Does a 90% chance of the cost of failed campaign out way the 10% chance of the benefit of a successful campaign. My guess is that the vast majority of successful people do not want to be governor to begin with.
I think that depends on the person. A "failed campaign" did a lot to raise Bernie Sanders' brand. Plausibly it will be good for Kevin Paffrath too (although he claims he's lost subscribers since all this happened because his politics are too controversial).
The thing is, California in particular is full of rich people who could either benefit from, or at least not be harmed by running for Governor. Think about all of the rich tech bros, VCs, etc. that are largely anonymous and normal people don't know or care who they are. Likewise, various actors who make outlandish political statements all the time, and for who dropping a million or two on a campaign is a rounding error. Or Internet celebrities who are already mired in controversy. Plenty of people with lots of money and nothing to lose.
Beg to differ. If you're a rich person, and especially if you're involved in complex business in hi-tech, you have a great deal to lose by having your every utterance recorded and broadcast widely for several months, especially in the context of being asked deliberately rude and/or provocative questions by people who are experts at political campaignery and who would love to see you put your foot in your mouth. One misstep, one "ah..oops...of course what I meant by that is..." and multiple future career option doors could slam shut.
Subscribers are practically worthless. A channel like VSauce has over 10 million subscribers, and most videos have millions if not tens of millions of views. Meanwhile, a channel like WatchMojo has similar subscriber numbers, but most videos have under 100k views. VSauce makes engaging, well-edited videos, while WatchMojo makes stupid clickbait list videos.
Point is, everything good comes from views, whether you're in it for money, spreading information/ideology, or the fun/art of making videos. Subs very weakly correlate with views.
Sure, but there are millions of successful people, and divide that by a thousand for whatever factors you need and there’s still a lot of people with the desire or use for or ability to use the opportunity. Most people don’t want to be politicians, or even want large scale power, and yet there’s stiff competition.
This. Unless you are really into politics, governor is much less fun than most of the other jobs that "successful" people have. Sure, by some measure a governor holds lots of power, but it is much more of a hassle for a governor to get his ideas enacted than for, say, a ceo of a tech company.
Well, in these Imperial Executive days it may sound laughably quaint, but in principle within our system the responsibility for having ideas and enacting them lies with the legislature, and the governor is supposed to restrict himself to putting those ideas into effective execution.
Whether it was technically "indoor" may have been a matter of opinion and the angle of the picture taken. What was not a matter of opinion was that he was in gross violation of his own COVID restaurant restrictions. That's the kind of thing that could unite anti-mask Republicans angry about his hypocrisy and pro-mask Democrats angry about him spreading COVID.
Exactly. The controversy wasn't over the fact that he was being risky with COVID. The controversy was over the fact that he was breaking his own executive order. I believe he would have been in violation even if it were outdoors (there were too many people). It gave the impression that the rules only applied to the little people and it pissed off both the left and the right.
OTOH California "indoor"/"outdoor" standards defy any attempt at logic. You can't be in a space where industrial ventilation system is installed (and can be easily amended to add whatever improvements exist to kill as many viruses as possible), but you totally can be in an enclosed tent having no air flow, no ventilation, poorly cleaned and trying to cram the same amount of people into half the space. Because yeah, technically it's "outdoors".
I get why it is like that - between not banning indoors dining and paying the political cost of all covid death being attributed to this single decision, and banning all dining and killing all the restaurant industry and causing enormous economic calamity (and being recalled for sure because people want their sushi back!), they chose a compromise - something that maybe does something, maybe not, but clearly they did their part and it's not their fault if something goes wrong.
And since they know exactly what they did - they behave accordingly.
Reading the story, it was alleged that due to weather/noise/can't remember what, the restaurant closed sliding glass doors and that turned it from 'outdoors' (which, by that photo, it isn't really outdoors either) to 'indoors'.
But it's not so much about the doors, as the public anger. Same things have tripped up politicians in my country as well, there were two such fundraising/lobbying parties and arguments over "well was it really indoors or outdoors" but people didn't care; what they cared about was the same members of the same government telling them "No, you can't go to Sunday Mass because of the risk of spreading infection, you can't visit family members, you can't go outside" had no problems at all breaking all the regulations when it came to themselves (and getting money for their campaigns).
Sally and John can't have their wedding because ban on gatherings of more than X people and hotels and restaurants have to institute rules on distance between tables. Minister for Cardboard Boxes has a function where the tables are jammed together, but that's different, don't you know!
Exactly. If you pass a sweeping law that hurts a lot of people ostensibly for their own good, they are going to be righteously pissed if you rules-lawyer yourself into vaguely plausible “compliance” that requires no apparent sacrifice on your part.
The fact that he did it at a stupid expensive restaurant with a bunch of fat cats is just icing on the let-them-eat-cake.
It really didn't help that the dinner included meeting with American Medical Association lobbyists. You'd think that of all people, the doctor's group would not take part in violating health orders.
One missing wall does not make that dinner, that eye-poppingly expensive dinner paid for by lobbyists, one iota less crass, naive and stupid.
I mailed my ballot today and I voted against recall. Even so, I think he's an idiot out of his depth but the best of the rotten bunch from which I had to choose.
Unless you have staggering amount of intelligence at your disposal, what you need is a decent amount, like, more than the average, for sure but no need to exceed the top 10%. After that, a lot of other factors matter. Imagination, for sure. Grit/dedication/ambition, absolutely. Social/political skills, very much so.
Do you actually want to be governor of California? For myself, this is a job that I am completely unqualified for (including residency requirements), would have no aptitude for, and which is a lot of work for not much reward. If I had the option of definitely becoming California governor, I would turn it down, so I certainly wouldn't campaign for the office.
Even if you go full Calvin Coolidge and don't do ANYTHING with the influence that you suddenly have, you're going to be absolutely inundated with perks. You won't be able to buy your own meals, your own drinks, your own tickets, for the friendly lobbyists swarming around (a friend-of-a-friend is a lowly State House Rep, and it's bad even at that level).
But say you have an iron will and you mightily refuse every gladhand; you STILL retain the option, for most of the rest of your life, to go give a $25,000 speech any day of the week. Any day, forever, even if you're not good!
They don’t pay you for a good speech. They pay you so they can say “the governor spoke at our event”. And also because they imagine it will lead to some sort of positive influence their way, someday.
I assume that I'd get recalled almost immediately if I became governor, once people found out what my actual policy positions were, so my influence wouldn't be worth a lot.
The perks doen't seem to be much reward given that you 1. become a public persona 2. are suddenly responsible for everything that's wrong with CA. I'd rather pay for my meals and have a better life.
One figures the novelty of having 'the non-politician who was briefly an unsuccessful Governor of CA' giving speeches would wear out pretty quickly, how many $25k speeches would you expect to give? If >50 then I guess this starts being appealing.
I might not know what to do, but I think I am smart enough to identify people who do. I'd just contact them (eg the list would include Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen) and basically just do whatever they tell me to do
Seriously, Cowen is a teetotaler but that is a personal choice. Considering his libertarian leaning I doubt very much that he would want to /impose/ a prohibition on alcohol. Maybe he would want more "nudging" against it, though.
I would be more worried about his open border tendencies. And even that I would expect him to be somewhat pragmatic about it, as he is about everything else.
I'm not so sure that the California Democratic party's logic was unsound here. If a legitimate democratic candidate did run, the chance that the recall succeeds is inevitably higher (there may be people who don't want a Republican replacement, but who'll vote yes on the recall because they don't like Newsom and are hoping for the sane Democratic replacement). But, the chance that the recall succeeds also raises the chance that we end up with Larry Elder as governor.
This is essentially what happened during the 2003 recall. Democratic politician Bustamente campaigned on "No on recall, yes on Bustamente", ended up getting 30% of the vote, and that's how we ended up with The Terminator as our governor.
This supposes that lots of people voted for recall specifically because they wanted Bustamente as governor instead of Davis. Is there much proof of this? It seems unlikely, especially since Recall won by 10 points.
I phrased that badly. To clarify, I find it unlikely that many people voted for recall because they wanted Bustamente as governor, and even if a few such people existed, they are unlikely to have swung a 10 point result.
There were a lot of people who really disliked Gray Davis. Up until the last month, I was considering voting Yes on the recall because I disliked him so much, and would have preferred Bustamante or Arianna Huffington.
It's been 7 years since I lived in California, so I haven't looked into this. I've disliked Newsom for my entire adult life, ever since he pulled in the national Democratic leadership to campaign for him against the Green Party alternative in the San Francisco runoff election, on a platform of removing funds for homeless people. But I've also never particularly liked San Diego Republicans. So I would need to study to know for sure.
I probably wouldn't prefer Faulconer to Newsom, but it's not out of the question that, if Faulconer were leading the polls in the race to replace Newsom, I might not worry so much about how the first question went.
One of the few challengers to the California Democratic Party's level of incompetence is... the California Republican Party. One-party rule is corrosive, nationalizing state politics is bad strategy, and the brain drain by federal offices is real.
This really annoys me as Californian (really, expat still registered to vote in California). New England has moderate state level Republican parties who can be voted into power when the Democrats screw up. The California Republican Party is as conservative as the national party and filled with weirdos. And it's self-fulfilling, since they never win statewide races they can't attract good candidates. I'd love to vote the California Democrats out of office, but not when the alternative is Larry Elder.
I'm a big fan of the Canadian system where provincial and federal parties are completely different things and you can be a provincial Liberal and a federal Conservative or vice versa and no-one thinks twice about it.
A bit different from state vs federal, where I know it used to be common for people to retain old party loyalties at the state level even while voting differently for national politics. I wonder why we've gone a different route from Canada.
I don't really know. Some Canadian provinces don't even have some parties, for instance British Columbia has the NDP and Liberals, but no Conservatives (federal Conservatives are mostly in the BC Liberals).
My suspicion is that Canada is largely to do with the Reform story. The main right wing party in Canada until the 1980s was the Progressive Conservatives. In the east (Ontario and the four Maritimes), it still is. But in the west (BC and the three plains provinces), the Reform Party arose as a party to the right of the PCs. At the federal level, they merged into the CPC in 2000-3. All four of the western states had their own separate versions of this, BC had Social Credit, which collapsed as a result of corruption scandals in 1991 and that resulted in everyone on the right joining the BC provincial Liberals to try to defeat the NDP provincial government (classic Duverger's Law creating a two party system). In other states a broad party of the right got formed - similar but different from the CPC - like the Saskatchewan Party or Alberta's "United Conservative" Party. Only in Manitoba has the PC brand survived in the west (in part because the Manitoba Liberals became very right wing in the 1970s, pulled in all the people who would form Reform elsewhere and then collapsed in infighting with the more leftwing federal-type liberals).
In the Maritimes, the provincial parties still match up with the three federal parties (provincial PC with the federal CPC, plus Liberals and NDP).
Quebec is obviously different, but it has been ever since the rise of the first nationalist parties in the 1970s.
Its not due to Reform per se, but does reflect an aspect of Canadian politics that American politics has evolved away from, that its a system where parties can and do die and get replaced by new parties. So even if you start with the same two major parties at the Federal level and in each of the 10 provinces, the situation evolves in each jurisdiction and changes accumulate with time.
I highly doubt someone will win question 2 with just 30% of the vote. In the most recent poll (YouGov), Elder was polling at 23%. But 45% of respondents said they either wouldn't vote on that question or were unsure. If you only count the respondents who chose a candidate, Elder is polling at 42%. For comparison, Schwarzenegger got 49%. And I imagine as the election approaches more people are going to coalesce around the front runners.
By this logic, should the Democratic Party *still* be telling people to leave the replacement slot blank, so they're screwing up now? Or was the optimal strategy "tell people to vote for the backup candidate, but make sure the backup candidate sucks so they'll vote not to recall"? That seems... not totally implausible, but I doubt it was anyone's plan at the start of this process.
It's better to have a simple message so people don't mess it up. Telling people to vote for Pathraff would likely lead to people getting confused and a net lose in votes. Plus, he's an idiot who shouldn't get near the governor's office anyway.
