The Voters’ Dilemma

“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal”

– attributed to Emma Goldman.

We are living through the worst group of Democratic candidates for governor, ever. And the Republicans are even worse. Californians are being treated to a group of has-beens who are looking for the next place to land on the public purse, a billionaire, and a group of candidates nobody knows and don’t have the support to get into the debates currently taking place.

The original front-runner was Eric Swalwell until last month, when he was besieged by a host of Rape and sexual misconduct allegations. He voluntarily. resigned as a member of the House of Representatives and dropped out of the governor’s race. What did people see in him? Was it his pretty face, nice suits, or something else? We probably won’t be hearing much from Mr. Swalwell for a while.

Then, to fill the front-runner slot, along came Xavier Becerra. He had been California’s Attorney General, and before that he had been in the House of Representatives. His term as AG was cut short when President Joe Biden appointed him as the Health and Human Services Secretary. He was put out of work when Trump won the election in 2024.

Nobody has anything bad to say about Becerra, except that he is lackluster, so I will do my best to shine some light on Mr. Becerra. When he ran for Congress back in 1993, he naturally came to the L.A. Federation of Labor to seek their endorsement. The Democratic lackeys in charge of the Fed only had one question for the would-be Congressman. Would he vote against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement)? This was a big issue with labor at the time because of its impact on jobs. It was labor’s number one issue across the country. Becerra said, Yes he would vote against NAFTA in Congress, no matter what. He repeated his pledge in front of numerous labor groups in L.A.

You can probably guess what happened when NAFTA came up for a vote in Congress, to which Becerra had been elected thanks to the votes, phone banking and money from labor unions. He voted Yes on NAFTA in spite of saying he would definitely vote No. In other words, he lied to get elected.

The Fed was in no mood to let it go. Instead, they refused to endorse Becerra in election after election. The boycott of Becerrra only ended when by natural turnover, new delegates to the Fed didn’t know about his duplicity or had forgotten that he was under boycott as an untrustworthy politician. No other news source has mentioned Becerra’s lack of trustworthyiness or the repercussions that it caused. At the time, I was an active participant in the Fed and I attended all the meetings with Becerra. Anyone who was a labor activist in the 1990s will know the story about Becerra thinking No means Yes. It gave us something to talk about when we met in coffee shops after the Fed adjourned.

It’s unlikely that Xavier Becerra will be the next governor. However, the state did elect Gov. Nuisance, so anything is possible.

There is a recent article in the L.A. Times entitled, There’s one unexpectedly strong candidate for California governor by my friend, Robin Abcarian, in which she castigates most of the Democratic and Republican candidates. There is just one little criticism I have with her article, (and friends sometimes need a little criticism). That criticism is her glowing admiration for Hedge Fund Billionaire, Tom Steyer.

Steyer likely has a battalion of analysts and researchers working for him. They would have told him that Billionaires, no matter how much money they spend, invariably lose the Governorship. Californians just don’t want those people, who live in a different world from the working class, running their state government. Steyer, as a billionaires, knows what the average Joe and Jennifer wants to hear. They worry about the environment, and the Gestapo-tactics of ICE, the immigration bullies.

Steyer even goes so far as to endorse the Billionaires’ tax, which will also be voted on in the primary election. This is more than what many of his colleagues on the debate platform will do. This shows how far the Democrats have fallen. They could be mistaken for Wendell Willkie Republicans. This doesn’t mean Steyer is a flaming progressive. It just means that he has a campaign staff that knows which way the wind is blowing. What candidates say when they are running for office and when they are in office is often quite different.

There are no good choices for Governor. Perhaps the office is so specialized that your last name has to be Brown, as in Pat Brown and Jerry Brown. They did great feats, and some not so great. The Higher Education Act engineered by Jerry’s father, Pat was probably their high point. Can you imagine that our state universities and colleges had free tuition, and still have it on the books. Unfortunately, someone decided to use the word fees as a synonym for tuition, and the rest is history. A new governor should pledge to make higher education free, once again. Society benefits financially for every college graduate. That is, they produce more wealth than the cost of sending them to college.

Since there are no qualified candidates from the Democratic or Republican parties, let’s take a look at the progressive third parties. The two major progressive parties, Peace and Freedom (P&F) and the Green Party have formed an election alliance in which various leaders of the two parties run for the various offices in contention. You can find out more about who’s who in your Voter’s Sample Ballot or online. Peace and Freedom is the largest socialist party in California and the U.S., while the Greens are a progressive party that contends for votes throughout the country. P&F has 149,397 registered members, while the Greens have 112,704. Together, the parties were chosen by more than a quarter of a million Californians.

Now is our chance to start a movement for real representation from smart people by shaking up the electoral map with candidates that scare the hell out of the Dems and the GOP establishments. The sky won’t fall if a lot of us take a step out of the mainstream. They’ve done it in the Mayor’s race in New York City, and we can do it with the Governor’s race. Don’t accept the status-quo.