by Brian Leubitz

Neel Kashkari seems to be a bright man doing his best Don Quixote for the California GOP. He knows he isn’t going to win without some sort of major Jerry Brown catastrophe. But, the party apparatus is thrilled that he defeated right wing nativist Tim Donnelly. Apparently so much so that GOP scribe George Will took to the pages of the Washington Post to declare that he is Goldwater 2.0:

Today, in this state where one in eight Americans lives, and where Democratic presidential candidates can reap 55 electoral votes without spending a dime or a day campaigning, the Republicans’ gubernatorial candidate has an agenda and spirit similar to Goldwater’s. Neel Kashkari is not, as some careless commentary suggests, an anti-Goldwater, diluting the state party’s conservatism. He is Goldwater 2.0, defining conservatism a ­half-century on.

As Calitics has been down to a DDOS attack on the SoapBlox network, I’ve not been able to respond to this mularkey until now. And in the interim, the CalBuzz folks have taken Will’s argument apart pretty completely.

This is, we report more in sadness than in anger, bullshit.

Maybe George had too many martinis wherever he was staying in Menlo Park when he wrote about Goldwater’s nomination at the “unfortunately named Cow Palace” “fifty Julys ago, up the road near San Francisco.” Or maybe he just had to come up with something to write off his trip out to the hustings. But he has no point, at least not one he shared with his readers.

Because: The widely known political imp Tyrion of Kashkari has not for one minute shown an interest in re-branding his party. He’s desperately trying to make a case against a governor who balanced the budget and calmed the hyperpartisan dysfunction in Sacramento (with the help of voters who passed his tax measure, gave the Legislature the power to pass a budget with a majority of votes and approved measures to boost centrism).

To be honest, at many points it seems like Kashkari is running to get famous more than anything else. Not that I begrudge a campaign on a low budget, but after the fourth time guest hosting KFI’s John and Ken Show, shouldn’t somebody say something? I’m not sure Kashkari has the it in him to become a flamethrowing media personality, but you could see him landing a gig somewhere on TV or radio after all this is over. He hasn’t really made any effort to change the hearts and minds of the still very much right-wing GOP base. He just was a slightly better option, and was able to squeak past Tim Donnelly by gathering 19.4% of the vote in the primary. There are a lot of people who voted for Donnelly, and they aren’t going anywhere.

In the end, Kashkari is basically running around trying to do whatever he can to get noticed. The latest polls have him down 52-32, and he will never have the money to compete with the governor on the air waves. So, he goes where he can find a bit of free media and tries to maximize whatever he can get. That’s about all you can do in a race like what he’s facing. It is a daunting and thankless task, but he signed up for it.

Hey, Charlie Brown knew Lucy was going to move that football, but he still went for it, right?

I don’t know the last time George Will has actually set foot in California, but his complete hash of a column about the state suggests he doesn’t know a thing about it.  Most of it is a rehash of the same tired, false conservative tropes – that job creators are fleeing the state (not, um, true), that state spending is out of control (not, um, true), that public employees and their unions are bankrupting the state (California has the second-lowest number of full-time government employees per capita among all states, so, wrong again, George).  But putting that aside, it is simply astonishing that anyone could write an entire column about California budget issues without bothering to mention the inconvenient fact of the 2/3 requirement for budgets and taxes.  Will’s notion that the Democratic legislature has made the state “liberalism’s laboratory” cannot be reconciled by the conservative veto over any tax hikes or budget solutions.  

Unsurprisingly, Will (who probably got paid handsomely by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to write this drivel) rejects the May 19 ballot measures, as do Calitics.  But he completely and totally misreads the issues facing the legislature, the structural constraints upon them, and the solutions necessary to move the state forward.  Showing himself to know nothing about California, maybe Will should stick to lying about climate change repeatedly.