I took the Democratic strategy as a sign of the local power of Newsom in California politics as much as anything else. The best strategy for the Democratic party might be to run an amazing candidate who could easily trounce any Republican running. That strategy almost certainly destroys Newsom (as you add the people who want the new D candidate to the people who dislike Newsom and they easily vote Yes to removing Newsom).
If Newsom were not very powerful in California Democrat politics, someone would have identified this possibility and tried to run as a powerful D or at least recruit a popular D to run. That he could remove all valid D competitors indicates that almost no one was willing to step out of line against him.
Then it sounds like the pragmatic best strategy is for the party to find an acceptable replacement, throw Newsom under the bus, and campaign on "Yes on recall, Yes on Nice Guy".
Why are they so wedded to Newsom? Presumably he does have very strong connections and allies, but why are they so gung-ho for him and nobody but him, and hang the public?
This seems to be a feature of the current political climate. Or maybe it's been around forever and I'm just noticing it?
A state Democratic Party with some common sense would think "hey, Newsom is kind of damaged property at this point, let's find someone better and run them". As you said: yes on recall, yes on nice guy.
A state Republican Party with some common sense would realize "hey, Trump-supporting candidates will never win statewide office in California, let's grit our teeth and run a moderate".
But nope, we get Newsom vs Elder.
I can't explain it. Maybe personalities are bigger than parties? Maybe something to do with modern primaries? I really don't know.
Larry Elder has said nice things about Trump in the past, but at this point seem to be trying to reject identification as a Trump supporter. Probably prudent.
I have to admit that I haven't looked into the recall candidates as much as maybe I should. (Or maybe I shouldn't... this election isn't really making me love anyone on either side, and I'm not convinced that spending time researching the candidates will do me any good.)
But anyway, as a pragmatist (I'll probably never love CA politics, but I have to live with them), I guess I'll count this as progress. If CA Republicans are willing to acknowledge, even implicitly, that association with Trump will hurt them, I suppose that's a good step.
I expect they believe, correctly, that it will help them in a Republican primary, hurt them in a general election. But California has a weird primary system, which may make the first irrelevant.
Larry Elder supports school vouchers and reduced regulation of construction, which strike me as important pluses, although given the legislature I wouldn't count on his succeeding in doing much.
As I see it generally the smaller a political party gets, the more ideologically rigid it gets. Evaporation of a solution concentrates it -- all the less rigid people who were just barely attracted into the tent leave, and what's left consists of the more hard-core people. Furthermore, when the party is generally shrinking, its focus tends to be on retention of who they still have, not recruiting people further from their remaining core. So they have "inreach" instead of "outreach," circular-firing squads, harsher tests of group loyalty, et cetera.
It all sounds dysfunctional, like it would accelerate complete evaporation, and I would say often it is and does -- but not always. The motivating belief is usually that by stripping down to a core group that is more ideologically pure, they acquire a degree of clarity and forcefulness in their messaging (no need for a ton of asterisks to mollify coalition partners on the fringe) that improves it for a future audience. Then, they count on some stroke of luck, change in circumstance, or massive screw-up by their enemies bringing that clear message to a big audience that is abruptly more receptive, and Bob's your uncle.
There is some historical precedent, e.g. I would say Reagan did *not* modify his message between his years as California governor and the election of 1980. Indeed, he rather purified it and moved if anything further to the right, which is probably why he didn't come close in 1968 and 1976. But the mountain came to Mohammed, so to speak, and when Carter immolated himself and took down 1970s liberalism with him in 1979, Reagan was ready, with a purer message that resonated strongly with the passions of the moment.
Newsom was up like 17 points before Delta hit and will probably still win. So much monday morning quarterbacking here, except the team hasn't even lost yet.
The problem is that Newsom didn't actually do anything that any other generic Democrat wouldn't have done (including the French Laundry thing, similar such "scandals" have happened repeatedly, all over the nation).
For them to openly endorse Yes on Recall implies that Newsom did do something wrong. But what? It'd be a huge sign of weakness and set a really bad precedent for the future.
You need something like an Andrew Cuomo style "20 women accuse you of sexual assault" level scandal, that is uniquely individualized to the person in question, to convince a party to turn on one of its own who has maintained the party line without fault.
This is a good point. I don't particularly like Newsom, but it's useful to be reminded that he's probably not much worse than any of the other Democrats.
That is entirely the problem for politics everywhere. "Yeah, he did this dodgy thing, but they're all doing it and he's no worse than anyone else".
It gives people very little recourse when they're angry, and their elected public representative can't in fact be shifted because, well, this is how the sausage is made.
The pragmatic strategy (endorsed by the LA Times) if were able to get enough people to agree on it is (No, Faulconer). It looks like we might fail the prisoners dilemma by not promoting it enough to be a Schelling point, even around here.
I think the way this works is that every politician has his personal groupies, or retainers, people who are faithful to him personally for whatever reason. Then there are party groupies, who are faithful to whomever is the most powerful party politician at the moment. When you win an election for governor, personal and party retainers merge, and that's your governing coalition.* While you govern, some party retainers may become personal retainers -- indeed, every politician hopes for this, and usually sends some favors their way to encourage the transition -- or, if you're a screw-up, personal retainers may become more distant from you and become mere party retainers, ready to abandon you if a better guy comes along.
If Newsom loses, by definition the Democratic party loses all his personal retainers, who will stick with their guy (and usually dislike the party for not having sufficiently supported him, the way Trump fanbois depise the "RINOs" who they think did not sufficiently support Trump). That weakens the party. If there has been the normal conversion of party to personal retainers while Newsom held power -- if he was a competent governing politician -- then the party is weakened by that extra amount.
The only way this doesn't happen is if (1) a fair amount of Newsom's personal retainers converted to merely party retainers lately, meaning he was a crappy feudal lord, and (2) whoever Newsom's replacement is comes in with at least as many personal retainers, so party strength is preserved. That's certainly possible, but usually it requires an unusually inept candidate -- "unusually" because he did, after all, win the previous election, so he has to have made serious missteps in the recent past (or got elected in the first place by wild luck).
----------------
* By "retainers" I don't just mean individual employees or voters, but also interest groups that are generally beholden to you on a somewhat personal basis, e.g. the late unlamented Gray Davis had a special relationship with the prison guards union, they were in some sense a member of his personal entourage.
I'm not sure about that narrative. The 2003 recall voted out Davis by a margin of 55.4% Yes to 44.6% No, and according to CNN's exit polls, only about 3% of votes voted Yes/Bustamante, which doesn't come close to making up the difference.
The 2003 recall was also very unusual in California in that the two major Republican candidates (Schwarzenegger and McClintock) combined for 62% of the vote, 6.6 percentage points over the Yes vote on the recall and almost 20 percentage points over the Republican performance in the state in the 2000 (41.7%) and 2004 (44.4%) Presidential elections. And per the exit poll, 18% of Democrats voted for Schwarzenegger and 6% voted for McClintock.
My read is that while Bustamante was a decent replacement candidate on paper, he and Davis were both unusually unpopular Democratic Party candidate in the actual election, while Schwarzenegger and McClintock were both unusually popular for Republicans in California. This is borne out by the favorable/unfavorable numbers in the same exit poll: Davis's job approval was deep underwater (26% approve, 73% disapprove), as was Bustamante's favorability (37% favorable, 58% unfavorable), while both Schwarzenegger and McClintock had net-positive favorabilities (51%-47% and 55%-37% respectively).
Also, partisanship is extremely strong nowadays. Not running a Democratic candidate greatly strengthens the "Republican recall" message in a state where there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans.
Which raises the question of whether his having married her should be taken as evidence of his incompetence. A large part of the job of a top level executive is evaluating other people in order to decide who to hire, who to have do what.
I'm much more confused about what Donald Trump Jr is doing with her. She's not quite old enough to be his mother, but she's too old to be his stepmother.
Not having a good alternative to Newsom seems bad. However,
1) Having a legitimate backup to Newsom might get some people who would normally vote "no" on the recall to vote "yes." Voters aren't super rational so if a high profile, reasonable Dem is running, you might get more "yes" votes even if they make it way more likely Larry Elder is elected.
Yeah, but if you give people a choice and they go "We want the new guy", isn't that more indicative of a problem with Newsom/the Californian Democrats than "the public are irrational"? Maybe they're not being fair to Newsom, but if I ask you for tea and you give me coffee on the grounds "No, what you really want is coffee", I'm still going to be dissatisfied no matter how good the coffee is.
Sure, but that means that there is a problem with the voting system. If people whose preference is new Democrat > Newsom > Larry Elder have no effective way of casting a vote that expresses that preference without a high risk of helping Elder, then that's a problem.
One option would be that the new candidate has to get more votes than the No vote in the first question (ie count the No votes as votes for Newsom as the replacement)
Well, politics. Choice of the lesser weevil usw. One needs to practice gratitude that you weren't served dog piss, and that coffee is a lot closer to what you really want than most other random brown liquids.
> if you don't have diminishing marginal utility to power, a 10% chance at the California governorship looks fantastic.
Does it?
If you, a random guy got elected as governor, what are the chances you'd be able to accomplish anything that you really wanted to?
I get the impression politicians are all actors in this insanely complex system which depends heavily on human relationships, that literally nobody is in charge of. The power any one politician has (i.e. their ability to influence outcomes) stems far more from the relationships they, and their ability to build and manage those relationships, than anything else.
Being governor of california sounds like being CEO of a giant money losing non-profit, stuffed to the gills with ambitious people who'll all be trying to trick you into doing what they want. It's not like the state government is some chess board and the governor gets to move pieces around. I'm beginning to think that measuring power with a number is kind of silly, and instead it's like, we're playing chess in 10 millions, and being made governor only amplifies a certain kind of power you must already possess in order to do any thing.
If you end up somewhere 'above your pay grade' then i'd be the most likely outcome is you have no idea how to appoint, who to trust, who's trying to screw you, or how to do things like build a consensus around your objectives, so that the end result is likely that you just become hated for doing nothing, as rivals for your power successfully trip you up and get the media to blame you for failing.
That's kinda how I felt about Schwarzenegger. He had reasonable policy goals, but had zero idea how to build the political capital necessary to move the state even the slightest bit toward those goals.
Didn't he manage to do a couple things? I know that he at least had one training-wheels accomplishment, with getting some after-school-care ballot measure passed the year before the recall.
Then there's the much more fun National Enquirer style hypothesis, that he was caught boning the maid much earlier, and the Kennedys neutered him as the price of their silence.
There are still presumably people who aren’t career politicians but have the experience and friends necessary to do something with such a position. But I am curious why they didn’t
I think both were way above their Peter Principle level as CEOs, so it's just as well they flamed out in politics, for the sake of their ultimate reputation. Now we can all say "oh what might have been!" without some ugly reality of what actually was making us sad.
As a libertarian, I'd be happy to just veto stuff all day long. I'm unelectable in the first place, so I have no reason to not do the right thing in the first place.
As nice as that sounds to people against the standard California Democrat stances, the reality of that approach would be the legislature overriding vetoes all day long. The better approach would be to use the bully pulpit and standard politics to promote better options and convince/shame the legislature into making better rules. That takes connections and support, which puts us back to square one of making it useful to be governor.
I mean, yeah, you can obstruct to a certain extent. You might also tick off the legislature to the point that they streamline the override process and just start passing crazy things even faster.
Donald Trump is the perfect example of this. He had no idea how to manage the massive bureaucracy, his subordinates resigned when asked to do harmful or illegal things, and he wasn't that successful in implementing his agenda. When he did get things done they were things that mainstream Republicans wanted like conservative judges and tax cuts.
He couldn't even get things done which were clearly legal and within his power. Cancelling DACA seems like an obvious no-brainer, but the Supreme Court wouldn't even let him do that.
For a guy who was supposedly a wannabe dictator, Trump couldn't get a Team R Congress to repeal Obamacare, much less fund The Great Wall of Ignorance.
For nearly eight years, Team R railed against the evils of Obamacare. Then, when they had solid majorities in both houses of Congress and a Team R president, no more talk, no more excuses, they couldn't get it done. Pathetic! (and I say that as one who sees Obamacare as perhaps the best that a late-stage oligarchy would able to accomplish under the circumstances and considering entrenched interests involved).
