Gov. Gavin Newsom lost his cool in a viral July 29 interview with the Sacramento Bee. He said, “It would be nice if our homegrown team start focusing on what’s right. Everybody outside this state is b****ing about the state!” The Sacramento Bee described his attitude as “defiant” and “angry.” He even pounded the table when he spoke.
Newsom is strategically characterizing the movement to recall him as a Republican effort, led by far-right extremists and Trump acolytes to seize control of California. This is a clever marketing ploy, which portrays Newsom as a victim to gain support. In reality, Californians across the political spectrum have a host of legitimate reasons to vote to recall Newsom on Sept. 14.
First, Newsom badly mishandled the pandemic. He unilaterally enacted arbitrary shutdown rules and failed to roll out vaccines efficiently. While the governor dined at three-star Michelin-rated French Laundry indoors and maskless and sent his children to a hybrid in-person private school, the rest of the state’s residents and millions of students were forced to comply with onerous shutdowns.
Newsom has run the state like a monarchy, issuing a vast number of executive orders that overreach the bounds of his legal powers. State lawmakers learned for the first time, from Newsom’s interview on The Rachel Maddow Show, that he was spending $1 billion on masks, a decision they say should have been made by a state appropriations committee. Another executive order made paid sick leave available to all food sector workers at large companies affected by the virus. But economists point out the difference between orders that aim to slow the spread of the virus and those that transfer the economic fallout from one party to another. John Eastman, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, said, “I don’t think he has the authority to do that.”
On July 30, a federal court ruled that Newsom violated parents’ rights regarding school closures during the pandemic. The plaintiffs argued that their children were denied access to meaningful education and that the rules violated their 14th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection.
In my home county of Santa Barbara, public schools serving approximately 70,000 students were shuttered for the entire year, while 320 child care facilities and after-school programs serving 18,000 children remained open. The United Way of Santa Barbara opened learning and enrichment centers, which allowed high-risk students to congregate indoors for in-person learning support and extracurricular enrichment activities. The nonsensical logic behind closing schools only to open learning centers doesn’t hold. It allowed some children to gather for learning but not others, straining families who needed child care and negatively affecting students.
Over 70% of the state’s 6 million children were attending remote school last year, but “twenty-nine percent of households did not always have internet available for educational purposes,” according to a study conducted by the Census Pulse Household Survey in 2020. Children and teachers averaged just “3 hours of live contact by phone or internet in a typical week.” California students across the board demonstrated significant learning lag from fall 2019 to winter 2021. California was one of the last states to offer in-person learning.
Worse, Newsom’s arbitrary school closures have given rise to a teenager mental health crisis. Dr. Mike deBoisblanc of the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek said that “we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.” The Children’s Hospital of Oakland experienced a 66% increase in teenagers screening positive for suicidal ideation in its emergency department between March and October 2020. UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital also saw a 66% increase in the number of children in the emergency room and a 75% increase in children who required psychiatric hospitalization.
The city of San Francisco sued the school district for keeping schools closed and “catalyzing a mental health crisis among school-aged children.” Newsom gravely miscalculated the costs and benefits of school closures, with devastating effects. According to the California Department of Public Health, 134 children under 18 died by suicide in 2020, a 24% increase from the previous year, while only 23 COVID-19 deaths out of 62,000 were children.
During the pandemic, the California Employment Development Department paid out as much as $31 billion in fraudulent claims, claiming the home state of Silicon Valley lacked the technology and processes to prevent it. Under Newsom, vaccine rollout was botched, ranking in the bottom third in the country for efficiency.
Despite having among the highest taxes in the nation and ranking 21st in spending per student, the California school system ranks a pathetic 41 out of 50 states. And as the equivalent of the fifth-largest economy in the world, California is home to the largest homeless population in the United States, and one-third of its residents live in poverty. California ranks 43 out of 50 states for fiscal health and budget management, with an “F” grade from Truth in Accounting, and California’s transportation infrastructure ranks 41st in the country.
If incompetence isn’t reason enough to recall him, Newsom lied about fire prevention measures that he promised to prioritize and overhaul when he took office in January 2019. He grossly overstated the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by a staggering 690%. A January 2020 press release from his office states, “The projects collectively have treated 90,000 acres,” when in actuality, the state’s data show the number of treated acres was only 11,399. Instead of expanding fire prevention as he promised, Newsom slashed 40% from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s budget in 2019, cutting fuel reduction in half. As a result, a record 4.3 million acres burned in California in 2020.
California has a lot of problems, which can be improved only by carefully selected teams of medical, organizational management, public policy, and financial experts under a visionary leader. Regardless of political leanings, all Californians have a stake in the recall election. I urge voters to think beyond party affiliations and vote to restore the California dream, which the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf observed “is dying.” He wrote, “The rising generation’s charge, whether on behalf of the country, the blue-state model, or the tens of millions who’ll make their home in the state, is to make California exceptional again.” Newsom has had his chance.
Patricia Pan Connor is a writer and investor residing in California.
