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A California Resident’s Gratitude
We have all watched the spectacle of very bad politicians getting re-elected time and time again. Think Marion Barry or Harold Washington. Mayor Ray Nagin got re-elected after refusing to evacuate New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mayor De Blasio got re-elected. Then there is just about every elected official in California.
We see mayors do nothing while their own cities get burned down and wonder just how bad is bad enough. Will they get re-elected?
Here comes an answer to that question: Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is losing his re-election bid.
This is justice. Right? A very bad mayor is about to lose his job. Right?
He is losing to Sarah “I am Antifa” Iannarone.
Californians are no longer the dumbest voters in the country!!!
Portland voters just blew past us and are headed for the finish line.
And they’re making it look easy.
Thank God for Portland!!!!
Published in General
The soft bigotry of low expectations for California?
Low but not inaccurate.
Good. As long as federal money does not go to support this lunacy the bring it on. Let them burn.
I’d be better with the suicide by ballot box, if the city was financial responsible for the property losses caused by the poor leadership.
They can do it because the Republican Party doesn’t offer a candidate.
Or a serious candidate.
So I’d blame the Republican Party for not recruiting and backing mayoral candidates for cities like these. Perhaps with a campaign slogan of “I won’t burn the city down to make the president look bad”.
That said, I’m guessing it’s more difficult than that. Depending on the city government setup, I’m sure there’s a ton of entrenched politics; you’d probably have to run a slate of people. Still…
If I were considering running for something like mayor in a place like Portland, I think I’d wait a while. It would be way too easy for the various ninnies and nincompoops to complain that it was automatically MY fault that all those burned buildings etc hadn’t been magically replaced with shiny new stuff, ready to be burned down again.
Maybe I’m especially jaded because I also had that experience managing apartment buildings. If the management company had things screwed up so that vendors didn’t get paid etc and so I couldn’t get anything fixed because nobody on the “approved list” would do anything at my location since they hadn’t been paid for previous work, that counted as MY fault. Somehow.
A PITster has already said Biden will win and Nancy wants to bail out the pension funds of CA, Il, and NY. We’re in for a rough ride.
Hopefully they’re not prescient.
Here’s an article on the race. She’s a real piece of work.
The problem for Republican candidates running for mayor in troubled deep Blue cities is to win they really have to define themselves to the public well before the run for the position — i.e. New York City media may mock and hate Bill de Blasio, who is term limited. But they will in 2021 support any ideological clone of Bill de Blasio for mayor over any Republican, and define that person in a negative light, if that person has not already defined himself positively to the public elsewhere.
Rudy Giuliani was able to run for mayor because he had been defined favorably by the media in the mid-1980 when he was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And he got that favorability because of his successful prosecutions of Mafia leaders, and — more importantly — Wall Streeters tie to insider trading, a particular thing that stirs the hearts of liberal media types. So Giuliani got great publicity up until the point he announced as a Republican for mayor in 1989. Then he was demonized, but the positive parts of his image were already in place (he did lose to David Dinkins in ’89, but the six-murder per day crime rate during Dinkins’ term allowed Rudy to win the rematch in 1993).
The same was true when Richard Riordan won for mayor in Los Angeles a year after Rudy. He was more in the Bloomberg mold but had a positive reputation outside of politics that allowed him to avoid the normal demonization. GOP candidates who are not already known to the public before the enter mayoral races in deep Blue areas are far more vulnerable of being defined negatively, to where voters in the Blue cities who lean left to begin with are willing to put up with candidates carrying out the same policies lowering the quality of life as their predecessor, because they convince themselves it was the politician and not the policies that failed, and they’re convinced by the media the Republican alternative would be far worse.
Is that “Percy Jackson” Riordan?
Unfortunately Mayor Ted Wheeler’s opponent in Portland is farther to the Left than Ted is. Portland will soon be able to drop the Havana on the Willamette moniker and will be able to rightly claim the title Caracas on the Willamette.
Democrat mayors get re-elected in big cities because big cities have powerful Democrat party machines. Change only happens when the citizens have had enough (e.g. Giuliani). However, Portland is a mystery because if this woman is really ahead, the citizens are voting change for the worse. Sad . . .
They are given no choice for change for the better. That is the issue with our current system. It is rigged to give the result those in power want. For some reason those in power in big cities want looting and burning and riots. Not sure where they are making money off of it but they will be.
Portland’s interesting because the worst of the Antifa rioting popped up after the candidates were locked into place. So you might have a certain group of “Anybody but Wheeler” voters who don’t care what the opponent’s positions are (which supposedly — if you go by the polls vs. overt voter support — would be what’s fueling Biden at the national level, where people don’t care about him, they just want Trump out of office. Those would be the same types of people shocked six months down the line that a Sarah Iannarone mayoralty or a Biden Administration is actually worse than what they just voted out, but are now stuck with the consequences of their decisions).
Eventually you can reach a level where voters’ tolerance point is breached. It just takes a long time in a lot of places, and where a place like New York has actually been more responsive to negative governance than a lot of other big cities — i.e. the official Democratic candidate has been out of City Hall for 44 of the last 89 years in New York, while it’s been 89 years since a Democrat didn’t hold the mayoralty in Chicago (with the caveat being in NYC before the parties coalesced more on pure ideological lines, there were a couple of times where the city might have been better off with the Dems not losing control of City Hall, as with John Lindsay’s eight years in office, which were the template for the current de Blasio administration).
Mayor Lindsay always reminds me of the 1960s Batman TV series referring to “Mayor Linseed” and “Governor Stonefellow.”
As an American in exile in the DPRC (Democratic People’s Republic of California), I can’t look at the Portland situation and be so sanguine: To my eyes, it’s less that folks in the DPRC have gotten less-stupid as much as people in certain places have become “Californianized.” A case in point: When I mention to people here in L.A. that I’m from Texas, I often hear, “Oh, I’ve been to Austin.” My response is invariably, “Austin’s not Texas. It’s Silver Lake with crappy [although I say something worse] weather.”
Portland is no longer a city in and of Oregon. It’s become fully Californianized. It’s San Francisco in REI gear. That’s what’s happening to a lot of cities – especially cities in the West – as idiot Californians move out because of various factors of state oppression: They bring their naïve, childish politics with them and begin colonizing Boise, Boulder, and Bend much the way they did Portland and Seattle beginning in the 1990s. This is how Washington and Oregon turned into mini-DPRCs, how Coloardo went from the free West to a Rocky Mountain Belarus, and how Arizona has gone from the Land of Goldwater to a state that will elect two Democrat U.S. senators – just like its neighbor to the West.
The DPRC’s colonization of America is nothing to cheer. Not at all.
Agreed. As Dennis Miller says on his podcast late, if Horace Greeley were alive now he would tell people he was wrong about “Go west, young man!”
Geez, that was depressing.
Sadly, the truth often is.