"couldn't" get it done? Republicans used to put up symbolic votes against the ACA all the time. The instant they got power, they lost interest in repealing it. What could this mean other than... they never really opposed it, they just wanted their base to see them opposing it.
Glad to see I'm not that alone in having this opinion of him. Trump's greatest weakness as a politician, which I think also runs all through his career, is his complete inability to hire and keep the loyalty of a cadre of competent subordinates. Even people who were ideologically very close to him, and had strong personal reasons for wanting to stick with him, ended up hating him. He must be a complete asshole as a boss. As long as he can make things work as a one-man operation, or a Messiah directly preaching simple sermons to a million groupies who don't really know him and aren't expected to be active lieutenants managing his army, he does OK. But as soon as he tries being captain of a ship, something about the way he interacts with them makes his entire bridge crew revolt and start shooting at each other, and then the ship runs into the iceberg while the 2nd Officer is trying to strangle the navigator.
After decades of work, he still runs what is essentially a small family business. He can't keep any talent required to run a business with thousands of employees. (Nearly every business that jumps to mind when people see "Trump" on it is actually the name being licensed out.)
It works out as a pretty solid move if you're a cynical asshole who doesn't care what other people think, but I don't think there are very many people who genuinely think that way.
This; as part of my job I work a lot with relatively senior people at a fairly wide range of companies, and one of their most consistent complaints is an inability to accomplish their goals. At first I thought this was false modesty, but the more I see the more I'm convinced that most large organisations actually run on a model closer to an ant hive or school of fish than what the org charts tell you.
There's a story, maybe apocryphal, maybe not, about a particular head of the US federal exective branch who had zero executive experience. When confronted with the bankruptcy of a certain very large automaker, one who made a bunch of cars no one wants to buy, this newbie exec looked at how well Honda Civics were selling and asked 'Why can't they just start making something like a Civic?'
I don't know if it actually happened, but it certantly sounds right to me, both on the part of the newbie exec not understanding that you can't just pick up your pen and phone and make an org change because your name plate says so, and because I've seen enough large orgs to know that some types of change are just outside of the realm of the possible.
There is a story which is straight from the horse's mouth about a certain very large automaker who hired a famous and highly qualified executive for the specific purpose of driving much needed reforms. A couple of years of ignominy and failure later, that executive said that the only people in the whole company who wanted any reforms were the people who interviewed him for the job.
<i>4. Californians are lucky Peter Thiel isn't a Democrat, because his mind is minmaxed for spotting opportunities like this, and you can bet he would have gotten involved here if he could have.</i>
I keenly remember when Thiel was going to influence Trump to pick all these awesome contrarian technocrats and instead he picked a bunch of mediocre hangers-on and FOX commentators.
And I note his current pet project, JD Vance, has approximately 100% name recognition from blue checks and 10% name recognition from Ohio primary voters, who are flocking to the established local actual-crazy-guy over a Yalie who left the state after college and wrote a book about how shitty it was but is now pretending to be crazy.
Mandel isn't actually crazy, just pretending. But, yeah; Vance's campaign is ineffectual to the extreme, and is extremely unlikely to fail because he is, in fact, substantially to the left of Mitt Romney.
Honestly speaking, I have seen nothing but hot air from Vance. What I personally would want to see is what specific proposals does he have, how will these proposals result in concrete and material benefits to the average frustrated Ohioan, and how does he plan to implement these proposals.
Instead, all I hear is vague talk of values and families, which is all well and good but tells me nothing. That in turn to me is a signal that, if elected, Vance is going to act just like any other replacement-level Team R politician, with perhaps a slightly different rhetorical cast.
Okay, you fascinate me strangely. Why is Mandel crazy? His Wikipedia article doesn't tell me much, apart from him having a few failed runs at campaigns and being involved in the usual political storms in a teacup over election campaigning re: calling your opponents names, pretending you did X, Y and Z, and repurposing money/resources to personal use.
What did he do that is particularly nuts? Or is it just his positions on abortion, gay rights, and climate change you are referring to?
"Abortion
Mandel is anti-abortion.
Health care
Mandel has called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. In a campaign advertisement during his 2012 Senatorial run, Mandel claimed opponent Sherrod Brown "cast the deciding vote on the government takeover of health care". Politifact has labeled as false the claim that Brown cast the deciding vote for the act. The description of the act as a government takeover of health care, by Mandel, has been labeled by Politifact as "nonsensical" and a "myth".
Environment
Mandel rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has referred to climate change research as "riddled with fraud" and has vowed to fight attempts to advance clean-air standards.
Mandel has called for what he terms as "aggressive and responsible" energy exploration that protects "the air we breathe and water we drink" while reducing environmental regulation. He supports the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Mandel is a supporter of expanded coal plants and has criticized what he has termed as "radical" environmental groups.
LGBT rights
Mandel opposes same-sex marriage, saying in 2012 that he will "protect the sanctity of marriage" and "this is a fight that I will never, ever back down." He is against openly gay people serving in the military, and voted against workplace and housing discrimination protections for gay and transgender people in 2009.
Foreign policy
In 2012, Mandel said that he disagreed with plans to set a "date certain" for withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, also stating that "at some point in time, we have to take the training wheels off and we have to allow those countries to stand on their own two feet."
I call him "crazy" because of how lockstep he is. I don't call someone crazy just for supporting Trump, I call them crazy if they backed 100% of the stolen election bullshit. I don't call someone crazy for opposing Democrats, I call them crazy if they can't stop calling Muslim Democrats "Hamas spokesmen." I don't call someone crazy for being skeptical of some COVID measures, I call them crazy if they oppose 100% of them, even those proposed by their Republican governor.
8 hours ago he tweeted "masks are a form of child abuse." This, to me, is crazy.
People who grew up in southern Ohio don't have any illusions that it's not dirt poor and dysfunctional; I don't know that him writing a book about his ugly background is going to alienate him with the locals. It's like when an old Jewish guy cracks a joke about Jewish mothers: he gets away with it because he very well knows whereof he speaks.
> Maybe you should actually be scared of the California Democratic Party and its demand that no Democrat stand as a replacement for Governor Newsom? I think this makes sense if you want a future career in California state politics; probably they can blacklist you forever if you cross them. But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath. That’s why we would have been able to take this weird opportunity that all the real politicians turned down. Also, given the level of competence they’ve shown here, having the California state Democratic Party out for your head is probably the surest path to a long and healthy life.
This is the key part, IMO. The opportunity is only desirable to people who want power within the Californian political system, but the costs are higher on those who... have a career engaged with the Californian political system. Without disputing that there surely are people whose expected value exceeded Paffrath's, I'd bet the candidate space is fairly small. Maybe a few thousand people or so?
Even smaller when you realize that Angelynne and Gary Coleman and various other B-or-lower-list celebrities already made their run 18 years ago (but Caitlyn Jenner had to wait until this time).
"But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath."
But the thing is, suppose you get a candidate like Joe Average, stand-in for Newsom, with party backing (just about, as they really want Newsom to survive). What are my positions? What are the issues I care about? If elected, what will I do? (1) Niceness in general (2) Nothing much past keeping any crazies from polling better than Newsom (3) Warming the seat until the Democratic Party picks a real candidate it wants to run.
Out of a bunch of similar "who the heck is that, I never heard of him?" runners, why should the long-suffering people of California pick you over, say, "Oh, that's that guy off Youtube? The one who dressed up as an elf?"
I would think most sane Democrats who don't want to see the state burn would go NO / Faulconer.
He's not some rando vanity candidate - or a far right loon. He was the mayor of demographically diverse, largely safe and orderly, San Diego - probably the best run city in California.
Which makes it even more hilarious that he's polling so low.
My theory is the normie California managerial class sees a "R" next to the name and is immediately revolted, and the more sophisticated politicos think that he would have a much better shot at re-election than any of the other meme candidates.
I know some Democrats who say that Faulconer is the best candidate, but that in the unlikely event that Dianne Feinstein ever dies, the governor will choose her replacement, and a GOP governor would choose a GOP replacement, and flipping the Senate to the GOP would be really bad.
Is the California GOP really that crazy? I seem to remember GOP-led California being pretty well managed in ye olden days, but I suppose being the minority party can make you weird, and ever since the Trump nomination I guess I have no idea what to think about the Republican party anymore (and I'm a Republican.)
I think there's a theory of base-level competence, which the leading party in whatever state has to meet. The lights need to stay on, the garbage needs to get picked up, etc. Is the California GOP up to that level of competence?
(My personal opinion of Newsom is mostly formed by being downwind from California and having our air quality suck all summer. And all last summer. And the summer before. Yes, climate change, etc., but fix SOMETHING.)
There's some sane CA GOP politicians in Orange County and San Diego (Faulconer), but on the state level much more insane than places like MD, VT or MA. Their only platform is really lower gas taxes and hardcore NIMBY. Better policies than Dems on crime and law and order IMO, but that takes a backseat to the other bad policies.
It's actually interesting how deep blue places like MD/VT/MA have decent Republican parties while places like NY and CA have insane GOP. I don't know what the commonality here is.
My theory is that Republicans in MA, VT, and MD are more moderate is because those are all small states with relatively evenly distributed populations. Just like conservatives on college campuses, they're forced to be more moderate, polite, and accommodating in order to avoid being cast out of their social and professional networks as a pariah. Republicans are both statewide and local minorities.
Contrast this with California and New York, large states with extraordinarily pronounced urban/rural divides. Republicans in California may be heavily outnumbered statewide, but dominate in the communities they actually live in. The interior of the state is, in many ways, as hardcore Red Tribe as anywhere in the country. There's no real incentive to moderate because Democrats don't really travel more than 20 miles inland unless they're driving to Vegas or the mountains, and they're always going to lose the statewide elections anyway. My understanding is that New York (and other states, like Virginia and Oregon) has a similar dynamic, but I'm not familiar enough with up-state politics to state with any confidence.
This also makes me wonder if the same happens in reverse. It makes intuitive sense to me that a Democratic Party in a rural state based mostly around a handful of isolated college towns would be more extreme than a Democratic Party that's forced to interact with a GOP majority in more mixed, suburban environments. But, having lived in big blue cities in big blue states all my life, I don't have a strong sense of red state dynamics
First of all - not sure if that's referring to the politicians or the general populace - but either way, I'd think it's much more likely that they're actually more moderate, not just putting on a fake "front". I don't think Charlie Baker is secretly a MAGA populist.
Fair enough. Forced may be too strong a word. I'm mostly speaking from my own experience as a right-libertarian on college campuses. I often felt the need to present myself as more moderate and agreeable than I really was. I wasn't nefariously lying about my true intentions or anything, but the incentives acting on me certainly had a significant effect on how I expressed my politics publicly. And now that I'm living and working in an environment much more in line with my personal beliefs, I've noticed I'm not quite as good at "reaching across the aisle" as it were. It feels like those skills have atrophied from less strenuous effort.
Native Upstate New Yorker here. A couple of decades ago, New York Republicans were largely sane and decent at governing, and popular upstate. Now, the usual pattern is Democratic local politicians in the cities, and the Trump base in the rural areas around them. There’s broad awareness that nobody at the state level gives Upstate much thought, which is probably why Trump’s support was as strong as it was.
The new Gov is from Buffalo - first upstate governor since FDR - but my friends who still live there don’t expect much from her.
Ok but don’t come crying if that attempt at 4D chess gives you Gov. Larry Elder.
Or just have a party with the balls to tell / beg / convince / bribe their grand old dames to step down when they have a chance to choose their own replacement (*cough* RBG *cough*)
She might get caught out in sunlight, or she might loose track of the earth from her native town when her coffin is being shipped to DC, might get tricked into going to a beach and end up counting all the grains of sand. Lots of possibilities, really.
Yes this is correct. NO on general principles, and Faulconer as the clearly most qualified candidate. This will be my vote as a reasonably left-libertarian California.
FWIW my wife is a staunch Democrat and voted NO/blank as she did not care for any of the replacement candidates.
Glad to see there's some convergence in this [stag hunt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt) mess of a ballot. I'm kind of floored no one has fixed the process since the 2003 fiasco.
As a Californian progressive, this is exactly what I did, since Paffrath seems like a piece of shit NIMBY, and if we're in the alternative where Yes wins, then there are more Republicans than Democrats voting, so the only real choices are Republicans. On a side note, this recall needs reform so badly.
