Mainstream Media Outlet Celebrates Biden's Plan to 'Make America California Again' By Joe Saunders
Published January 18, 2021 at 1:51pm
Only days before the inauguration of a new president, this might be the last message the country wanted to hear but the one it needed to see whats coming.
After four years of the relentless, in-your-face optimism of President Donald Trumps motto of Make American Great Again, citizens of the greatest country on earth are being advised Trumps successor wants to Make America California Again.
Californias largest newspaper might think thats great news. For the rest of the country, it sounds like a confirmation of everything Trump supporters spent the election and its aftermath fighting against.
The headline came from Sundays edition of the Los Angeles Times:
Make America California Again? Thats Bidens plan.
The piece by Evan Halper, a Washington-based writer for the L.A. Times, harkened back to a time when California really was a national leader. As Halper wrote, an incubator of innovation, premier laboratory of democracy, land of big ideas.
Its safe to say thats not the image most Americans have of a perennially fire-stricken region thats better know for its reputation for liberal insanity than anything particularly admirable these days. Nonetheless, Halper described a host of reasons the now-tarnished Golden State will serve as a beacon for President-elect Joe Bidens administration, not least of which is his Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris.
Harris, of course, is a soon-to-be former California senator who got her unseemly start in politics as a consort to California heavyweight politician Willie Brown in the early 1990s, when Brown was the powerful speaker of the state Assembly and Harris was an assistant prosecutor.
Though Brown was married at the time, the relationship was no secret. As SF Weekly reported in a 2003 piece that was sympathetically written about Harris:
Harris met Brown in 1994 when he was speaker of the state Assembly. She was 29, he was 60. Their May/December affair was the talk of the town during the year before Browns successful 1995 bid to become mayor. But shortly after he was inaugurated, Harris dumped Brown, a notorious womanizer.
The fact that Harris rose from that relationship to be Californias attorney general and eventually a United States senator who decided to run for the presidency before completing even one Senate term says a lot about California politics.
Of much more importance, the fact that Harris was forced to drop out of the crowded Democratic presidential primary in December 2019 before even a single vote was cast or caucus attended says a lot about her appeal even among her own party and about how well California politics go down in the rest of the United States.
She was selected by no one but Biden. Her qualifications are somewhere between slim and none. Yet through an accident of genetics primarily her gender and skin color Harris is just one bad day for Biden away from holding the most powerful position in the world.
But Harris isnt the only symbol of how the Biden administration will Californicate the country for the next four years.
As Halper points out, California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a Congress soon to be under Democratic control.
There is no place the incoming administration is leaning on more heavily for inspiration in setting a progressive policy agenda.
The dismal news continues: California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a man with a soft spot for illegal immigrants and a hard heart against Second Amendment rights is Bidens nominee for the secretary of Health and Human Services.
Bidens choice for Treasury secretary is Janet Yellen, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, possibly the most left- wing campus in a radically left university system, who also has picked up more than $7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street since leaving her last government position as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve in 2018.
If California is known for anything besides radically leftist politics, its the abyss between the extraordinarily wealthy and the very poor. A 2020 report by the World Population Review put California fourth in income inequality in the U.S., behind the liberal bastion of New York, its neighbor Connecticut (of course) and Louisiana.
And if California is known for anything besides left-wing politics and Third-World style wealth-poverty gaps, its the states commitment to sacrificing its economy on the altar of climate change.
As Halper notes, the rest of the country should get used to the idea of Californias draconian energy rules including an envisioned ban on gasoline-powered engines, and a commitment to the demonstrable bunkum ideals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement Trump walked away from becoming at least part of the national conversation, and even national policy.
The idea of an administration so open to Californias fads was not well received in conservative quarters.
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Poster Comment:
This story is really juicy and shows how Harris clawed her way up the ladder.