CALIFORNIA
FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2021, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“BIDEN
MAKES A DIFFERENCE: STATE NO LONGER A TARGET”
California
spent most of the last four years as a target, the object of continual
presidential resentment from Donald Trump because he lost here in 2016 by
almost a 62-38 margin, the state’s differential providing all 3 million votes
by which Hillary Clinton defeated him in the popular vote that fall.
But with
the end of successor Joseph Biden’s first 100 days in office drawing near,
things look very different for California today.
First, a look back at
California’s background with Trump.
The
popular vote numbers against Trump were somewhat higher last fall than in 2016,
but the percentage was virtually the same, this time slightly more than 64-34
percent, suggesting few minds changed over four years.
Trump
took out his resentment in myriad ways, refusing to come here for almost
anything but visits to his vaunted border wall and a couple of fund raising
dinners. More substantially, his presidency meant less money for
California schools than before, and less funding for police, highways, parks
and almost anything else the federal government helps pay for.
When it
came to new federal projects and climate change measures, forget about it. As
for top appointments, almost no one from California except big donors to Trump
campaigns got any. The big exception was Stephen Miller, the only close advisor
who was not family that lasted the length of Trump’s term.
Miller, a
Santa Monica High School graduate whose family suffered financial losses during
his youth that forced a move from the most affluent part of his hometown to a
lesser area, became the ideologue behind Trump’s extreme hard line policies on
immigration.
With
Biden’s accession – something Trump fought to stop right up to inauguration day
– things quickly turned around for California.
Start
with the vaccination program against the COVID-19 plague. Under Trump, there
was virtually no program. Some health care workers managed to get inoculated
before Biden took over, but there were no mass vaccination sites, small
supplies for hospitals and health systems and tiny numbers of people getting
the shots.
Within
less than a month after Biden’s arrival, California had dozens of large-scale
vaccine centers, and six weeks into his term, about one-third of Californians
(13.5 million) had been jabbed. There was some confusion, but except for weather-caused
shipping problems, there have been no supply shortages or vaccination
stoppages. With the advent of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson version of the
vaccine, the rollout gained speed and hurtled toward herd immunity, slowed only
by a chemical mixup in one J&J plant in Baltimore.
Biden
aimed for 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days, but the campaign far
exceeded what at first seemed an impossible goal.
California
also ceased to be the center of resistance to federal policy, that role shifting
to states like Texas and Arizona, run by conservative Republicans.
Instead,
Californians – none part of the Biden family – moved into one top policy-making
role after another. UC Berkeley Prof. Janet Yellen became Treasury secretary,
state Attorney General Xavier Becerra became head of Health and Human Services,
former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm – a Berkeley professor most of the time
since she left office in 2011 – is Energy secretary. Many more Californians got
sub-cabinet jobs.
For California,
this means treatment as a most-favored state rather than the least favored. It
means California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s new bill to permanently ban
offshore oil drilling along the West Coast – a direct descendant of the
anti-drilling movement that began with the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1968 –
stands a good chance.
Plus,
Biden ordered a moratorium for new oil drilling from federal land and waters
within less than a week of taking office.
Biden’s
arrival also means the million or so Dreamers whose status under the Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program established by ex-President Barack
Obama and targeted by Trump, now breathe easier. Immigration raids and
deportations of the undocumented, some of whom have lived and worked here for
decades, are much reduced and targeted more to known criminals than others.
It leaves
California’s universal mail balloting unmolested by federal interference.
For
California, then, Biden has meant the last election had consequences that
figure to increase every day.
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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