If people think Paffrath has that good a chance of becoming governor, I'll offer them 12:1 odds. I'll accept up to $200. (As an assurance that I'm trustworthy, I work at the Future of Humanity Institute, and my colleagues would expect me to honor bets like this, and if I didn't pay, you could ruin my reputation by informing them.)
I think he wants to demonstrate that he's pretty confident that Paffrath doesn't have much of a chance which makes Scott's argument not as strong if true.
But he's not saying 'I believe the odds are 12:1'; he's saying 'I will offer you 12:1'. It makes sense that he'd try to get the best odds he can. 12:1 might just be a number chosen to sound tempting to somebody who believes it's truly 9:1.
I don't think he has a chance of becoming governor, but I do think he has a good chance of picking up a lot of disaffected people who want to send a protest vote message to the local party: we're not recalling Newsom but we want you to take us seriously.
This reminded me to check who won the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York and yep, it was Eric Adams, which did not surprise me at all.
Back when everybody was running and Yang was topping the polls, I figured that the voters would go for people they knew, people from local government or otherwise, and when it came down to Adams and Garcia, this was in line with my expectations.
Same way with Paffrath; I think Newsom *may* squeak past the recall, but I do expect Paffrath or some other 'random' candidate to chalk up a lot of votes as people want to express dissatisfaction with both Newsom's governorship and how the Democratic Party are treating them re: not permitting any other candidate to run with party backing.
I would think that most people voting for Paffrath are actually your standard-issue MSNBC-watchers who think that voting No on recall, and then voting for the guy with the D after the name is how you show loyalty to the party.
Is Peter Thiel really so ideologically attached to the Republican Party that he wouldn't have switched party registration to run? It seems like he totally could have run, so either he didn't see it or it wasn't worth it to him given the controversy it would stir up.
Probably meant that he wouldn’t win as a Democrat, given supporting Trump. He does have two friends as senate candidates up an running now, (Vance and masters) suggesting he is interested in political power
The question is whether Peter Thiel can find anyone that he trusts to implement sufficiently Thiely policies. The overlap between "smart enough to agree with Peter Thiel on everything" and "dumb enough to want to go into politics" has to be pretty small.
I think if you're as well-known as Bloomberg or Thiel, switching parties to run in the easier lane doesn't really help - everyone always knew Bloomberg was basically a technocratic Democrat, and everyone already knows Thiel is a weird Christian libertarian Trumpian Republican. In Bloomberg's case, changing lanes helped because there was a formal Democratic primary and a formal Republican primary, and the Republican primary was easy to win. But in Thiel's case, there is no formal primary, and putting a D after his name was just going to make the wolves bay even louder for his blood rather than pick up many votes.
Switching parties might work if you stick with it and are a loner. Trump was a centrist D like D-Richard Gephardt until the 1990's, made the usual 'the party left me' switch, ran and governed on D-Gephardt's platform. And you could read Matt Braynard's pretty solid claim that the level of 2020 election fraud was higher than the margin of D victory.
I don't believe that Trump governed on a Gephardt-style platform. At least, the bill that is usually pointed to as the largest legislative accomplishment of the Trump era is the tax bill of 2017, which seems like it was very un-Gephardt-ian. (Perhaps the explanation though is that this bill was driven by Congress, and the distinctively Trump endeavors were things like tariffs and immigration policy, which probably were much more consonant with Gephardt.)
"At first, the hearing went smoothly for Braynard, who has the professional presentation of a data specialist. But then came state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democrat from Atlanta. It turns out she had been doing her own research. Citing an exhibit filed by Braynard that listed people who had voted but who supposedly had registered in Georgia and another state, she pointed out that several names were duplicated on the list. Then she said that she had looked up the first 10 names on the list and had found eight of these people listed in Georgia property records as residents. She reached one of them on the phone, she said, and he confirmed that he lived and voted only in Georgia. Nguyen said she verified this person’s voting record.
Taking another name from this list—a woman allegedly registered in Georgia and Arizona—she confirmed this person’s residence and voting record in Georgia, and she found another voter with the exact same name listed in the Arizona voter rolls, born in the same year but with a different birth date. She also identified another person on the list in a similar situation: same name, different birth dates.
In rapid-fire fashion, Nguyen continued on. She turned to the Braynard list of voters who he said had registered with postal boxes “disguised” as residences. She recognized one of the addresses as being around the corner from her home—a condo complex with a FedEx center on the first floor. (Some apartment buildings use a postal box-like system for their addresses.) A friend in the building sent her a list of residents of the complex. They were all on Braynard’s list, she said. And the same was true, she had discovered, for another condo complex with a FedEx center. On her own, she said, she had discovered that 128 names on this list—more than 10 percent of Braynard’s total number—were errors."
Where is this from? If you work somewhere you'd be fired for reading anything but D media, you could still read Charlie Peters' anecdote about how D-Daley's machine stole Illinois in 1960- 1) let the other guy vote first so you know how much to fake, 2) then raise the dead and print more ballots. The 2020 amateurs needed a suspicious pause between these two, but Daley was a pro.
There are laws about that in California - you can't run as a party member unless you've been in that party for something like 12 months. (Too lazy to look up details, but that's the idea.) 12 months before the filing deadline, the recall wasn't really on anyone's horizon.
My wish is that a close election shakes up the smug complacency of California Democrats.
The state is like a one-party mandated country, but unlike somewhere like China, government officials don't face any consequences for poor outcomes. China fired hundreds of local officials for poor COVID response for example. In California you can be a corrupt grifter and really nothing happens.
Take crime in California. The numbers are relatively middle of the pack vs. other states, but I recently did an analysis where I looked at county by country crime rates adjusted for demographics and income, and virtually every county in CA dropped to the very bottom / worst.
A country like China has the benefit of a standard or common conception of what constitutes good governance. It's hard to call it "incompetence" when your government makes a conscious decision to prioritize decarceration.
We really need to break the stranglehold of national parties on state and local politics. California needs a pro-development/pro-housing party and a slow growth party, that both align with Democrats at the federal level, but that contest state and local elections, and maybe even both run candidates for federal office with separate subscripts after the D (the top-two jungle primary system in California makes it easy to do this kind of thing).
The problem is that without two actual local party lines, you can't hold primaries, and run one candidate on each line, and actually figure out which direction the voters prefer (or let the factions figure out where exactly to split the difference to get half of the voters on each side). I remember in the Los Angeles race to succeed Villaraigosa, I eventually did support Garcetti, but it was a bit hard to decide between him and the two other Democrats that qualified for the four-candidate debates. And I suspect the situation for London Breed in San Francisco would be a bit clearer if the Board of Supervisors had a clear party split in her favor or against her.
It might. Newsom's first election (at least, the first one I heard of him in) was a runoff for San Francisco mayor, where he faced off against the Green Party candidate. I don't recall what triggered the runoff there, since it was not a federal office (and the federal jungle primary law didn't exist yet anyway, I think).
I still think it would be more helpful to make the factions more explicitly clear, so that we know whether there are specifically two factions, or specifically three, and so that we can be more sure whether electing this candidate or that one to city council or county supervisor will help or hurt the mayor in their goals, rather than having to read the tea leaves of what people are saying in their campaign ads, and what is hovering just below the surface.
I see your point, but such antics take creativity and independence, which are probably better qualifiers than blind obedience and adeptness at ass-licking and character assassination.
Expert level: Imagine a possible future where antics like this AREN'T necessary for political influence.
I'm already working on a novel where the dominant party is 4chan's "troll party", and the Church of GME is the biggest lender...
In a world where they're necessary, it doesn't take creativity and independence, it just requires you to hire some PR firm that makes up crazy stunts for you to do.
I was just about to post the same thing ! We need more elves in government. Perhaps then we'd finally get something done, even if it's cookie-cutter environmental policy :-)
I find it interesting that the strategy of the party that calls themselves Democrats was to intentionally limit the choices available to voters. Doesn't seem very (little d) democratic to me.
It turns out that two patriotic-sounding names picked from the same descriptor "Democratic Republic" over a hundred years prior convey very little info about the actual policies of their respective parties
I mean, party primaries have a long and established history within political parties with all sorts of democratic ambitions, despite their role in intentionally limiting the choices available to voters in the general election.
I don't think your comparison really fits the situation. There's a world of difference between whittling down a field of many contenders and attempting to dissuade the rise of contenders in the first place. The former is meant to give voters a choice, whereas the latter is meant to not. Certainly there's plenty of gaming the system that occurs, as well as times when there aren't any real primary challengers, but the point still stands.
Also, there's the usual problem of markets overweighting longshot candidates.
Nope. At this point I'm just hoping that an unbeatable benevolent superintelligence becomes dictator.
Does a 90% chance of the cost of failed campaign out way the 10% chance of the benefit of a successful campaign. My guess is that the vast majority of successful people do not want to be governor to begin with.
I think that depends on the person. A "failed campaign" did a lot to raise Bernie Sanders' brand. Plausibly it will be good for Kevin Paffrath too (although he claims he's lost subscribers since all this happened because his politics are too controversial).
Yes. But it narrows the poll considerably. You need a candidate that
A. Has the name recognition of Kevin Paffrath. (otherwise the argument that you have a similar probability falls apart)
B. Has a career that can benefit from branding like Kevin Pafferath.
Most people have only what to lose be putting their politics out in the open.
The thing is, California in particular is full of rich people who could either benefit from, or at least not be harmed by running for Governor. Think about all of the rich tech bros, VCs, etc. that are largely anonymous and normal people don't know or care who they are. Likewise, various actors who make outlandish political statements all the time, and for who dropping a million or two on a campaign is a rounding error. Or Internet celebrities who are already mired in controversy. Plenty of people with lots of money and nothing to lose.
Beg to differ. If you're a rich person, and especially if you're involved in complex business in hi-tech, you have a great deal to lose by having your every utterance recorded and broadcast widely for several months, especially in the context of being asked deliberately rude and/or provocative questions by people who are experts at political campaignery and who would love to see you put your foot in your mouth. One misstep, one "ah..oops...of course what I meant by that is..." and multiple future career option doors could slam shut.
If you know who Arianna Huffington is, thank a failed campaign.
Subscribers are practically worthless. A channel like VSauce has over 10 million subscribers, and most videos have millions if not tens of millions of views. Meanwhile, a channel like WatchMojo has similar subscriber numbers, but most videos have under 100k views. VSauce makes engaging, well-edited videos, while WatchMojo makes stupid clickbait list videos.
Point is, everything good comes from views, whether you're in it for money, spreading information/ideology, or the fun/art of making videos. Subs very weakly correlate with views.
Sure, but there are millions of successful people, and divide that by a thousand for whatever factors you need and there’s still a lot of people with the desire or use for or ability to use the opportunity. Most people don’t want to be politicians, or even want large scale power, and yet there’s stiff competition.
This. Unless you are really into politics, governor is much less fun than most of the other jobs that "successful" people have. Sure, by some measure a governor holds lots of power, but it is much more of a hassle for a governor to get his ideas enacted than for, say, a ceo of a tech company.
Well, in these Imperial Executive days it may sound laughably quaint, but in principle within our system the responsibility for having ideas and enacting them lies with the legislature, and the governor is supposed to restrict himself to putting those ideas into effective execution.
“ unvaccinated unmasked indoor dinner”
In his defense:
https://assets.vogue.com/photos/5a820d454bab8b3e87d794dd/master/pass/00-promo-french-laundry-garden-renovation.jpg
I wouldn’t call that indoor.
There was a lot of debate on how some doors might or might not have gotten closed, but I'll remove the word "indoor" to avoid controversy.
Whether it was technically "indoor" may have been a matter of opinion and the angle of the picture taken. What was not a matter of opinion was that he was in gross violation of his own COVID restaurant restrictions. That's the kind of thing that could unite anti-mask Republicans angry about his hypocrisy and pro-mask Democrats angry about him spreading COVID.
Exactly. The controversy wasn't over the fact that he was being risky with COVID. The controversy was over the fact that he was breaking his own executive order. I believe he would have been in violation even if it were outdoors (there were too many people). It gave the impression that the rules only applied to the little people and it pissed off both the left and the right.
