Some things in politics just can't be explained, especially when it comes to the Democratic Party picking candidates for various elections. Case in point: The ongoing California gubernatorial election. Since the withdrawal from the race of former Congressman Eric Swalwell, famous for his close working relationship with certain Chinese interests, the former Biden administration's Health and Human Services Director, Xavier Becerra, has been the presumed frontrunner.
Why, that's not so obvious, especially since Becerra was, apparently, notorious for his absences while in the Biden administration. In any job, pretty much the one thing you have to do above anything else is to turn up, but it looks like Becerra was kind of weak on that. Politico recently spoke with several former Biden admin members, and their recollections are telling.
Six former Biden administration officials, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about a former colleague, acknowledged the subject of Becerra’s unlikely rise has come to dominate their group chats and conversations. “It gets the biggest laugh every time we send around a poll,” the first former official said, describing the perception across the administration that the former HHS secretary was ineffective on the Covid response, a migrant health crisis at the border and other matters.
The former colleagues, if we take this at face value, seem rather bemused to find Xavier Becerra in this situation, where he may well be governor of the biggest Democrat stronghold in the country. Especially since he seems to have been notorious by his absence on many occasions.
“He ran one of the most consequential agencies in government at the height of the pandemic,” the former official continued. “But he took a backseat to Dr. Fauci and his team, didn’t visibly lead on implementation and had to go through layers to get to POTUS even as a Cabinet member.”
A second former Biden official shared that view, describing Becerra as having been “absent” on Covid responses. So did a third former Biden official, who called Biden’s selection of the former California attorney general, who brought no medical or public health background to the job, “an unfortunate choice.”
Becerra, a fourth former Biden official said, “is very good at being a politician. When he was attorney general, the formula was: you file a lawsuit. When you’re a member of Congress, you help your constituents and you introduce legislation. When people noticed he wasn’t cut out for [the Cabinet] was when there was a crisis — it was clear he didn’t know how to handle that.”
Of course, that's par for the course for the late, unlamented Biden administration, isn't it? Politics seems all too often to operate on the Peter Principle, in which people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. That may be the case here.
Read More: CA Gubernatorial Debate Night Scorecard: Who Killed It, Who Bombed
Xavier Becerra's Troubling Relationship With One of the Nation's Largest Healthcare Systems
My friend, sometimes accomplice in adult beverages and colleague Bob Hoge, writing after the recent CA gubernatorial debate, made a cogent and pithy observation about Becerra:
In sum, here’s my prediction for the upcoming polls: Porter will drop, Mahan will see some increased interest, nobody cares about Becerra, Tom Steyer will hold steady, and voters who actually watched the debate will find that both Bianco and Hilton made powerful arguments.
California is broken, and more Democrat tax-and-spend, radical race and gender ideology politics is not going to fix it. Steyer, Porter, Becerra, and Mahan are just more of the same — failure theater on a grand scale.
To that, about Xavier Becerra, it seems we can now add "No-show."
I remember back in the day, the famous country singer George Jones, in the throes of a drinking problem, was notorious for not showing up for booked gigs, to the point that people (including my brother, who was stiffed by Jones in just such an instance) referred to him as "No-Show Jones." If these former Biden administration members are speaking truth and not pique, we may now have "No-Show Becerra."
All of this begs the question: Can California afford an absentee Governor? Well, when you consider the Democratic candidates, honestly, they may be better off.
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