The miserable choice at the heart of the recall
Wednesday’s certification of California’s second attempt to recall a governor finally makes the dreary choice facing voters official. We can endorse the status quo in the form of an overly financed, endlessly triangulating, vaguely annoying establishment Democrat. Or we can mistake our forgivable lack of enthusiasm for doing so as justifying the incalculable risk of handing power to an untested reactionary supported by an electoral minority.
Sound familiar? Granted, the parallels between the 2021 gubernatorial recall and the 2016 presidential election are not precise. California’s governor, albeit a powerful executive running an eighth of the country, wields nothing near the potentially ruinous power of the presidency. And unlike prepresidency Donald Trump, at least two of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wouldbe replacements have held public office — though that works out to less than 2% of them if the field turns out to be as unwieldy as it was in 2003.
But the recall does spring from the same reckless impulses that drove too many Americans to vote for Trump — or not vote for his opponent.
Like Hillary Clinton, Newsom hasn’t earned our votes so much as the alternative hasn’t. The governor’s own campaign acknowledges as much by focusing on the fringy characters who populate the recall effort, abandoning all pretense that many of us are eager to cast an extra ballot for him.
Clinton made the infamous mistake of (accurately) characterizing some of her opponent’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Because a California recall is about as difficult to enter as a roleplaying game, a good portion of our own wacky wicker receptacle isn’t just going to cast ballots but also appear on them.
Sure, Newsom’s potential
member. But another prominent candidate is riding a bus around the state with a bear. Yet another is threatening to fly around it with Sean Hannity. A recall could elect whichever of these characters secures a scant plurality of the Californians willing to spend an evening with a mailin ballot instead of going to a bar for the first time in 15 months.
Even for a politician, Newsom suffers from a remarkable compulsion to play all sides and leave everyone peeved. He undermined his relative success controlling the spread of the coronavirus by changing his own reopening rules so often he apparently lost track of how many lobbyists he was allowed to dine with. He set a preposterously ambitious housing production goal but failed to show any such energy for legislation that might do something about it. Instead of taking ownership of bureaucratic and policy disasters such as the state unemployment agency, he deployed a plethora of “strike forces” to distance himself from them.
All that and more deserve serious consideration at the normally appointed time, which is next year’s general election. But barring dramatic revelations as to the governor’s gross unfitness compared with his opposition, there’s no reasonable case for revoking the year or so remaining in Newsom’s regular term just to replace him with another standardissue pol at best or an ignorant dilettante at worst.
Newsom is only the fourth governor in American history to face a recall election. He isn’t, however, one of the four worst to run a state any more than he’s one of the four best. He is, like most of us, just OK.
And under the circumstances, voters would do better to be OK with that. Insisting that our leaders be heroes or villains is a recipe for perpetual disappointment and disorder, especially when doing a difficult job with a semblance of competence has become rare.
Of course we should ask that our leaders live up to high standards. But when they fall short, as most politicians and people will, we shouldn’t get so carried away with punishing them as to take revenge on ourselves by electing someone off the TV or the street.
As a political manifesto, keeping California soso doesn’t possess the inscrutable power of making America great. Many voters will resent having to dutifully check the box to reaffirm our election of a governor we’re not particularly excited about. That’s fine as long as enough of us do it anyway.