OTOH California "indoor"/"outdoor" standards defy any attempt at logic. You can't be in a space where industrial ventilation system is installed (and can be easily amended to add whatever improvements exist to kill as many viruses as possible), but you totally can be in an enclosed tent having no air flow, no ventilation, poorly cleaned and trying to cram the same amount of people into half the space. Because yeah, technically it's "outdoors".
I get why it is like that - between not banning indoors dining and paying the political cost of all covid death being attributed to this single decision, and banning all dining and killing all the restaurant industry and causing enormous economic calamity (and being recalled for sure because people want their sushi back!), they chose a compromise - something that maybe does something, maybe not, but clearly they did their part and it's not their fault if something goes wrong.
And since they know exactly what they did - they behave accordingly.
Reading the story, it was alleged that due to weather/noise/can't remember what, the restaurant closed sliding glass doors and that turned it from 'outdoors' (which, by that photo, it isn't really outdoors either) to 'indoors'.
But it's not so much about the doors, as the public anger. Same things have tripped up politicians in my country as well, there were two such fundraising/lobbying parties and arguments over "well was it really indoors or outdoors" but people didn't care; what they cared about was the same members of the same government telling them "No, you can't go to Sunday Mass because of the risk of spreading infection, you can't visit family members, you can't go outside" had no problems at all breaking all the regulations when it came to themselves (and getting money for their campaigns).
Sally and John can't have their wedding because ban on gatherings of more than X people and hotels and restaurants have to institute rules on distance between tables. Minister for Cardboard Boxes has a function where the tables are jammed together, but that's different, don't you know!
Exactly. If you pass a sweeping law that hurts a lot of people ostensibly for their own good, they are going to be righteously pissed if you rules-lawyer yourself into vaguely plausible “compliance” that requires no apparent sacrifice on your part.
The fact that he did it at a stupid expensive restaurant with a bunch of fat cats is just icing on the let-them-eat-cake.
It really didn't help that the dinner included meeting with American Medical Association lobbyists. You'd think that of all people, the doctor's group would not take part in violating health orders.
One missing wall does not make that dinner, that eye-poppingly expensive dinner paid for by lobbyists, one iota less crass, naive and stupid.
I mailed my ballot today and I voted against recall. Even so, I think he's an idiot out of his depth but the best of the rotten bunch from which I had to choose.
Why wouldn't they be rotten if misbehavior brings no punishment?
point in favor of intelligence, but evidence that intelligence isn't worth much without imagination?
That.
Unless you have staggering amount of intelligence at your disposal, what you need is a decent amount, like, more than the average, for sure but no need to exceed the top 10%. After that, a lot of other factors matter. Imagination, for sure. Grit/dedication/ambition, absolutely. Social/political skills, very much so.
... if you want to be conventionally successful.
Do you actually want to be governor of California? For myself, this is a job that I am completely unqualified for (including residency requirements), would have no aptitude for, and which is a lot of work for not much reward. If I had the option of definitely becoming California governor, I would turn it down, so I certainly wouldn't campaign for the office.
Not much reward!
Even if you go full Calvin Coolidge and don't do ANYTHING with the influence that you suddenly have, you're going to be absolutely inundated with perks. You won't be able to buy your own meals, your own drinks, your own tickets, for the friendly lobbyists swarming around (a friend-of-a-friend is a lowly State House Rep, and it's bad even at that level).
But say you have an iron will and you mightily refuse every gladhand; you STILL retain the option, for most of the rest of your life, to go give a $25,000 speech any day of the week. Any day, forever, even if you're not good!
That option is MUCH REWARD, if you ask me.
That'd only last for a few speeches before they realize I'm a super boring speaker and I only want to talk about civic planning.
$50k for marginal amounts of effort on your part is still pretty baller tho
They don’t pay you for a good speech. They pay you so they can say “the governor spoke at our event”. And also because they imagine it will lead to some sort of positive influence their way, someday.
I assume that I'd get recalled almost immediately if I became governor, once people found out what my actual policy positions were, so my influence wouldn't be worth a lot.
Holmes, there is nothing that you or I or any politician can say in a speech that is worth any $25,000, much less the sums what the real players get.
The "speech" is a figleaf. The speakers are paid surely not to talk, but to listen.
And even more, to be favorably disposed toward those who paid him.
The perks doen't seem to be much reward given that you 1. become a public persona 2. are suddenly responsible for everything that's wrong with CA. I'd rather pay for my meals and have a better life.
One figures the novelty of having 'the non-politician who was briefly an unsuccessful Governor of CA' giving speeches would wear out pretty quickly, how many $25k speeches would you expect to give? If >50 then I guess this starts being appealing.
I might not know what to do, but I think I am smart enough to identify people who do. I'd just contact them (eg the list would include Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen) and basically just do whatever they tell me to do
While your Covid policy would win worldwide plaudits with Tabarrok and Cowen your reinstatement of prohibition might cause some controversy.
Reinstatement of prohibition?
Seriously, Cowen is a teetotaler but that is a personal choice. Considering his libertarian leaning I doubt very much that he would want to /impose/ a prohibition on alcohol. Maybe he would want more "nudging" against it, though.
I would be more worried about his open border tendencies. And even that I would expect him to be somewhat pragmatic about it, as he is about everything else.
Not a bad choice, in my humble opinion.
Alcohol taxes. The late Mark Kleiman always insisted they were way too low given the amount of damage caused by drunk people.
I'm not so sure that the California Democratic party's logic was unsound here. If a legitimate democratic candidate did run, the chance that the recall succeeds is inevitably higher (there may be people who don't want a Republican replacement, but who'll vote yes on the recall because they don't like Newsom and are hoping for the sane Democratic replacement). But, the chance that the recall succeeds also raises the chance that we end up with Larry Elder as governor.
This is essentially what happened during the 2003 recall. Democratic politician Bustamente campaigned on "No on recall, yes on Bustamente", ended up getting 30% of the vote, and that's how we ended up with The Terminator as our governor.
This supposes that lots of people voted for recall specifically because they wanted Bustamente as governor instead of Davis. Is there much proof of this? It seems unlikely, especially since Recall won by 10 points.
I phrased that badly. To clarify, I find it unlikely that many people voted for recall because they wanted Bustamente as governor, and even if a few such people existed, they are unlikely to have swung a 10 point result.
There were a lot of people who really disliked Gray Davis. Up until the last month, I was considering voting Yes on the recall because I disliked him so much, and would have preferred Bustamante or Arianna Huffington.
Would you prefer Kevin Faulconer to Newsum?
It's been 7 years since I lived in California, so I haven't looked into this. I've disliked Newsom for my entire adult life, ever since he pulled in the national Democratic leadership to campaign for him against the Green Party alternative in the San Francisco runoff election, on a platform of removing funds for homeless people. But I've also never particularly liked San Diego Republicans. So I would need to study to know for sure.
I probably wouldn't prefer Faulconer to Newsom, but it's not out of the question that, if Faulconer were leading the polls in the race to replace Newsom, I might not worry so much about how the first question went.
Unlike 2003 there is no Arnold in this field unifying the Republican vote. 30% would be very likely to win in this field.
One of the few challengers to the California Democratic Party's level of incompetence is... the California Republican Party. One-party rule is corrosive, nationalizing state politics is bad strategy, and the brain drain by federal offices is real.
This really annoys me as Californian (really, expat still registered to vote in California). New England has moderate state level Republican parties who can be voted into power when the Democrats screw up. The California Republican Party is as conservative as the national party and filled with weirdos. And it's self-fulfilling, since they never win statewide races they can't attract good candidates. I'd love to vote the California Democrats out of office, but not when the alternative is Larry Elder.
What do you have against Larry Elder? He's a libertarian, not a conservative, and I plan to vote for him.
I'm a big fan of the Canadian system where provincial and federal parties are completely different things and you can be a provincial Liberal and a federal Conservative or vice versa and no-one thinks twice about it.
But I have no idea how it gets there.
David Schleicher has blamed the lack of partisan competition in urban politics on people choosing their party loyalties at the national level.
https://volokh.com/posts/chain_1228735775.shtml
A bit different from state vs federal, where I know it used to be common for people to retain old party loyalties at the state level even while voting differently for national politics. I wonder why we've gone a different route from Canada.
I don't really know. Some Canadian provinces don't even have some parties, for instance British Columbia has the NDP and Liberals, but no Conservatives (federal Conservatives are mostly in the BC Liberals).
My suspicion is that Canada is largely to do with the Reform story. The main right wing party in Canada until the 1980s was the Progressive Conservatives. In the east (Ontario and the four Maritimes), it still is. But in the west (BC and the three plains provinces), the Reform Party arose as a party to the right of the PCs. At the federal level, they merged into the CPC in 2000-3. All four of the western states had their own separate versions of this, BC had Social Credit, which collapsed as a result of corruption scandals in 1991 and that resulted in everyone on the right joining the BC provincial Liberals to try to defeat the NDP provincial government (classic Duverger's Law creating a two party system). In other states a broad party of the right got formed - similar but different from the CPC - like the Saskatchewan Party or Alberta's "United Conservative" Party. Only in Manitoba has the PC brand survived in the west (in part because the Manitoba Liberals became very right wing in the 1970s, pulled in all the people who would form Reform elsewhere and then collapsed in infighting with the more leftwing federal-type liberals).
In the Maritimes, the provincial parties still match up with the three federal parties (provincial PC with the federal CPC, plus Liberals and NDP).
Quebec is obviously different, but it has been ever since the rise of the first nationalist parties in the 1970s.
Its not due to Reform per se, but does reflect an aspect of Canadian politics that American politics has evolved away from, that its a system where parties can and do die and get replaced by new parties. So even if you start with the same two major parties at the Federal level and in each of the 10 provinces, the situation evolves in each jurisdiction and changes accumulate with time.
I highly doubt someone will win question 2 with just 30% of the vote. In the most recent poll (YouGov), Elder was polling at 23%. But 45% of respondents said they either wouldn't vote on that question or were unsure. If you only count the respondents who chose a candidate, Elder is polling at 42%. For comparison, Schwarzenegger got 49%. And I imagine as the election approaches more people are going to coalesce around the front runners.
By this logic, should the Democratic Party *still* be telling people to leave the replacement slot blank, so they're screwing up now? Or was the optimal strategy "tell people to vote for the backup candidate, but make sure the backup candidate sucks so they'll vote not to recall"? That seems... not totally implausible, but I doubt it was anyone's plan at the start of this process.
It's better to have a simple message so people don't mess it up. Telling people to vote for Pathraff would likely lead to people getting confused and a net lose in votes. Plus, he's an idiot who shouldn't get near the governor's office anyway.
I took the Democratic strategy as a sign of the local power of Newsom in California politics as much as anything else. The best strategy for the Democratic party might be to run an amazing candidate who could easily trounce any Republican running. That strategy almost certainly destroys Newsom (as you add the people who want the new D candidate to the people who dislike Newsom and they easily vote Yes to removing Newsom).
If Newsom were not very powerful in California Democrat politics, someone would have identified this possibility and tried to run as a powerful D or at least recruit a popular D to run. That he could remove all valid D competitors indicates that almost no one was willing to step out of line against him.
Then it sounds like the pragmatic best strategy is for the party to find an acceptable replacement, throw Newsom under the bus, and campaign on "Yes on recall, Yes on Nice Guy".
Why are they so wedded to Newsom? Presumably he does have very strong connections and allies, but why are they so gung-ho for him and nobody but him, and hang the public?
This seems to be a feature of the current political climate. Or maybe it's been around forever and I'm just noticing it?
A state Democratic Party with some common sense would think "hey, Newsom is kind of damaged property at this point, let's find someone better and run them". As you said: yes on recall, yes on nice guy.
A state Republican Party with some common sense would realize "hey, Trump-supporting candidates will never win statewide office in California, let's grit our teeth and run a moderate".
But nope, we get Newsom vs Elder.
I can't explain it. Maybe personalities are bigger than parties? Maybe something to do with modern primaries? I really don't know.
Larry Elder has said nice things about Trump in the past, but at this point seem to be trying to reject identification as a Trump supporter. Probably prudent.
