We all know that California is in a Depression—even Hollywood productions are fleeing the State. The Dodgers played the World Series in Dallas and the Rose Bowl moved to Texas. Oracle, HP and Musk have left—and I am getting a haircut tomorrow, secretly via three knocks on a door. That is how we live in California.
A church in Simi Valley is only allowed ten people, including the Minister, while the local grocery story, 200 yards away is allowed 460 people. Newsom did not lose California, he gave it away.
California is running so low on oxygen that officials are telling emergency crews to conserve supplies. Ambulances in Los Angeles are backed up outside emergency rooms, sometimes for hours. And the coronavirus vaccine distribution remains so disjointed that a freezer failure that forced immediate inoculations of hundreds of people in Northern California — inmates, older people, and some people on the street — was hailed as an improvement.”
But he was able to send his children to private schools and eat at the French Laundry, while you were ordering take out from Taco Bell. Newsom gave away the State.
‘It’s all fallen apart’: Newsom scrambles to save California — and his career
The Democrat leading the nation’s biggest state is facing a raging pandemic, vaccine distribution problems and a nascent recall drive.
By DAVID SIDERS and CARLA MARINUCCI, Politico, 1/11/21
LOS ANGELES — California is running so low on oxygen that officials are telling emergency crews to conserve supplies. Ambulances in Los Angeles are backed up outside emergency rooms, sometimes for hours. And the coronavirus vaccine distribution remains so disjointed that a freezer failure that forced immediate inoculations of hundreds of people in Northern California — inmates, older people, and some people on the street — was hailed as an improvement.
Californians are frustrated, tired and sick. And in the midst of the unfolding catastrophe, Gov. Gavin Newsom — confronting a burgeoning recall effort, on top of a year of wildfires and civil unrest — is under siege.
“Nobody has been dealt a tougher hand than Gavin Newsom,” Gray Davis, the former California Democratic governor who was recalled in 2003, said in an interview. “Look, I had the energy crisis and a recession. He has a pandemic we haven’t seen for 100 years. He has the fallout from that pandemic, racial injustice, wildfires, and I think I’m leaving something out. But nobody, no living governor, has had to experience as many crises as him.”
Halfway through his first term, the Democratic governor of the nation’s most populous state is scrambling to control a pandemic that has crippled the southern half of California since Thanksgiving. The pandemic has given Republicans, long sidelined in this heavily Democratic state, a rare opportunity to wound him. And Newsom is laboring to keep the state — and his own political future — intact.
“People are really pissed off,” said Ted Costa, the anti-tax crusader who was the original proponent of the Davis recall. He signed Newsom recall papers last weekin the parking lot of a Home Depot in Thousand Oaks. “Things can get hot quick, and I don’t know if Newsom realizes what happens when a groundswell hits.”
For Newsom, an ambitious Democrat with a national profile, the extent of the problem is unclear. The last Republican to win a gubernatorial election in California was Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that was nearly 15 years ago. When Newsom won the governorship in 2018, he carried the state by nearly 24 percentage points. His public approval rating last year stood at 60 percent.
Yet the pandemic has worsened in recent weeks. And the frame of reference through which Californians view Newsom is about to change dramatically when Joe Biden replaces Donald Trump in the White House. No longer benefiting from a reliable foil in Washington, the bar of public approval for Newsom — and for Democratic governors across the country — is likely to be raised.
“For the last couple of years during Newsom’s tenure, people have been saying the nation’s going in the wrong direction and the state, compared to the nation, is going in the right direction,” said Mark Baldassare, a veteran pollster and president of the Public Policy Institute of California. Now, without a Republican president to judge Newsom against, he said, “It certainly changes that point of contrast.”
Newsom has met the surging virus and its economic fallout with a series of proposals intended to help the most vulnerable Californians and to get schoolchildren back into classrooms. Last month, he proposed a $2 billion effort to reopen elementary schools for the state’s youngest students, with additional protective equipment and testing. Earlier last week, Newsom proposed giving the state’s low-income workers $600 “rapid cash” grants. And in a boon for his political fortunes, the state’s budget, despite dire predictions, is so healthy that Newsom released a budget proposal on Friday that calls for record spending while adding billions of dollars to the state’s reserve accounts.
But good news has been rare in California, and Newsom has not been without blunders. He came in for a drubbing after attending a dinner party for a top political adviser at the upscale restaurant The French Laundry — a liability not only because Newsom enjoyed his night out as he was discouraging Californians from gathering for the holidays, but because the location was so posh. Californians who might otherwise have stopped mocking him for that episode weeks ago have only had more reason for frustration amid the pandemic’s worsening conditions.
“In the city of Los Angeles and in our county, Covid-19 is now everywhere and infecting more people than ever,” the city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, said at a grim news conference on Thursday night.
Garcetti, a Democrat who has come under public pressure similar to that facing Newsom, has blamed the federal government — not the state — for delays in vaccine distribution. But Newsom is facing criticism from others for being too slow to distribute the Covid-19 vaccine, something the federal government has left up to states.
“I don’t think Californians can understand why we have hundreds of thousands of doses sitting there, and they’re not being administered,’’ said Garry South, a Democratic strategist who advised Newsom’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign and was a senior adviser to Davis. “California’s been through nearly 10 months of hell, and now there’s potentially a light at the end of tunnel with these vaccines — but it doesn’t do anybody any good if they’re not administered.”
