The President Nobody Needs

Finding someone, anyone to replace the increasingly senile Joe Biden is becoming more urgent. Not only do Democrats need to find a replacement for Biden, but they need to do so without offending those who continue, despite all the evidence, to see Kamala Harris as an acceptable candidate.

Rising to the top of the replacement list is California governor, Gavin Newsom. Surely, he wants the job. He might have failed as governor of California, but he and his supporters do not think that that will be too much of an impediment. With the media spinning like mad, before you know it Newsom’s California will be a great success story. Whatever problems it might have will be placed on the account of one Donald Trump.

In the meantime Joel Kotkin, a Democrat himself, just wrote an article where he called Newsom the “president nobody needs.” A nice turn of phrase, if I may say so.

Kotkin says that Newsom has become an object of desire for disaffected Democrats, for Democrats who are afraid that Joe Biden will lose:

For many Democrats, Gavin Newsom has become an object of desire. Aged 55, the Governor of California’s relative youth, coiffed good looks and ability to speak in something close to coherent English contrasts with their bumbling leader, whom as many as two in three Americans feel is not entirely up to the job. As a result, the chorus calling for Newsom to become America’s 47th President has been growing steadily louder.

Amazingly, and reasonably, Kotkin then casts a cold eye on the Newsom record. He emphasizes that it’s not worth running on:

Yet Newsom’s sparkling ascendency might dim somewhat if the media bothered to consider what is actually happening in his fiefdom. Flicking through the mainstream press, one could be forgiven for realising that Newsom has presided over California’s fall from economic pre-eminence: the Golden State is now home to record homelessness, sub-par GDP growth, the nation’s highest poverty rate, a tech downturn fuelled by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and a consistently underperforming public education system. These factors have fuelled a powerful out-migration trend — up 135% in just two years. Recent polls find upwards of 40% of residents are considering leaving, while the rising tide of wealthy emigrees has already taken away $20 billion in adjusted income since 2018.

If the record is abysmally bad, one needs to run on issues involving gender and racial politics, on abortion and Black Lives Matter. That is, on emotional manipulation.

Today, Brown’s successor is far more concerned with issues that interest the gentry Left: gender and race politics and, most critically, climate change.

Newsom likes to attack Florida and Texas, but his stewardship of California is vastly inferior to the governance that Republicans are bringing to those other states:

Newsom would have to explain why his state lags behind those, such as Florida and Texas, that he routinely attacks — but which enjoy large budget surpluses, rising tax revenues, generate more jobs and, in some cases, are initiating tax cuts.

And Kotkin emphasizes the important point. Namely, that Democrats are incompetent at governing:

Here, Newsom’s dilemma reflects a wider weakness of the current crop of Democratic Party leaders — a consistent record of poor governance. This applies not only to Newsom, but to Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, both of whom are widely pitched by Democratic operatives as possible Biden replacements.

Large cities are even worse:

Yet arguably the worst examples of poor Democratic governance are found at the municipal levels. Democrats control virtually every big city, the majority of which are suffering both economic and demographic decline. Once-celebrated cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis are all largely run by progressives. In every case, the biggest losers from this kind of one-party rule are the very people that progressives seek to champion by adopting the ideology of “anti-racism” and affirmative action. Over the last decade, Los Angeles actually lost foreign-born residents, who have been flocking to the very sunbelt metros — Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Miami — that Newsom likes to caricature as “racist hellholes”.

So, our politics has become a personality contest. It has valued good looks over good governance. The Democratic Party in particular cannot put forth any candidate who can run on having done a good job while in office. Surely, that is a sobering fact. 

Until they can find presidential candidates with a positive record of accomplishment, their only option will be to campaign largely on cultural issues — particularly if faced with someone other than Trump. The economic argument, after all, has already been lost. 

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