I have to admit that I haven't looked into the recall candidates as much as maybe I should. (Or maybe I shouldn't... this election isn't really making me love anyone on either side, and I'm not convinced that spending time researching the candidates will do me any good.)
But anyway, as a pragmatist (I'll probably never love CA politics, but I have to live with them), I guess I'll count this as progress. If CA Republicans are willing to acknowledge, even implicitly, that association with Trump will hurt them, I suppose that's a good step.
I expect they believe, correctly, that it will help them in a Republican primary, hurt them in a general election. But California has a weird primary system, which may make the first irrelevant.
Larry Elder supports school vouchers and reduced regulation of construction, which strike me as important pluses, although given the legislature I wouldn't count on his succeeding in doing much.
As I see it generally the smaller a political party gets, the more ideologically rigid it gets. Evaporation of a solution concentrates it -- all the less rigid people who were just barely attracted into the tent leave, and what's left consists of the more hard-core people. Furthermore, when the party is generally shrinking, its focus tends to be on retention of who they still have, not recruiting people further from their remaining core. So they have "inreach" instead of "outreach," circular-firing squads, harsher tests of group loyalty, et cetera.
It all sounds dysfunctional, like it would accelerate complete evaporation, and I would say often it is and does -- but not always. The motivating belief is usually that by stripping down to a core group that is more ideologically pure, they acquire a degree of clarity and forcefulness in their messaging (no need for a ton of asterisks to mollify coalition partners on the fringe) that improves it for a future audience. Then, they count on some stroke of luck, change in circumstance, or massive screw-up by their enemies bringing that clear message to a big audience that is abruptly more receptive, and Bob's your uncle.
There is some historical precedent, e.g. I would say Reagan did *not* modify his message between his years as California governor and the election of 1980. Indeed, he rather purified it and moved if anything further to the right, which is probably why he didn't come close in 1968 and 1976. But the mountain came to Mohammed, so to speak, and when Carter immolated himself and took down 1970s liberalism with him in 1979, Reagan was ready, with a purer message that resonated strongly with the passions of the moment.
Newsom was up like 17 points before Delta hit and will probably still win. So much monday morning quarterbacking here, except the team hasn't even lost yet.
The problem is that Newsom didn't actually do anything that any other generic Democrat wouldn't have done (including the French Laundry thing, similar such "scandals" have happened repeatedly, all over the nation).
For them to openly endorse Yes on Recall implies that Newsom did do something wrong. But what? It'd be a huge sign of weakness and set a really bad precedent for the future.
You need something like an Andrew Cuomo style "20 women accuse you of sexual assault" level scandal, that is uniquely individualized to the person in question, to convince a party to turn on one of its own who has maintained the party line without fault.
This is a good point. I don't particularly like Newsom, but it's useful to be reminded that he's probably not much worse than any of the other Democrats.
That is entirely the problem for politics everywhere. "Yeah, he did this dodgy thing, but they're all doing it and he's no worse than anyone else".
It gives people very little recourse when they're angry, and their elected public representative can't in fact be shifted because, well, this is how the sausage is made.
The pragmatic strategy (endorsed by the LA Times) if were able to get enough people to agree on it is (No, Faulconer). It looks like we might fail the prisoners dilemma by not promoting it enough to be a Schelling point, even around here.
I think the way this works is that every politician has his personal groupies, or retainers, people who are faithful to him personally for whatever reason. Then there are party groupies, who are faithful to whomever is the most powerful party politician at the moment. When you win an election for governor, personal and party retainers merge, and that's your governing coalition.* While you govern, some party retainers may become personal retainers -- indeed, every politician hopes for this, and usually sends some favors their way to encourage the transition -- or, if you're a screw-up, personal retainers may become more distant from you and become mere party retainers, ready to abandon you if a better guy comes along.
If Newsom loses, by definition the Democratic party loses all his personal retainers, who will stick with their guy (and usually dislike the party for not having sufficiently supported him, the way Trump fanbois depise the "RINOs" who they think did not sufficiently support Trump). That weakens the party. If there has been the normal conversion of party to personal retainers while Newsom held power -- if he was a competent governing politician -- then the party is weakened by that extra amount.
The only way this doesn't happen is if (1) a fair amount of Newsom's personal retainers converted to merely party retainers lately, meaning he was a crappy feudal lord, and (2) whoever Newsom's replacement is comes in with at least as many personal retainers, so party strength is preserved. That's certainly possible, but usually it requires an unusually inept candidate -- "unusually" because he did, after all, win the previous election, so he has to have made serious missteps in the recent past (or got elected in the first place by wild luck).
----------------
* By "retainers" I don't just mean individual employees or voters, but also interest groups that are generally beholden to you on a somewhat personal basis, e.g. the late unlamented Gray Davis had a special relationship with the prison guards union, they were in some sense a member of his personal entourage.
I disagree strongly. The best strategy is to cast the recall in partisan terms. Trying to be clever and thread the needle is a recipe for failure.
I'm not sure about that narrative. The 2003 recall voted out Davis by a margin of 55.4% Yes to 44.6% No, and according to CNN's exit polls, only about 3% of votes voted Yes/Bustamante, which doesn't come close to making up the difference.
The 2003 recall was also very unusual in California in that the two major Republican candidates (Schwarzenegger and McClintock) combined for 62% of the vote, 6.6 percentage points over the Yes vote on the recall and almost 20 percentage points over the Republican performance in the state in the 2000 (41.7%) and 2004 (44.4%) Presidential elections. And per the exit poll, 18% of Democrats voted for Schwarzenegger and 6% voted for McClintock.
My read is that while Bustamante was a decent replacement candidate on paper, he and Davis were both unusually unpopular Democratic Party candidate in the actual election, while Schwarzenegger and McClintock were both unusually popular for Republicans in California. This is borne out by the favorable/unfavorable numbers in the same exit poll: Davis's job approval was deep underwater (26% approve, 73% disapprove), as was Bustamante's favorability (37% favorable, 58% unfavorable), while both Schwarzenegger and McClintock had net-positive favorabilities (51%-47% and 55%-37% respectively).
Data: https://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2003/recall/pages/epolls/governor.html
Also, partisanship is extremely strong nowadays. Not running a Democratic candidate greatly strengthens the "Republican recall" message in a state where there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans.
His ex-wife... has done a lot worse than date Donald Trump Jr.
(I don't recommend reading this)
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-history-of-kimberly-guilfoyles-departure-from-fox
Which raises the question of whether his having married her should be taken as evidence of his incompetence. A large part of the job of a top level executive is evaluating other people in order to decide who to hire, who to have do what.
I'm much more confused about what Donald Trump Jr is doing with her. She's not quite old enough to be his mother, but she's too old to be his stepmother.
On the other hand, the fact that she's his EX-wife could be a point in FAVOR of his ability to evaluate other people!
Not having a good alternative to Newsom seems bad. However,
1) Having a legitimate backup to Newsom might get some people who would normally vote "no" on the recall to vote "yes." Voters aren't super rational so if a high profile, reasonable Dem is running, you might get more "yes" votes even if they make it way more likely Larry Elder is elected.
2) At least some people think this is what happened in the 2003 election: https://www.kqed.org/news/11870960/should-a-democrat-run-in-the-newsom-recall-we-asked-cruz-bustamante
Thanks, I've added this to the post.
Yeah, but if you give people a choice and they go "We want the new guy", isn't that more indicative of a problem with Newsom/the Californian Democrats than "the public are irrational"? Maybe they're not being fair to Newsom, but if I ask you for tea and you give me coffee on the grounds "No, what you really want is coffee", I'm still going to be dissatisfied no matter how good the coffee is.
Sure, but that means that there is a problem with the voting system. If people whose preference is new Democrat > Newsom > Larry Elder have no effective way of casting a vote that expresses that preference without a high risk of helping Elder, then that's a problem.
One option would be that the new candidate has to get more votes than the No vote in the first question (ie count the No votes as votes for Newsom as the replacement)
Well, politics. Choice of the lesser weevil usw. One needs to practice gratitude that you weren't served dog piss, and that coffee is a lot closer to what you really want than most other random brown liquids.
I think voters may be sensing that someone named "Patrick Kilpatrick" would be at risk of suicide.
yessss
I resisted the urge to make that joke!
Great minds think alike. And so do we.
I can imagine the chanting at rallies...
"KILL, PATRICK, KILL"
I posted something similar but saw this post and it is better -- removed my original :)
> if you don't have diminishing marginal utility to power, a 10% chance at the California governorship looks fantastic.
Does it?
If you, a random guy got elected as governor, what are the chances you'd be able to accomplish anything that you really wanted to?
I get the impression politicians are all actors in this insanely complex system which depends heavily on human relationships, that literally nobody is in charge of. The power any one politician has (i.e. their ability to influence outcomes) stems far more from the relationships they, and their ability to build and manage those relationships, than anything else.
Being governor of california sounds like being CEO of a giant money losing non-profit, stuffed to the gills with ambitious people who'll all be trying to trick you into doing what they want. It's not like the state government is some chess board and the governor gets to move pieces around. I'm beginning to think that measuring power with a number is kind of silly, and instead it's like, we're playing chess in 10 millions, and being made governor only amplifies a certain kind of power you must already possess in order to do any thing.
If you end up somewhere 'above your pay grade' then i'd be the most likely outcome is you have no idea how to appoint, who to trust, who's trying to screw you, or how to do things like build a consensus around your objectives, so that the end result is likely that you just become hated for doing nothing, as rivals for your power successfully trip you up and get the media to blame you for failing.
That's kinda how I felt about Schwarzenegger. He had reasonable policy goals, but had zero idea how to build the political capital necessary to move the state even the slightest bit toward those goals.
Didn't he manage to do a couple things? I know that he at least had one training-wheels accomplishment, with getting some after-school-care ballot measure passed the year before the recall.
Then there's the much more fun National Enquirer style hypothesis, that he was caught boning the maid much earlier, and the Kennedys neutered him as the price of their silence.
The bull being wild and rabid doesn’t mean you can’t ride and whip it with the right gear and skill
There are still presumably people who aren’t career politicians but have the experience and friends necessary to do something with such a position. But I am curious why they didn’t
Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina should have held out an extra decade before trying to make their jump into politics.
I think both were way above their Peter Principle level as CEOs, so it's just as well they flamed out in politics, for the sake of their ultimate reputation. Now we can all say "oh what might have been!" without some ugly reality of what actually was making us sad.
As a libertarian, I'd be happy to just veto stuff all day long. I'm unelectable in the first place, so I have no reason to not do the right thing in the first place.
As nice as that sounds to people against the standard California Democrat stances, the reality of that approach would be the legislature overriding vetoes all day long. The better approach would be to use the bully pulpit and standard politics to promote better options and convince/shame the legislature into making better rules. That takes connections and support, which puts us back to square one of making it useful to be governor.
Vetoes take extra time. And every minute they have to spend running through the veto process is one minute they can't spend wrecking new things.
I mean, yeah, you can obstruct to a certain extent. You might also tick off the legislature to the point that they streamline the override process and just start passing crazy things even faster.
This sounds accurate.
Donald Trump is the perfect example of this. He had no idea how to manage the massive bureaucracy, his subordinates resigned when asked to do harmful or illegal things, and he wasn't that successful in implementing his agenda. When he did get things done they were things that mainstream Republicans wanted like conservative judges and tax cuts.
He couldn't even get things done which were clearly legal and within his power. Cancelling DACA seems like an obvious no-brainer, but the Supreme Court wouldn't even let him do that.
Not to mention a Team R with solid majorities in both houses of Congress.
For a guy who was supposedly a wannabe dictator, Trump couldn't get a Team R Congress to repeal Obamacare, much less fund The Great Wall of Ignorance.
For nearly eight years, Team R railed against the evils of Obamacare. Then, when they had solid majorities in both houses of Congress and a Team R president, no more talk, no more excuses, they couldn't get it done. Pathetic! (and I say that as one who sees Obamacare as perhaps the best that a late-stage oligarchy would able to accomplish under the circumstances and considering entrenched interests involved).
I don't think Obamacare was ever that important to Trump. Just something to bash the last guy over. Any minor tweak and he could declare victory.
