Opinion | California's recall election is a chance to end the state's cycle of dysfunction - The Washington Post

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Most of California’s recall election ballots are expected to reach voters by early next week. Absent a cliffhanger, the election should wrap up shortly after Sept. 14.

Question One before the Golden State’s electorate: Should Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) be recalled?

Question Two presents a list of the 46 candidates who qualified for the ballot. If a majority of votes cast on Question One are “yes,” then the leading vote-getter among the 46 becomes governor (at least until the inauguration of whoever wins next year’s gubernatorial election).

There is a small chance that either former Republican congressman Doug Ose or Republican state Assemblyman Kevin Kiley could parlay a divided field into the smallest of pluralities. Doing so would take vast amounts of cash. That’s not impossible. This is the rare case where a Mike Bloomberg, a Peter Thiel or a Mark Zuckerberg could actually tilt an election. (None has indicated plans to do so, but part of any such plan’s success would be stealth execution until the moment of unveiling.)

Absent such an intervention, it has become a two-candidate race between former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer and my longtime colleague and friend Larry Elder. Best known as a veteran radio talk-show host, Elder is also a businessman, filmmaker and author. (Disclosure: Elder’s radio show is syndicated by Salem Media, which syndicates mine as well.) Elder is whip-smart, has a gift for sharp rhetoric and is a fellow University of Michigan Law School grad.

My thinking right now is that if Donald Trump loudly endorses him, Elder would win the plurality of votes but probably at the cost of Newsom surviving the recall. The former president is uniquely disliked in California. Effectively, Trump is Newsom’s best ally. If Trump tries to elevate Elder, it would actually hurt Elder. If the former president stays quiet, Elder should win the Question Two campaign and perhaps see Newsom lose Question One.

Faulconer, the former mayor, is as close to the middle of California’s political spectrum as has been seen in decades. If this state has a silent majority for calm, centrist politics and let-us-all-come-and-reason-together thinking or the old “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” shibboleth, Faulconer would own it. That’s a very big “if,” however. California tried buying tickets to that show with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003. Although “the Terminator” is still widely popular, the Schwarzenegger era’s best day was the day he won. You can’t govern from the center in California. The special interests will crush you.

I follow my former state’s politics closely, but we’ve also been back in Southern California visiting family and friends for two weeks. We left in 2016, part of the great decampment in which, for the first decade since the census began, California’s population declined.

That’s a sad commentary on the state of this state. So many Golden State refugees love California. Large numbers of them received great educations from terrific public schools, or their children did. Still, a staggering number of us fled. The economic reality is that if you don’t have to make your life on the Pacific Coast, you shouldn’t.

California is in the grip of a long-unfolding triumph of special interests and wealthy elites, a stultifyingly dense collection of reality-denying ideologues. The state is living on its seed corn, making promises it cannot keep, especially to public employees whose retirement funds are woefully short of what’s needed to meet pledged commitments.

California is a land of worsening wildfires, chronic drought, deeply fractured communities and growing radicalism on the left and right. Every city or town along the coast has smaller versions of the roughly 70,000 unhoused in the county (and city) of Los Angeles.

California’s once-magnificent higher education system still has Nobel laureates and remains a leader in many fields of the “hard sciences,” but liberal education is another story. Many faculties are so radical as to defy description in a dozen columns, yet anyone who follows the subject, even at a distance, wouldn’t argue the point. “Woke” is to this decade what the Jesus People were to the 1970s in Orange County and what rock-and-roll was to L.A. in the ’60s: ubiquitous and breathtaking in their self-confidence and ambition.

These issues were worsened by a pandemic as badly “managed” here as it has been anywhere. The delta variant of covid-19 threatens to lure school districts into more shutdowns because of militant teachers unions that have polarized scores of large communities. Newsom’s new mandate that all public school employees get vaccinated or tested weekly, while smart, is long overdue. It is now mixed up with the issue of obligatory masking of children in primary schools.

Newsom is at the center of all these storms. In recent days, his happy demeanor has cracked as he snarled at reporters asking obvious questions. Elder as the outsider or Faulconer as the competent moderate both seem preferable to the exponentially increasing dysfunction and conflict in this state.

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Opinion | California's recall election is a chance to end the state's cycle of dysfunction - The Washington Post
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