California, You Blew It Again
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/15/california-you-blew-it-again/
Not only did California Gov. Gavin Newsom survive the recall election, the vote margin was tilted so far in his favor by Wednesday morning that he’s likely to see the results as a mandate to issue another round of harsh pandemic rules. What is certain is that he will consider it a signal to press the Blue State agenda that’s made California a miserable experience for so many.
Recalling a Democratic governor in a state where roughly twice as many Democrats are registered to vote as Republicans was always going to be a nearly impossible task. At one time, polls indicated Newsom could be ousted. It appeared a chance to climb out of the wreckage had arrived. But in the final poll that matters, voters changed the narrative. On the morning after, results were showing 64% said no to the recall, only 36% said yes.
It wouldn’t be loco to think that Newsom is now going to seek revenge on those who voted to remove him. A likely place to start is to put California back under a tight and unforgiving pandemic lockdown regime even though it had never fully escaped Newsom’s iron fist over the summer. If not for the heat he felt from the recall polls, the life-has-been-handed-to-him governor would have surely reinstated the freedom-robbing policies he had ordered in 2020 after the Delta variant arrived in June.
There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, Newsom’s constituents are supportive of lockdowns, mask mandates, and government-required coronavirus vaccinations, while those who voted to rid themselves of this meddlesome prince of privilege were hungry for the liberties he’d so cruelly taken. Now he’s free to punish those who dared challenge him, and will do so with the gushing approval of the affluent progressives of California who are his most ardent supporters.
The recall effort began before the pandemic, but Newsom’s rules – and high-profile hypocrisy – fueled it. The governor himself wildly and irresponsibly said the recall election was ”a matter of life and death.” He was primarily referring to the possible election of radio talk show host Larry Elder, the runaway leader as the choice to replace Newsom in the event a majority chose yes on the recall question.
Elder represented the shrinking number of Californians who know, not just believe, that freedom is important. After years of a persistent pummeling of their rights by government, they were quickly drawn to support a candidate who said if he was elected, he would repeal “right away” any “facemask mandates and vaccine mandates,” should they remain.
“Then I’ll break for breakfast,” he added.
Newsom’s “reelection” also ensures that California will continue to be hostile to businesses, break the middle class’ back with taxes, and waste precious time and resources imagining that it can impact the climate. Fire, drought, and blackouts will be allowed to ruin a once-golden state, housing and just plain daily living will grow ever more costly, and the homelessness problem will remain unresolved.
Under another year of Newsom, and probably four more after that, the well-documented flight of companies and residents will accelerate, leaving California with an hour-glass economy made up of the extremely rich and the desperate poor, the latter forever serving the former. Apparently that’s exactly the sort of society Democrats inside and out of California want.
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