Well, the USMCA was basically NAFTA with a few tweaks. But Trump couldn't even do that with Obamacare, after Team R railing against it for years.
The individual mandate got zeroed out, but I can't remember if that happened under Obama or Trump.
"couldn't" get it done? Republicans used to put up symbolic votes against the ACA all the time. The instant they got power, they lost interest in repealing it. What could this mean other than... they never really opposed it, they just wanted their base to see them opposing it.
Performative rage.
Pretty much this.
Finster's Second Law: no matter how cynical you think you are, the people in charge are way more cynical than that.
Glad to see I'm not that alone in having this opinion of him. Trump's greatest weakness as a politician, which I think also runs all through his career, is his complete inability to hire and keep the loyalty of a cadre of competent subordinates. Even people who were ideologically very close to him, and had strong personal reasons for wanting to stick with him, ended up hating him. He must be a complete asshole as a boss. As long as he can make things work as a one-man operation, or a Messiah directly preaching simple sermons to a million groupies who don't really know him and aren't expected to be active lieutenants managing his army, he does OK. But as soon as he tries being captain of a ship, something about the way he interacts with them makes his entire bridge crew revolt and start shooting at each other, and then the ship runs into the iceberg while the 2nd Officer is trying to strangle the navigator.
> He must be a complete asshole as a boss.
After decades of work, he still runs what is essentially a small family business. He can't keep any talent required to run a business with thousands of employees. (Nearly every business that jumps to mind when people see "Trump" on it is actually the name being licensed out.)
It works out as a pretty solid move if you're a cynical asshole who doesn't care what other people think, but I don't think there are very many people who genuinely think that way.
This; as part of my job I work a lot with relatively senior people at a fairly wide range of companies, and one of their most consistent complaints is an inability to accomplish their goals. At first I thought this was false modesty, but the more I see the more I'm convinced that most large organisations actually run on a model closer to an ant hive or school of fish than what the org charts tell you.
“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
There's a story, maybe apocryphal, maybe not, about a particular head of the US federal exective branch who had zero executive experience. When confronted with the bankruptcy of a certain very large automaker, one who made a bunch of cars no one wants to buy, this newbie exec looked at how well Honda Civics were selling and asked 'Why can't they just start making something like a Civic?'
I don't know if it actually happened, but it certantly sounds right to me, both on the part of the newbie exec not understanding that you can't just pick up your pen and phone and make an org change because your name plate says so, and because I've seen enough large orgs to know that some types of change are just outside of the realm of the possible.
There is a story which is straight from the horse's mouth about a certain very large automaker who hired a famous and highly qualified executive for the specific purpose of driving much needed reforms. A couple of years of ignominy and failure later, that executive said that the only people in the whole company who wanted any reforms were the people who interviewed him for the job.
<i>4. Californians are lucky Peter Thiel isn't a Democrat, because his mind is minmaxed for spotting opportunities like this, and you can bet he would have gotten involved here if he could have.</i>
I keenly remember when Thiel was going to influence Trump to pick all these awesome contrarian technocrats and instead he picked a bunch of mediocre hangers-on and FOX commentators.
And I note his current pet project, JD Vance, has approximately 100% name recognition from blue checks and 10% name recognition from Ohio primary voters, who are flocking to the established local actual-crazy-guy over a Yalie who left the state after college and wrote a book about how shitty it was but is now pretending to be crazy.
Mandel isn't actually crazy, just pretending. But, yeah; Vance's campaign is ineffectual to the extreme, and is extremely unlikely to fail because he is, in fact, substantially to the left of Mitt Romney.
Did you mean "extremely likely to fail"?
Yeah.
I don’t think Vance is to the left of Romney? What do you mean?
An article that paints him as ... not that: https://t.co/0TFIANPQVN?amp=1
Honestly speaking, I have seen nothing but hot air from Vance. What I personally would want to see is what specific proposals does he have, how will these proposals result in concrete and material benefits to the average frustrated Ohioan, and how does he plan to implement these proposals.
Instead, all I hear is vague talk of values and families, which is all well and good but tells me nothing. That in turn to me is a signal that, if elected, Vance is going to act just like any other replacement-level Team R politician, with perhaps a slightly different rhetorical cast.
Okay, you fascinate me strangely. Why is Mandel crazy? His Wikipedia article doesn't tell me much, apart from him having a few failed runs at campaigns and being involved in the usual political storms in a teacup over election campaigning re: calling your opponents names, pretending you did X, Y and Z, and repurposing money/resources to personal use.
What did he do that is particularly nuts? Or is it just his positions on abortion, gay rights, and climate change you are referring to?
"Abortion
Mandel is anti-abortion.
Health care
Mandel has called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. In a campaign advertisement during his 2012 Senatorial run, Mandel claimed opponent Sherrod Brown "cast the deciding vote on the government takeover of health care". Politifact has labeled as false the claim that Brown cast the deciding vote for the act. The description of the act as a government takeover of health care, by Mandel, has been labeled by Politifact as "nonsensical" and a "myth".
Environment
Mandel rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has referred to climate change research as "riddled with fraud" and has vowed to fight attempts to advance clean-air standards.
Mandel has called for what he terms as "aggressive and responsible" energy exploration that protects "the air we breathe and water we drink" while reducing environmental regulation. He supports the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Mandel is a supporter of expanded coal plants and has criticized what he has termed as "radical" environmental groups.
LGBT rights
Mandel opposes same-sex marriage, saying in 2012 that he will "protect the sanctity of marriage" and "this is a fight that I will never, ever back down." He is against openly gay people serving in the military, and voted against workplace and housing discrimination protections for gay and transgender people in 2009.
Foreign policy
In 2012, Mandel said that he disagreed with plans to set a "date certain" for withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, also stating that "at some point in time, we have to take the training wheels off and we have to allow those countries to stand on their own two feet."
I call him "crazy" because of how lockstep he is. I don't call someone crazy just for supporting Trump, I call them crazy if they backed 100% of the stolen election bullshit. I don't call someone crazy for opposing Democrats, I call them crazy if they can't stop calling Muslim Democrats "Hamas spokesmen." I don't call someone crazy for being skeptical of some COVID measures, I call them crazy if they oppose 100% of them, even those proposed by their Republican governor.
8 hours ago he tweeted "masks are a form of child abuse." This, to me, is crazy.
Okay, that's an explanation, thanks.
People who grew up in southern Ohio don't have any illusions that it's not dirt poor and dysfunctional; I don't know that him writing a book about his ugly background is going to alienate him with the locals. It's like when an old Jewish guy cracks a joke about Jewish mothers: he gets away with it because he very well knows whereof he speaks.
> Maybe you should actually be scared of the California Democratic Party and its demand that no Democrat stand as a replacement for Governor Newsom? I think this makes sense if you want a future career in California state politics; probably they can blacklist you forever if you cross them. But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath. That’s why we would have been able to take this weird opportunity that all the real politicians turned down. Also, given the level of competence they’ve shown here, having the California state Democratic Party out for your head is probably the surest path to a long and healthy life.
This is the key part, IMO. The opportunity is only desirable to people who want power within the Californian political system, but the costs are higher on those who... have a career engaged with the Californian political system. Without disputing that there surely are people whose expected value exceeded Paffrath's, I'd bet the candidate space is fairly small. Maybe a few thousand people or so?
Even smaller when you realize that Angelynne and Gary Coleman and various other B-or-lower-list celebrities already made their run 18 years ago (but Caitlyn Jenner had to wait until this time).
Not that Coleman could run again this time anyway of course.
"But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath."
But the thing is, suppose you get a candidate like Joe Average, stand-in for Newsom, with party backing (just about, as they really want Newsom to survive). What are my positions? What are the issues I care about? If elected, what will I do? (1) Niceness in general (2) Nothing much past keeping any crazies from polling better than Newsom (3) Warming the seat until the Democratic Party picks a real candidate it wants to run.
Out of a bunch of similar "who the heck is that, I never heard of him?" runners, why should the long-suffering people of California pick you over, say, "Oh, that's that guy off Youtube? The one who dressed up as an elf?"
I would think most sane Democrats who don't want to see the state burn would go NO / Faulconer.
He's not some rando vanity candidate - or a far right loon. He was the mayor of demographically diverse, largely safe and orderly, San Diego - probably the best run city in California.
Which makes it even more hilarious that he's polling so low.
My theory is the normie California managerial class sees a "R" next to the name and is immediately revolted, and the more sophisticated politicos think that he would have a much better shot at re-election than any of the other meme candidates.
I know some Democrats who say that Faulconer is the best candidate, but that in the unlikely event that Dianne Feinstein ever dies, the governor will choose her replacement, and a GOP governor would choose a GOP replacement, and flipping the Senate to the GOP would be really bad.
In my state, the appointee must be of the same political party as the person they're replacing. But I guess that's not a thing in California.
Given how California normally operates, I'm sure you can get a ballot initiative to fix that if the governor ends up GOP :)
Is the California GOP really that crazy? I seem to remember GOP-led California being pretty well managed in ye olden days, but I suppose being the minority party can make you weird, and ever since the Trump nomination I guess I have no idea what to think about the Republican party anymore (and I'm a Republican.)
I think there's a theory of base-level competence, which the leading party in whatever state has to meet. The lights need to stay on, the garbage needs to get picked up, etc. Is the California GOP up to that level of competence?
(My personal opinion of Newsom is mostly formed by being downwind from California and having our air quality suck all summer. And all last summer. And the summer before. Yes, climate change, etc., but fix SOMETHING.)
There's some sane CA GOP politicians in Orange County and San Diego (Faulconer), but on the state level much more insane than places like MD, VT or MA. Their only platform is really lower gas taxes and hardcore NIMBY. Better policies than Dems on crime and law and order IMO, but that takes a backseat to the other bad policies.
It's actually interesting how deep blue places like MD/VT/MA have decent Republican parties while places like NY and CA have insane GOP. I don't know what the commonality here is.
My theory is that Republicans in MA, VT, and MD are more moderate is because those are all small states with relatively evenly distributed populations. Just like conservatives on college campuses, they're forced to be more moderate, polite, and accommodating in order to avoid being cast out of their social and professional networks as a pariah. Republicans are both statewide and local minorities.
Contrast this with California and New York, large states with extraordinarily pronounced urban/rural divides. Republicans in California may be heavily outnumbered statewide, but dominate in the communities they actually live in. The interior of the state is, in many ways, as hardcore Red Tribe as anywhere in the country. There's no real incentive to moderate because Democrats don't really travel more than 20 miles inland unless they're driving to Vegas or the mountains, and they're always going to lose the statewide elections anyway. My understanding is that New York (and other states, like Virginia and Oregon) has a similar dynamic, but I'm not familiar enough with up-state politics to state with any confidence.
This also makes me wonder if the same happens in reverse. It makes intuitive sense to me that a Democratic Party in a rural state based mostly around a handful of isolated college towns would be more extreme than a Democratic Party that's forced to interact with a GOP majority in more mixed, suburban environments. But, having lived in big blue cities in big blue states all my life, I don't have a strong sense of red state dynamics
I think I agree with all of that except:
"they're forced to be"
First of all - not sure if that's referring to the politicians or the general populace - but either way, I'd think it's much more likely that they're actually more moderate, not just putting on a fake "front". I don't think Charlie Baker is secretly a MAGA populist.
Fair enough. Forced may be too strong a word. I'm mostly speaking from my own experience as a right-libertarian on college campuses. I often felt the need to present myself as more moderate and agreeable than I really was. I wasn't nefariously lying about my true intentions or anything, but the incentives acting on me certainly had a significant effect on how I expressed my politics publicly. And now that I'm living and working in an environment much more in line with my personal beliefs, I've noticed I'm not quite as good at "reaching across the aisle" as it were. It feels like those skills have atrophied from less strenuous effort.
Native Upstate New Yorker here. A couple of decades ago, New York Republicans were largely sane and decent at governing, and popular upstate. Now, the usual pattern is Democratic local politicians in the cities, and the Trump base in the rural areas around them. There’s broad awareness that nobody at the state level gives Upstate much thought, which is probably why Trump’s support was as strong as it was.
