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November 28, 2024 - 7:30pm
In The Sound of Music, the nuns worry “how do you solve a problem like Maria?” when considering an obstreperous member of their convent. After Donald Trump’s convincing victory in the US election, the Democrats will now be asking themselves: “how do you solve a problem like Kamala?”
Except some Democrats don’t think Kamala is an electoral problem. Remarkably, there’s already talk among her aides that she could run for governor of California in 2026, and then return to the national stage in 2028. It’s hard to believe that the Democratic establishment would allow this, but the Harris campaign has been rather self-congratulatory after its recent failures, so it’s not impossible.
The Vice President’s team has been slow to admit that her failure was down to her lack of concrete policy measures and her cosying up to celebrities rather than normal folk. For many Democrats, she lost not because she was a uniquely terrible candidate, but because the voters — even Hispanics and black men — rejected her gender and race. What’s more, in their eyes, her inability to articulate anything substantive was not her fault but that of the Right-wing media.
Not everyone is fooled, however — and thankfully so. Let’s not forget that Harris squandered $1.3 billion on her failed presidential bid and is still in debt, continuing a longstanding tradition of poor management that includes the disaster of her failed 2020 campaign. “I think this disqualifies her forever,” mega-donor John Morgan complained this week.
The Guardian might believe that Harris could easily win the governorship, or simply build her national presence for a return engagement. Yet even in California she is not widely popular. She underperformed Biden in 2020 by two million votes, and this year lost the heavily Latino Inland Empire to Trump, marking a significant drop-off.
Should she run in her home state, Harris’s candidacy will be seen widely as a consolidation of Gavin Newsom’s agenda. She owes her career to the Bay Area ruling clique and, as California’s attorney general, backed policies on environment and housing which proved disastrous for most middle- and working-class people. This was confirmed in a study by the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s climate agenda. Her policies hurt those earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.
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SubscribeI don’t know what to say about Californians. On the one hand, the sight of idiots trying to smash their foreheads into the wall of reality is pretty funny. On the other hand, their diligence is downright scary.
But they are not all like that. Get away from the bit cities and the coast and it’s very different. Same story in Oregon and Washington State.
This is over-simplifying somewhat, but the Democrat strongholds are ones where there’s a large proportion of skilled migrant workers and things like European attitudes to welfare and health systems are admired. In the rest of the US you simply don’t get this same inferiority complex (which is so atypical of the US). In Britain we spent several decades with a similar attitude to France and Germany – because we weren’t doing well and they appeared to be, we assumed they were fundamentally better.
I’ve travelled in the northernmost parts of California. Yes, they’re very different. The politics there doesn’t map neatly into UK comparisons, but if I were to try it reminded me of parts of semi-rural Wales; old-school leftish but still grounded in reality. ‘Blue Labour’ perhaps?
I noticed a strong sense of community, quite alien to the more prosperous parts of central and southern Cali. Volunteer fire departments. Small, locally-run libraries. Stars and stripes flown from porches. Political independents who voted either way, not tribally, depending on the candidate. A measure of respect for ‘the other side’ (admittedly, this was pre-Trump). A sort of pleasingly libertarian vibe, one where pot-smoking coffee-house dwellers waved good morning to men with gun racks in their pick-up trucks.
I wasn’t remotely surprised to see counties north of Sacramento agitate for independence from the rest of the state. It’s like London being forced into an administrative arrangement with the Home Counties.
Sadly, at least in Oregon, getting away from the big cities isn’t enough. As Portland has turned into an even bigger cesspool of homelessness, lawlessness, and Antifa, the people with means have moved over the Cascades mountains and brought their progressive politics with them. I give central Oregon about ten years before it’s as bad as Portland.
What to say about California…. Perennially good weather, hundreds of miles of nice beaches, national parks and the Sierras, decent-yet-devaluing universities, a once-common (but now mostly lost) meritocracy in the valley, the once-admired cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles … there’s a lot that drew (and can still draw) bright and talented people to work in California. The problem is that all of the above positives have also attracted a significant number of takers and moochers.
These freeloaders take the ‘free’ natural benefits … and they soon realize that long-time residents will put up with a lot of mooching before the citizens will ever consider moving to a State in which they’ll need to shovel snow for four or five months each year, deal with extremely hot and freezing temperatures, have a view of a barren and nondescript landscape, have fewer engaging outdoor activities during the colder months, etc.
The greater the abundance of natural resources within a location, the softer the citizens will become over the decades, if they are not wary, relative to harsher locations that breed hardy people. The equilibrium is different, as the vikings discovered.
