Right climate for Democratic risk-taker

One of Washington’s favourite parlour games these days is guessing whether Joe Biden will seek a second term in 2024. He says he will, but doubts persist. A number of factors could influence his decision, including his age on election day (he’d be two weeks short of 82), the balance of power in Congress and the volatile state of the world.

Gavin Newsom has pursued progressive policies that are all but non-starters in Republican states

The obvious follow-up question: If not Biden as the Democrat nominee, then who? The same question is facing Republicans if Donald Trump, who would be 78 on election day, defies expectations and declines to try again. Factions in both parties are clamouring for younger leadership, and potential candidates in both parties await firm and final decisions.
For Democrats, there’s no obvious front-runner. That includes Vice President Kamala Harris, who has not won universal acclaim as a president-in-waiting. Republicans on the other hand do have a clear favourite in the wings, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Both parties have other would-be contenders, who have either sought the office before or have expressed interest should an opening arise. And, like Barack Obama prior to 2008, there may be an unknown plotting a meteoric rise from relative obscurity.

So let me throw out a name of someone who has not been part of the conversation but has acted as if the White House may be on his bucket list.

As governor of California, the nation’s most populous and most Democrat state, 57-year-old Gavin Newsom has pursued progressive policies that are all but non-starters in Republican states and in Washington, where compromise is a dirty word. His ability to do so is the natural byproduct of a legislature run by Democrats for all but one of the last 52 years. Currently, they hold 60 of 79 seats in the Assembly and 31 of 40 seats in the Senate.

Further, Newsom swatted away a pesky recall effort last year, winning 62 percent of the vote to stay in office, and faced re-election this month with no threat of losing. With such rare political tailwinds, Newsom has spent the past year strengthening California’s environmental and reproductive rights laws as a bulwark against conservative policies in other states, a few led by governors with their own presidential aspirations. No other Democrat leader has governed so aggressively and successfully as Newsom.

“He’s acting in the way you’d expect for a Democrat who’s leading the largest state in the country,” said Raphael Sonenshein, Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “There’s a vacuum in the Democratic party that he is starting to fill. As soon as you start to fill it, you see the Governor of Illinois (J.B. Pritzker) who also has national ambitions jumped in as well. It tells me there is something to that missing spot.”

As federal lawmakers have struggled to reach compromise on climate change legislation, never advancing as far as progressives would like, Newsom pushed through initiatives that go well beyond changes in federal policy, including a plan for the state to reach carbon neutrality by 2045.

The most ambitious measure is requiring all new cars and light trucks sold to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035, a target designed to cut carbon emissions in half by 2040, eliminating 395 million metric tons, the equivalent of 915 million barrels of petroleum. According to the governor’s office, combined with other measures, this will enable the state to create four million jobs and reduce oil use by 91 per cent.

“Each of these actions on their own are monumental steps to tackling the climate crisis,” Newsom said. “But California isn’t waiting a minute longer to get them done. We’re taking all of these major actions now in the most aggressive push on climate this state has ever seen because later is too late.”

Newsom has also strengthened abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court removing them at the federal level. He approved posting billboards in seven Republican states with abortion restrictions, inviting women who need one to come to California. He also trolled their governors, announcing the billboards in hashtagged Tweets. “The people of Mississippi deserve to know they have access to the care you are refusing to provide,” said one aimed at Tate Reeves, Governor of Mississippi, where the state law banning abortions after fifteen weeks was the vehicle to strike down Roe v. Wade.

How would Newsom’s politics play more widely? Not well with Trump supporters or even moderate Democrats. It obviously depends on what Biden decides although it’s no secret that growing numbers of Democrats want a change, and younger ones want dramatic change.

“Throughout the country within the Democrat party there is a hunger for a more offensive, less defensive strategy in the political arena,” Sonenshein told me. “Newsom has been meeting that. In a Democrat party that’s always afflicted with terminal caution, a little bit of risk taking can go a long way.”