The new Gov is from Buffalo - first upstate governor since FDR - but my friends who still live there don’t expect much from her.
Zach, some people are claiming that Newsom actually had some role in causing the fires by cutting fire prevention budgets. https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-they-blame-heat-deaths
How much did he cut the fire prevention budgets in Siberia?
Ok but don’t come crying if that attempt at 4D chess gives you Gov. Larry Elder.
Or just have a party with the balls to tell / beg / convince / bribe their grand old dames to step down when they have a chance to choose their own replacement (*cough* RBG *cough*)
>the unlikely event that Dianne Feinstein ever dies
Why, because of all the adrenochrome she drinks?
She might get caught out in sunlight, or she might loose track of the earth from her native town when her coffin is being shipped to DC, might get tricked into going to a beach and end up counting all the grains of sand. Lots of possibilities, really.
An H S Thomson reference? The reader base of ACX continues to surprise me.
Unfortunately the term has spread much wider than Thomson's readership recently... https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-dark-virality-of-a-hollywood-blood-harvesting-conspiracy/
Oh boy. Didn’t know it was part of the baby eating Democrat business.
Also a running ACX joke from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-august #5
Couldn't agree m ore.
Americans have the government they deserve.
Yes this is correct. NO on general principles, and Faulconer as the clearly most qualified candidate. This will be my vote as a reasonably left-libertarian California.
FWIW my wife is a staunch Democrat and voted NO/blank as she did not care for any of the replacement candidates.
Glad to see there's some convergence in this [stag hunt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt) mess of a ballot. I'm kind of floored no one has fixed the process since the 2003 fiasco.
As a Californian progressive, this is exactly what I did, since Paffrath seems like a piece of shit NIMBY, and if we're in the alternative where Yes wins, then there are more Republicans than Democrats voting, so the only real choices are Republicans. On a side note, this recall needs reform so badly.
If people think Paffrath has that good a chance of becoming governor, I'll offer them 12:1 odds. I'll accept up to $200. (As an assurance that I'm trustworthy, I work at the Future of Humanity Institute, and my colleagues would expect me to honor bets like this, and if I didn't pay, you could ruin my reputation by informing them.)
Why don't you just use Polymarket or Omni or any of the crypto betting sites out there.
I think he wants to demonstrate that he's pretty confident that Paffrath doesn't have much of a chance which makes Scott's argument not as strong if true.
His is not significantly different from Scott's, though. 12:1 and 10% chance are quite similar.
Yes, good point. Not an astounding difference.
But he's not saying 'I believe the odds are 12:1'; he's saying 'I will offer you 12:1'. It makes sense that he'd try to get the best odds he can. 12:1 might just be a number chosen to sound tempting to somebody who believes it's truly 9:1.
I don't think he has a chance of becoming governor, but I do think he has a good chance of picking up a lot of disaffected people who want to send a protest vote message to the local party: we're not recalling Newsom but we want you to take us seriously.
This reminded me to check who won the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York and yep, it was Eric Adams, which did not surprise me at all.
Back when everybody was running and Yang was topping the polls, I figured that the voters would go for people they knew, people from local government or otherwise, and when it came down to Adams and Garcia, this was in line with my expectations.
Same way with Paffrath; I think Newsom *may* squeak past the recall, but I do expect Paffrath or some other 'random' candidate to chalk up a lot of votes as people want to express dissatisfaction with both Newsom's governorship and how the Democratic Party are treating them re: not permitting any other candidate to run with party backing.
I would think that most people voting for Paffrath are actually your standard-issue MSNBC-watchers who think that voting No on recall, and then voting for the guy with the D after the name is how you show loyalty to the party.
This doesn't really say anything because scott's argument is roughly as strong whether paffrath has a 5% chance or a 10% chance
Yeah, conditional on the recall going through, it's virtually guaranteed to be Elder. Paffrath will only get a subset of Democratic votes.
Is Peter Thiel really so ideologically attached to the Republican Party that he wouldn't have switched party registration to run? It seems like he totally could have run, so either he didn't see it or it wasn't worth it to him given the controversy it would stir up.
Probably meant that he wouldn’t win as a Democrat, given supporting Trump. He does have two friends as senate candidates up an running now, (Vance and masters) suggesting he is interested in political power
Thiel likely has no appetite for running himself but there certainly wasn't anything stopping him from bankrolling some ambitious state legislator.
The question is whether Peter Thiel can find anyone that he trusts to implement sufficiently Thiely policies. The overlap between "smart enough to agree with Peter Thiel on everything" and "dumb enough to want to go into politics" has to be pretty small.
No "ambitious state legislator" will run because doing so as a Democrat will automatically kill your career.
I think if you're as well-known as Bloomberg or Thiel, switching parties to run in the easier lane doesn't really help - everyone always knew Bloomberg was basically a technocratic Democrat, and everyone already knows Thiel is a weird Christian libertarian Trumpian Republican. In Bloomberg's case, changing lanes helped because there was a formal Democratic primary and a formal Republican primary, and the Republican primary was easy to win. But in Thiel's case, there is no formal primary, and putting a D after his name was just going to make the wolves bay even louder for his blood rather than pick up many votes.
Thiel would be an awesome choice if only to see what to does to stop Girardian mimetic violence, sacrifice Trump maybe?
I think he doesn't really crave the limelight, and has far too weird a demeanour to be electable. Far too smart too.
Switching parties might work if you stick with it and are a loner. Trump was a centrist D like D-Richard Gephardt until the 1990's, made the usual 'the party left me' switch, ran and governed on D-Gephardt's platform. And you could read Matt Braynard's pretty solid claim that the level of 2020 election fraud was higher than the margin of D victory.
I don't believe that Trump governed on a Gephardt-style platform. At least, the bill that is usually pointed to as the largest legislative accomplishment of the Trump era is the tax bill of 2017, which seems like it was very un-Gephardt-ian. (Perhaps the explanation though is that this bill was driven by Congress, and the distinctively Trump endeavors were things like tariffs and immigration policy, which probably were much more consonant with Gephardt.)
"At first, the hearing went smoothly for Braynard, who has the professional presentation of a data specialist. But then came state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democrat from Atlanta. It turns out she had been doing her own research. Citing an exhibit filed by Braynard that listed people who had voted but who supposedly had registered in Georgia and another state, she pointed out that several names were duplicated on the list. Then she said that she had looked up the first 10 names on the list and had found eight of these people listed in Georgia property records as residents. She reached one of them on the phone, she said, and he confirmed that he lived and voted only in Georgia. Nguyen said she verified this person’s voting record.
Taking another name from this list—a woman allegedly registered in Georgia and Arizona—she confirmed this person’s residence and voting record in Georgia, and she found another voter with the exact same name listed in the Arizona voter rolls, born in the same year but with a different birth date. She also identified another person on the list in a similar situation: same name, different birth dates.
In rapid-fire fashion, Nguyen continued on. She turned to the Braynard list of voters who he said had registered with postal boxes “disguised” as residences. She recognized one of the addresses as being around the corner from her home—a condo complex with a FedEx center on the first floor. (Some apartment buildings use a postal box-like system for their addresses.) A friend in the building sent her a list of residents of the complex. They were all on Braynard’s list, she said. And the same was true, she had discovered, for another condo complex with a FedEx center. On her own, she said, she had discovered that 128 names on this list—more than 10 percent of Braynard’s total number—were errors."
Yeah, looks solid alright.
Where is this from? If you work somewhere you'd be fired for reading anything but D media, you could still read Charlie Peters' anecdote about how D-Daley's machine stole Illinois in 1960- 1) let the other guy vote first so you know how much to fake, 2) then raise the dead and print more ballots. The 2020 amateurs needed a suspicious pause between these two, but Daley was a pro.
So you literally have no evidence of fraud in 2020 then?
For now your censors haven't deleted Matt Braynard https://lookaheadamerica.org/wisconsinreport/.
There are laws about that in California - you can't run as a party member unless you've been in that party for something like 12 months. (Too lazy to look up details, but that's the idea.) 12 months before the filing deadline, the recall wasn't really on anyone's horizon.
The election is rigged
Wow, already? My, the deep state does work fast, doesn't it?
/s
Fast, effective and efficient.
Oh wait...
Can we elect *them* governor? They're starting to sound pretty good compared to Newsom.
You not only can, but you will!
Just wanted to say, LOL
My wish is that a close election shakes up the smug complacency of California Democrats.
The state is like a one-party mandated country, but unlike somewhere like China, government officials don't face any consequences for poor outcomes. China fired hundreds of local officials for poor COVID response for example. In California you can be a corrupt grifter and really nothing happens.
Take crime in California. The numbers are relatively middle of the pack vs. other states, but I recently did an analysis where I looked at county by country crime rates adjusted for demographics and income, and virtually every county in CA dropped to the very bottom / worst.
Was it the income or the demographics? It's a high COL state, so I'm not sure if that gives you apples-to-apples. Is it on GitHub?
A country like China has the benefit of a standard or common conception of what constitutes good governance. It's hard to call it "incompetence" when your government makes a conscious decision to prioritize decarceration.
We really need to break the stranglehold of national parties on state and local politics. California needs a pro-development/pro-housing party and a slow growth party, that both align with Democrats at the federal level, but that contest state and local elections, and maybe even both run candidates for federal office with separate subscripts after the D (the top-two jungle primary system in California makes it easy to do this kind of thing).
The problem is that without two actual local party lines, you can't hold primaries, and run one candidate on each line, and actually figure out which direction the voters prefer (or let the factions figure out where exactly to split the difference to get half of the voters on each side). I remember in the Los Angeles race to succeed Villaraigosa, I eventually did support Garcetti, but it was a bit hard to decide between him and the two other Democrats that qualified for the four-candidate debates. And I suspect the situation for London Breed in San Francisco would be a bit clearer if the Board of Supervisors had a clear party split in her favor or against her.
Could expanding the “jungle primary” to non-federal positions in California help with that?
It might. Newsom's first election (at least, the first one I heard of him in) was a runoff for San Francisco mayor, where he faced off against the Green Party candidate. I don't recall what triggered the runoff there, since it was not a federal office (and the federal jungle primary law didn't exist yet anyway, I think).
I still think it would be more helpful to make the factions more explicitly clear, so that we know whether there are specifically two factions, or specifically three, and so that we can be more sure whether electing this candidate or that one to city council or county supervisor will help or hurt the mayor in their goals, rather than having to read the tea leaves of what people are saying in their campaign ads, and what is hovering just below the surface.
If you want to demonstrate the anti-crime backlash, recall Chesa Boudin, not Newsom.
I consider "went through a competitor's office dressed as an elf and giving out flowers" a pro, not a con.
Imagine a future were antics like this are necessary for political influence. People criticize the other candidates as "boring"
I see your point, but such antics take creativity and independence, which are probably better qualifiers than blind obedience and adeptness at ass-licking and character assassination.
Expert level: Imagine a possible future where antics like this AREN'T necessary for political influence.
I'm already working on a novel where the dominant party is 4chan's "troll party", and the Church of GME is the biggest lender...
In a world where they're necessary, it doesn't take creativity and independence, it just requires you to hire some PR firm that makes up crazy stunts for you to do.
For me, it depends. Keebler elf or Tolkien elf? I like both well enough, but for very different reasons.
I was just about to post the same thing ! We need more elves in government. Perhaps then we'd finally get something done, even if it's cookie-cutter environmental policy :-)
I find it interesting that the strategy of the party that calls themselves Democrats was to intentionally limit the choices available to voters. Doesn't seem very (little d) democratic to me.
It turns out that two patriotic-sounding names picked from the same descriptor "Democratic Republic" over a hundred years prior convey very little info about the actual policies of their respective parties
Indeed. I wonder how many of the members of those parties could even adequately define the terms that underlie their names....
I mean, party primaries have a long and established history within political parties with all sorts of democratic ambitions, despite their role in intentionally limiting the choices available to voters in the general election.
I don't think your comparison really fits the situation. There's a world of difference between whittling down a field of many contenders and attempting to dissuade the rise of contenders in the first place. The former is meant to give voters a choice, whereas the latter is meant to not. Certainly there's plenty of gaming the system that occurs, as well as times when there aren't any real primary challengers, but the point still stands.