Recall: California's Governor Faces the Music

The pretty boy of San Francisco politics, Gavin Newsom, is facing a reckoning: are his staunchest, long-time believers successful in convincing those on the fence to keep him in office, or has a long list of failures as governor come to haunt him?

Newsom has risen from member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (our city council), to mayor, and now governor. Along the way, he used his charm and gruff voice to rally his democrat party voters to victory. His positions on controversial matters such as gay marriage earned him a place in history.

During the Trump presidency, Newsom focused on pushing back against his administration at every chance possible, earning him further points along the way. But since Biden is now in the White House, and here in California the state government (and local San Francisco city hall government) is occupied by the various flavors of Democrats and even socialists, there is little case to be made that Trump nor remnants of Trump are anywhere to be found in governance to justify influence nor blame.

And yet, this is exactly what Newsom and his supporters are doing.

Governor Newsom is facing a recall. Along with elections, impeachments, appointments and resignations, a recall is one component of a healthy democracy. Voters choose a candidate for office, and voters have a chance to remove. It’s a publicly-participatory impeachment if you will.

Our golden state of California has been hurting for years, and yet under Newsom’s administration, we’ve seen a marked increase in failures. Businesses fleeing, homelessness and crime spiking, taxes climbing and fires burning so much of our pristine forests and our homes.

Newsom deserves much of the blame, as he’s failed to lead in preparation for fire and electrical grid disasters, ignores the plight of homelessness and drug addiction, and spent much of the past year pointing the finger at others – mostly the rival political party and at the ghost of a president past.

Newsom and allies in democrat party leadership used to scream Trump at every opportunity to defect blame; lately, when criticism is made against the governor, the knee-jerk rebuttal is to call the accuser racist, Trumpian, and more recently, “White Supremacist” , even when the critic is black or Asian. Adding further insult, the leading contender to replace Newsom is Larry Elder, an African-American conservative who’s been labelled a “black face of white supremacy.” Vile indeed.

Such slanderous accusations have become so commonplace to be boring, as very little in San Francisco or California state politics can currently be blamed on Trump nor on conservative supporters. A “supermajority” of city mayors, city council members, state legislators, the governor, attorney general and more, effectively prevents any republican initiative (or pushback against policy, by a republican) to have any effect at all.

Tuesday, September 14, 2021, is the deadline for voting in Newsom’s recall. Voters in San Francisco will cast ballots against a recall, this is clear. Governor Newsom is very popular in this city, even with so much crime, homelessness and drug dealing, failing education, high taxes, businesses leaving and tourism down.

Regardless of the humanitarian crisis right in our midst, when the tally becomes official, we should expect to see Newsom survive his recall in an overwhelming fashion, at least here in the city. After all, the Bay Area is the birthplace of hard-core, counter-culture and prominent figures in politics such as Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris.

They’ve all come out in support of Newsom, as has the local Democrat Party itself. So have the biggest names in Hollywood elite, actors, singers- of course, these are some of the least affected by the decline in the California quality of life. President Biden is also now making an appearance to bolster support prior to the deadline. Will it help in the end? Time will tell.