I still mourn the loss of meritocracy in the valley. You can still find it in small pockets within organizations (e.g. start-ups, hidden R&D departments and skunkworks, engineering teams, etc), but the massive support ‘cities’ that develop within the same organizations are largely made up of the social sciences types. Those who worry more about their newest pet Woke cause than about the mission of the organization. And, being more numerous, they throw their weight around.
One can’t walk 25 feet without some sort of Woke messaging on the corporate walls about how these social science activists will organize (over a breakfast of avocado toast or dinner tapas and wine) to save us all from ourselves, even as the activists are still too lazy and immature to take the minuscule responsibility to regularly clean their own rooms before demanding a complete reorganization of our societies into their vision of utopia.
We’ve all seen how the utopian dreams of these social science activists played out with their demands during COVID Lockdown, their organizing of the 2020-2021 anarchy riots that cost the US over 20 innocent lives and the US economy (mostly mom-and-pop stores) $2 billion in damages and lost goods, and their dreamy autonomous zones that worked for a mere couple of weeks until they could not mooch any more ‘free’ resources – from the broader and more responsible society – to keep these net-taker activists from falling into a self-destructive spiral of Mad Max murder and mayhem, etc. Sooner or later, they buy a plane ticket and return to their unkempt bedrooms in mom’s lavish home while the poor societies left behind have to deal with their failed meddling for years to come.
I hope it’s not too late for California to return to the former – functional – broader model of meritocracy before the brain-drain is compete.
Let me share your hope
100% correct on the “social scientist types”. They have infested every institution and corporation everywhere in prosperous developed countries and will be their downfall.
They are a massive drag on productivity and sources of division and disharmony within organisations and society as a whole.
Don’t vibes and joy count as policies?
I suppose they do if you’re living in a dreamworld.
Very well said. Although this is probably attractive to a good number of Californian Democrats. I weep to see what she and her ilk have done to the beautiful city of San Francisco.
Surely the Californian neighbourhoods decimated by drugs, crime and rivers of excrement can take comfort from the fact that their Democratic leaders are so visibly kind and inclusive?
Harris vs Vance (and/or Gabbard) in 2028.
A turkey shoot…
You made my day
Well, maybe not. Depends how long it takes the Democratic Party centrists to win the coming civil war. If this is unresolved by the end of this current election cycle and the Progressives still have a foothold then yes, it will likely be a turkey shoot but perhaps with Newsome and not Harris.
The video she put out the other day did not really inspire confidence in her abilities to do anything high level, she appeared to be as tight as a boiled owl.
You sometimes wonder if Joe Biden doesn’t talk more sense (in his more lucid moments) than Kamala Harris.
It’s textbook cognitive dissonance by Kamala and co. Almost as if she feels entitled to have a big job …
The Right Wing Media. That is laughable.
She had 80% of the advantages – most mainstream broadcasters, newspapers, Hollywood Elite, Silicon Valley, Union Leaders, Wall Street, Woke Education Elites – even the old style Republican NeoCons.
The only she didn’t have was policies to address the needs of ordinary people. Kind of important which is why she lost.
She is the worst VP in living memory, and bearing in mind that includes Dan Quayle and her new mate Cheney, that is some effort.
Had she won it would have been due to nation’s distaste for Trump’s personal vulgarities and actual crimes. The fact people prefer to put up with those as his policies may work at least to some extent, tells us all you need to know about DNC.
Which were the ‘actual’ crimes?
34 of them as things stand. He has yet to be sentenced.
The slate on the others is as good as wiped clean so he will avoid anymore indefinitely.
Name one.
Google is your friend.
Are those two halos above her head or the remnants of her brains evaporating?
Lest we forget that Biden was also considered down for the count in the 1980’s after being caught lying about his educational credentials and plagiarism. It’s painful to be this old and remember things like history with my own eyes. If Kamala wants it that badly, she will persevere and America will forget that she is a vacuous empty suit, who only has her mixed race and chromosomes to thank.
California (and Illinois and Ohio and Michigan) need some kind of electoral college system to protect their naturally conservative rural residents from being persistently outvoted by the masses of sleepwalking Democrats ruling them from the continually collapsing urban areas.
Never mind Harris.
Let’s talk about “obstreperous”, my new word of the day. 😀
Use it frequently on my husband…
Does he reciprocate ? 🙂
So she’s taking a page out of the Nixon playbook.
So she must run for Governor and lose! Then wait until 2032.
Nixon was smart.