There is an old wildland firefighter joke.
Q: How does a smokejumper stop a fire in the kitchen?
A: He lights a control fire in the living room.
That, apparently, is the strategy California Governor Gavin Newsom is employing to stay alive during the recall. Newsom announced on Friday that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala “25A” Harris will campaign on his behalf in the upcoming weeks. The duo is slated for personal appearances and social media plugs.
Seriously, these two? I can hear it now from POTUS: “We’ve got to elect the guy to, you know…the thing. ‘Cause he touched my leg hair… zzz.” Cue the Kamala Harris laugh track. Newsom’s handlers would be better off getting their campaign strategy from a Bazooka Joe comic.
So the man who shuttered businesses and dined at French Laundry of all places amid the wineries he shut down (except, of course, his own), has turned most of his state into a giant homeless encampment—complete with needles and excrement maps—and raised taxes to a level normally occupied by the Big Dipper is calling on an administration that has overseen ballooning inflation, a massive influx of illegal immigrants, and a hike in fuel prices that could eventually rival the ’70s to save his backside? And that isn’t even a deep dive into the policies of the White House and Newsom’s office. Those are just the greatest hits. I could go on, but it’s the weekend and I have stuff to do. I won’t even get into the fact that the VP is about as popular as a tobacco spit smoothie.
Biden stated that Newsom “knows how to get the job done because he’s been doing it. And to keep him on the job, registered California voters should vote ‘no’ on the recall election by September 14 and keep California moving forward.” I am not sure that Biden or Newsom even know what “forward” means. Unless it refers to the direction California residents are moving after they shut the door on the U-Haul. After all, Team Newsom is even calling on Ice Cream Queen Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters to lend their voices, which raises the question as to whether or not the old-school Democratic Machine is in its death throes.
But who knows? It may just work. The governor is referred to by many former, and not a few current constituents as “Lose ‘em Newsom”—a fact to which I can attest as my neighborhood is up to its collective armpits in Golden State ex-pats. So anyone left who is not planning an exit strategy is a true believer or has their hands at 10 and 2 and their heads firmly at 6:30.
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