On the menu today: How often does the state of California give conservatives some good news? San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin is on his way out, Los Angeles billionaire Rick Caruso got the most votes in yesterday’s Los Angeles mayoral primary, there’s a Republican with an actual shot to win a statewide race, and the California GOP achieved something yesterday it hasn’t achieved in a decade. Meanwhile . . . aren’t you glad you don’t work at the Washington Post?
California Defenestrates Progressives
Do you want a reason to smile this morning? Voters in San Francisco — Nancy Pelosi’s backyard! Arguably the most progressive and hard-left big city in America! — overwhelmingly supported the recall of Chesa Boudin, the city’s radical district attorney, two years after he was elected on a platform that emphasized reducing the jail population and prioritizing “restorative justice.” The vote wasn’t even close — 59.98 percent for recall, 40.02 percent against.
Here’s a quick refresher, from the NR editorial calling for Boudin’s ouster:
For those in need of an introduction, Boudin is left-wing royalty. When he was 14 months old, his parents were arrested and convicted of murder for their role in the Brink’s armored-car robbery of 1981, which killed two cops and a Brink’s guard. They were members of the left-wing Weather Underground. He was raised by fellow Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Boudin temporarily served as a translator in the Venezuela Presidential Palace under Hugo Chávez.
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn! And you thought you would stop hearing about them after Obama left office. They are truly the radical Left’s gift that keeps on giving. NR’s editorial continues:
In 2019, with the backing of George Soros, he ran for district attorney on a platform of ending mass incarceration and cash bail, as well as paralyzing police under the guise of aggressively hunting for evidence of police misconduct. Upon taking office, he unveiled an even more radical agenda of de-emphasizing the prosecution of drug cases and property offenses. In the first year, he reduced San Francisco’s jail population by 25 percent. . . .
Boudin’s record reflects his deepest views. He sees the criminal-justice system and the police as the problem in the lives of criminals, and he views the public’s impatience with crime and its demands for justice and good public order as the cause of more evil than good. He is not just bad at the job, but unfit for office. His recall is a necessary precondition for improving life in San Francisco.
As Jeff Blehar acidly observed, “Alas, poor Chesa Boudin. I hear they’re hiring Brinks truck drivers, though.”
Politico summarized why this wasn’t just another district-attorney recall:
The result is likely to reverberate far beyond San Francisco. Opponents of criminal justice reform and Republicans seeking to depict Democrats as weak on public safety will likely cite Boudin’s rejection in a deeply liberal city as evidence that voters are balking at efforts to ease sentencing and reduce incarceration.
Progressive district attorneys took a fundamentally anti-policing stance on crime in America’s biggest cities, and even the most sympathetic populations of voters are concluding that it is failing them. At least on this issue, sweeping change is coming to America, even to its most progressive corners. I guess you could say that you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind — eh, you get the idea.
A little further down the coast, billionaire developer and relatively right-of-center voice Rick Caruso did not win the Los Angeles mayor’s race outright, but he got the most votes. As of this writing — with a frustratingly low 34 percent of precincts reporting — Caruso won 42 percent of the votes counted, while Representative Karen Bass, his Democratic-establishment-backed opponent, has won just under 37 percent.
Some political analysts on the West Coast foresee a simple Bass victory from here — she’ll emphasize that she’s the true Democrat in the race, paint Caruso as a not-so-secret Republican, and coast to victory on the strength of the city’s traditional liberalism. But I’m not so sure that the traditional Democratic playbook will be as effective in an anti-status-quo political environment, where long-simmering frustration is about ready to boil over. Caruso’s not a lock in November, but he’s got the advantage of the largest base of support right now, momentum, near-unlimited financial resources, and a very simple, resonant message: change vs. more of the same.