A day not to remember

Presidents’ Day has been a U.S. national holiday since 1968, celebrated on the third Monday of February. This year, the second Thursday of October was the opposite kind of day, one focusing attention for all the wrong reasons on the two most recent presidents.

The incumbent Joe Biden was slammed by ill-timed grim economic news that provided gourmet talking points for Republicans just weeks before Congressional and statewide elections. With inflation and the economy as the major influences on how people vote, this new government data was helping them decide.

The Consumer Price Index – the chief measure of inflation – showed the annual rate of price increases through September had reached 8.2 per cent, the highest annual increase in 40 years. At the same time, successive increases in prime lending rates pushed 30-year mortgage rates to more than double the 3.0 to 3.25 per cent they were just a year ago, a fire hose effect on home buying. Sales in October dropped for a seventh consecutive month. The stock market has dropped more than twenty per cent this year.

Even against more favourable indicators, like record low unemployment and moderating gas prices, the rising cost of food and services hit consumers more directly, providing all the rationale needed for undecided voters to view Republicans more favourably.

Biden has done what he can to focus on other issues, like the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on abortion, and how the extremist faction in the Republican party threatens American democracy. Republicans, meanwhile, have made the economy and inflation their main campaign issue, bashing Biden and Democrat candidates 24/7 for the wrong-way trends. And why wouldn’t they? Anything to avoid talking about the ongoing travails of his predecessor. Which brings us to Donald Trump and his own Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Thursday – unusually so, even by Trump standards.

For the former president – who is expected to run again in 2024 – the bad news came from three directions starting with the latest and probably last public hearing of the House commission investigating the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol. This was effectively the panel’s closing argument as members reviewed each of Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The presentation was essentially a roundup of the eight previous hearings but compelling nonetheless for the degree of Trump’s persistence. Using video testimony of Republicans close to Trump, the panel showed how he knew immediately that he’d lost, but then used dubious tactics to hang onto power. These culminated in his role in the Capitol attack, the intent of which was to stop Vice President Mike Pence from certifying Biden as the winner.

The evidence showed Trump proclaiming victory while votes were still being counted, urging an end to vote counting when he was ahead early, losing 61 of 62 lawsuits in battleground states over bogus claims of fraud, pressuring officials in Georgia to “find 11,780 votes” (the number he needed to overturn Biden’s victory there), ignoring warnings that many within the Capitol mob were armed with deadly weapons, disparaging Pence by Tweet at a time when rioters were screaming “hang Mike Pence” (and even erected a gallows), encouraging supporters to submit alternative, pro-Trump slates of “electors” for certification and watching the Capitol assault on television for more than three hours without doing anything to stop it.

“There is no doubt, none, that Donald Trump led an effort to disrupt democracy,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, chairman of the commission. “He is the one person at the centre of the story of what happened on January 6.”

The hearing ended as the nine members voted unanimously to subpoena Trump to testify and provide key documents. A day later, he responded with a rambling fourteen-page letter to Thompson, under the headline, “THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN.” He repeated many of his debunked claims of fraud and accused the panel of selective emphasis, ignoring, for example, the size of the crowd that came to hear his rally speech on 6 January or investigating left-wing groups like Black Lives Matter. Calling the panel’s work “the Crime of the Century,” he neglected to say whether he would submit to the subpoena. Whatever happens next, including the possibility of criminal charges, depends on the Department of Justice.

While the Thursday session was underway, the Supreme Court dealt Trump another blow, in a one-sentence order denying his request to gain access to the 100 or so classified documents seized at his residence over the summer, some believed to reflect top-secret material that rightfully belongs in the National Archives. And the third development came from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who filed a motion to block Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization, from transferring corporate funds to a new business entity to avoid paying any future damages in a fraud conviction. A month before, James sued Trump and his business for misrepresenting assets, a tactic she claimed continues. “Today, we are seeking an immediate stop to these actions because Mr Trump should not get to play by different rules,” she said. It was a statement that pretty much summed up his day.

Michael Janofsky is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He previously spent 24 years as a correspondent for The New York Times