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GELFAND’S WORLD - It’s that moment in the run up to the state and national primary elections where things get ugly. And by that, I refer to the negative television commercials that are hitting us every night. I want to concentrate on one commercial because it may have a lot to say about who makes it into the November runoffs.
I’m going to ignore for the moment all those ads for Tom Steyer. If you haven’t seen at least a few dozen. then you must have just come back from a long pilgrimage to some mountain cave without electricity or a propane stove. For the rest of us, we’ve been deluged with tv spots that tell us two things: (a) Tom made some investments about twenty years ago that made him very rich, but which would be considered bad things from the liberal standpoint nowadays – things like private prisons and fossil fuels. (b) Tom repents of that stuff and is dedicated to spreading goodness through charity (admittedly a lot of it) and becoming California’s next governor so he can do impossible things like create single payer health care at the statewide level and single-handedly cut electricity rates locally.
I think that’s a fair summary, but it’s not where I want to go with this. Instead, I’d like to consider the way that supposedly liberal Democrats are willing to tear each other to pieces on the advertising boards in order to give themselves a couple of points in the primary election.
An aside: The fact that this goes on is evidence that the Democratic Party is not an autocracy or a dictatorship because if it were, it would not be permitting this kind of thing. Under a more disciplined system (which did, in fact, exist at various times in our country’s history) the Democratic candidates would be saying nothing at all about each other that is bad. They might be bragging about their own credentials and they might be comparing policy papers, but they would not be putting out material that would be used against the Democratic Party finalist in the November election.
But forget for the moment what is happening in the modern version of the smoke filled room, and instead let’s think about what is going on in the heads of the voters.
Confusion.
Yes, confusion is the intended result of those attack ads. I have to admit that some of that confusion effects me as well.
So let’s consider that tv ad that creates such confusion. It’s the one that accuses Xavier Becerra of losing 85,000 children as HHS Secretary. This is a rather remarkable assertion. I mean, how do you lose 85,000 children? I’m actually tempted to dust off that most famous line in Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Ernest. In that play, a young man who has become orphaned is remarked upon by an upper crust English lady: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Wilde has made great satire out of his character’s insensitivity and, to be blunt, a kind of upper crust stupidity which is based on unrealistic expectations – the young man, having lost a parent, should have been more careful.
And that anti-Becerra ad is of the same kinf of logic, isn’t it? He’s being accused of carelessness.
The ad is tailored precisely to leave you confused and flummoxed as to what Becerra has really done with those children, implying that he has done something wrong and negligent but not describing anything that you can understand.
So what did happen with those children, and which children are they anyway?
I can give you a link to another story which tries to take a deeper dive into this one. For example, you can read the piece by the group that calls itself Chirla here. The argument, roughy paraphrased, is that Becerra joined the Biden administration in the aftermath of a situation in which Trump’s administration had been scooping up immigrants – adults and children alike – and throwing them into cages. The project for the new administration was – at least – to get the people out of the cages. You may also remember that during the first Trump administration, they were scooping up children and adults without determining which children went with which adults. They made clear that they really didn’t care, and you can read their comments from that time demonstrating the brutality of their attitude.
So if you want to read between the lines you will come up with the explanation that the Becerra-led department went ahead and got the children out of the cages to somebody, somewhere, rather than continuing to keep them locked up. Lots of questions would have arisen. Would there be some way to return these children to central America? The question pretty well implies the answer: The children were refugees from a system which threatened to kill them. And it wasn’t obvious at the time even which country the children were from. It was not even obvious whether some of the children had been sent across the border with some other relative or family friend rather than the true parents. There were lots of stories to that effect.
So any congressional committee or government agency trying to sort through the mess made by the Trump process would have found itself as confused as you or me. If we were no longer holding the children in cages, where were they? It is likely that the Becerra-led departments made a good faith effort to find the children and cater to their needs. This does not mean that they would have succeeded.
Of course we could be entirely wrong about this, but it would require that we imagine Xavier Becerra as having the same attitude towards these displaced children as Donald Trump and Stephen Miller have.
One last thing about the anti-Becerra ads we have been seeing. Who is paying for them? You have to watch carefully, and for me it took multiple efforts, because the signature part (the part that tells you who bought and paid for the ad) is made of light letters against a light background. But there it is. These ads are sponsored by Steyer for Governor.
So now we come to the crux of he matter: When is an attack ad a legitimate communication that is justified in being shown, and when is it a sleazy ad that reflects worse on its sponsor than on the target which it attacks?
For example, was the revelation about Eric Swalwell a legitimate political argument or just mud throwing? I think we all agree that exposing Swalwell’s transgressions was legitimate and served the public interest. We might even wonder why the Trump administration, most likely aware that Swalwell was being rude and insulting and harassing to women, didn’t go after him for those weaknesses.
So what is it that was going on in the case of the lost children? I would venture a guess that it was, at worst, the case of a new department head who had to oversee literally thousands of different issues regarding processes and hirings and firings and questions over distributions of funds to research institutions and on and on --- and among all that, there was the issue of releasing innocent children from the jails and cages and what to do with them and where to send them.
If that is the case then Tom Steyer is engaging in negative campaigning that is not acceptable, and he is doing it against a fellow Democrat.
Now here is the last part, the part that always sticks in my craw. The ad was intentionally made to be vague. It was written to sound like Becerra knew all about the lost children and just didn’t care. There is of course no evidence presented to back up this insinuation.
And finally, we have the old argument about whether the system has the legal right to limit the amount of money that billionaires can spend to smear their opponents.
Addendum
Polls on this governor’s race have been sparse in the weeks surrounding the two debates. We have some new data that just came in, that you can find here. There is one poll that seems to have been done since the second debate, and it shows a near tie between Hilton and Becerra, with everyone else running well behind. Of course it is just one poll and limits itself to Likely Voters, which means that the pollsters have done some filtering. All this having been said, it may be the case that Democratic and independent voters are starting to engage in their own process of coalescence, and that their chosen candidate is Becerra. It is of course possible that another poll will show something different, but for the moment, the system seems to be working.
One More Thing
It turns out that Republican candidate Chad Bianco (Sheriff of Riverside County) was once a dues paying members of the extremist group called the Oath Keepers. You can read about it here. Bianco treats it as pretty much of a nothing, just an accidental act in which he thought he was supporting the Constitution. You might imagine his secretary asking him if he wants to send five dollars to this patriotic group, and he asks, “Who are they?” I don’t really believe it, so I’d like to ask this question: How much in dues did Bianco pay to the Oath Keepers to gain his membership? And what promises came with those dues?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at amrep535@sbcglobal.net)