Meanwhile, competitive statewide races in California are rarer than hen’s teeth, and competitive statewide races that feature Republicans are rarer still. But yesterday in the state-controller race, the candidate with the most votes was . . . Republican Lanhee Chen, who has won 36.7 percent of the votes counted so far, and will now advance to a runoff against Democrat Malia Cohen, who’s won 21.4 percent. (The California state controller oversees and runs the state’s finances and conducts audits of how state agencies spend their money.) Chen is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a former adviser to Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, was a loud advocate for reopening schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, and has written for National Review a few times. Chen still faces an uphill climb, but in at least one statewide race this year, Democrats won’t have an automatic win.
Finally, in the last bit of good news for the right, there’s going to be a Republican Senate candidate on California’s general-election ballot this year in Mark Meuser. Don’t get your hopes up,as the governor-appointed incumbent, Democrat Alex Padilla, will still likely keep his Senate seat until he retires, dies, or goes senile — if Dianne Feinstein is any precedent, perhaps long after that last option. But under California’s jungle-primary system, the two candidates with the most votes, regardless of primary, go on to the general election. And there hasn’t been a Republican Senate candidate on the general-election ballot since Elizabeth Emken in 2012.
Ironically, the Post’s Woke Narcissists Could Use Some Collectivism
Are you ready for a dose of irony? The slow-motion car wreck going on over at the Washington Post — all spurred by a dumb joke that amounted to, “Women! They’re crazy, am I right, fellas?” — is driven by woke progressive staffers who are, by a certain measure, excessively individualist and insufficiently collectivist.
When you go to work for a company, you are signing on to accomplish a certain task, and agreeing to prioritize that task. If it’s the Acme Widget Company, your job is to help make widgets. If it’s the Washington Post, it’s to help cover news. Your employer is not running a therapy session. Ensuring that you feel good about your coworkers is not the company’s priority or mission. It has an interest in ensuring there’s no harassment, abuse, or behavior that is genuinely harmful to employees and disruptive to the company’s objectives. But it is not interested in making sure you’re friends with all your coworkers and every day is a virtual campfire gathering of holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.”
Sometimes, your coworker is going to say or do something that you think is stupid or offensive or irritating. When that happens, your job as an employee is to suck it up and focus on the task at hand or work it out yourselves, and if it becomes intolerable and irreconcilable, you’re free to move on to another employer. Almost every great achievement by a group — from Lincoln’s “team of rivals” to military special-forces units to innovative designers and engineers to championship sports teams — involves individuals on a team putting aside their differences, disagreements, and personality conflicts and focusing on the common goal. Teammates don’t need to love or even like one another, but they do need to respect one another.
You have to prioritize the mission over how you feel each day. That’s not repression or workaholism, that’s just human civilization.
Narcissism and collectivism don’t work well together; in fact, neither works well with much of anything, and some of us would argue that large-scale collectivism doesn’t work at all.
Josh Barro offered a funny and spot-on essay about this, asking if there are any adults left at the Post and observing that, “Airing internal workplace disputes in public like this is not okay, even when you are right on the merits. My statement isn’t just obvious, it’s how almost all organizations work. If you think your coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.”
What we’re seeing at the Post is several employees who are incapable of prioritizing the organization’s running smoothly over venting their spleen at every opportunity; in some cases, the behavior genuinely appears to be obsessive or compulsive.
A key question for employers is: If a potential hire gives off even the slightest whiff of this kind of uncontrollable exhibitionist narcissism and a desire to hash out all differences in the public square on social media . . . is it work the risk of bringing this person into your organization?
ADDENDUM: On yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, Greg and I discussed the upcoming prime-time hearings of the January 6 committee, and I said that the second hearing is scheduled for Monday, June 13, which puts it in direct conflict with game five of the NBA Finals. That conflict is no longer an issue, as the second hearing is now scheduled to start at 10 a.m. Eastern on Monday. But I forgot to mention that the first hearing is scheduled to start tomorrow night, just as the puck is being dropped to begin game five of the NHL’s Eastern Conference Finals between the New York Rangers and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
It’s early summer. Top Gun: Maverick is soaring at the box office, Stranger Things’s long-awaited fourth season is streaming, the weather’s getting hot, concert and festival season has begun . . . do you think Americans are itching to watch a congressional hearing about January 6 tomorrow night?