nixon’s political undoing).
The point is: Nixon didn’t constantly remind voters about his working-class roots, like Harris does to the point of satire. The tough upbringing spoke for itself—even if Nixon did resort to a middle-class metaphor (his wife not wearing a mink stole but a “respectable Republican cloth coat”) in his famous “Checkers” speech that saved his political career in the fall of 1952.
As for Reagan, his California journey began in his mid-20s after a screen test led to a Hollywood contract (Reagan would appear in fifty-three films over the next two decades). By the time of his first and second official presidential runs in 1976 and 1980 (I’m not counting his flirtation with the White House in 1968), Reagan not only had two terms as a California governor under his belt, but he was also taking a deeper look at the American condition. Or so one learns from Reagan, In His Hand—three Hoover Institution fellows revealing Reagan’s handwritten thoughts on economics, social pathologies, welfare reform, and the Cold War as he delivered more than six hundred radio addresses in the lull between the two presidential campaigns.
The point is: at no point as a presidential hopeful was Reagan accused of being a captive of his California roots and a Hollywood mentality—i.e., not needing to surrender his Screen Actors Guild card to prove he was a Regular Joe. The future president was studying America’s condition far beyond California’s border.
Why hasn’t Harris shown a similar evolution of thought, despite two decades of experience seeking office (her first campaign for San Francisco district attorney was back in 2003)?
Call it a question of nurture versus nature.
On the nurture side, perhaps it’s as simple as Harris not being all that intellectually curious as a public servant. Consider: upon entering the US Senate in 2017, she faced a choice—amass a policy record as a freshman senator and engage in contentious matters or focus instead on a presidential run. She chose the latter (only six months into her Senate term, Harris was mingling with Hillary Clinton’s biggest backers in the Hamptons).
As for the “nature” side, that’s the reality of Harris residing in a different California from the one that elevated Reagan and saw Nixon through his early years.
Nixon’s first presidential win came in 1968—two years after the state had elected a conservative Republican (Reagan) in a gubernatorial landslide and in the midst of a GOP presidential run on the state (voters opting for the Republican nominee in nine of the ten presidential elections spanning 1952‒1988).
Reagan’s first presidential win came in 1980—closer to the end of the GOP’s presidential dominance in the Golden State, but also two years after nearly two-thirds of California voters approved Proposition 13 and a limit on property-tax increases (that same year, Reagan gave a speech in Philadelphia urging Republicans to adopt Proposition 13 beyond California so as to light a “prairie fire” of opposition to “costly, overpowering government”).
That said, Kamala Harris’s California is a different political animal. It’s voted “blue” in every presidential election since 1988. Democrats control every elected statewide constitutional office; Republicans account for less than 25 percent of the state’s 22.3 million registered voters (by contrast, Republicans accounted for 45 percent of California’s statewide vote in 1980).
Could it be that Harris doesn’t feel the need to dramatically tear away from California—i.e., turn on progressive notions—because she’s never felt the need from California voters to do so? Perhaps.
Or, it could be that Harris and her campaign’s brain trust don’t believe that California bashing carries much in the way of political traction (the argument being that the rest of the nation’s dislike of California is baked in the electorate cake). How else to explain the decision to send Newsom, California’s governor and a lead proponent of phasing out gasoline-powered cars, to the battleground state of Michigan—a state where Trump is trying to convince voters that Harris wants to follow Newsom’s lead and declare war on internal combustion engines.
Will Harris make it to the Oval Office thanks in part to, or in spite of, California? We’ll know soon enough.
As for California bashing itself, to paraphrase something awkward that Richard Nixon uttered—yes, in California—after a crushing election loss in 1962: we’ll always have the Golden State to kick around.
