Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an interesting aspect of a recent West Coast candidate debate.
About an hour and 44 minutes into this week’s debate among seven candidates for governor of California, the moderator asked a question that he said had been sent in by “Henry in San Bernardino.” It said, “Governor Newsom made several high-profile commitments, such as addressing housing affordability, reducing homelessness, and improving public safety that some Californians feel remain unmet or insufficiently delivered. What concrete accountability mechanisms would you put in place to ensure that your own commitments are not just announced but measurably delivered within a defined timeline?”
The question underscored an awkward reality for the six Democrats on stage and for the party as a whole. The Golden State governor, Gavin Newsom, is near the top of polls for the 2028 presidential nomination. He has an autobiography, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, scheduled for publication in just a few weeks, on Feb. 24, that is already bringing a burst of press attention. Vogue is warning middle-aged women readers: “He is embarrassingly handsome.”
Yet after seven years with Newsom as governor, California is still suffering—not only from the problems Newsom got elected originally trying to fix, but from others that he has helped create along the way.
“We have the highest poverty rate in the United States of America,” said a former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. “In our cities, we’ve had too much crime.” Villaraigosa said the state had spent $24 billion supposedly combating homelessness, “and homelessness went up.”
“Let’s face it, the cost of gas is high,” acknowledged the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond, another Democrat running for governor.
If Newsom does end up as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028, his opponents in the primary and general elections could make a pretty good attack ad just showing six other Democrats talking about what one of them, the mayor of San Jose, Matt Mahan, called “the brutally high cost of housing” and “the obvious failures of our policies to address homelessness.”
