THE KEY QUESTION FOR KAMALA HARRIS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“THE KEY QUESTION FOR KAMALA HARRIS”

 

The polls show Kamala Harris holds the approval of about 50 percent of California voters as she heads into a self-assigned summer of decision making about her political future.

 

Does the former vice president who lost last year’s election by just 1.6 percent of the popular vote want to give up on the possibility of succeeding Donald Trump as president? Is she ready to deal with all the detailed and complex issues that constantly confront any California governor? Can she raise the $100 million or so minimum needed to be a credible candidate for governor?

 

These are just some of the items on Harris’ mind as she disapprovingly watches Trump run the government in a confrontational manner completely foreign to her.

 

But she knows that if she does not run for president in 2028, she will forfeit any advantage she would possess as a barely beaten candidate last time out, one whose defeat now has many 2024 Trump voters feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse.

 

She also knows that if she goes for governor, she will have to promise to serve out a full term in that office should she win. Reneging on that pledge would likely doom her in any presidential primary election, tagging her as a non-promise keeper. But keeping such a pledge also takes her out of the 2028 presidential running.

 

It's a rare quandary no previous California Democrat has faced. The huge question for Harris: Does she care enough about the details of California issues from electric vehicle mandates to Medi-Cal for the undocumented to give up on her national ambitions, at least for most of her 60s? (Harris will be 63 on Election Day 2026.)

 

For sure, Harris bears the image of a surfacy politician. Rivals also blame her for failing to disclose just how disabled ex-President Joe Biden became. Few can name salient achievements of either her six years as state attorney general or her four years as Biden’s No. 2.

 

Some of those are substantial: During the fiscal crisis of 2009-2012, when many thousands of mortgages were threatened with foreclosure, she leveraged California’s sheer size to jump the state’s share of a 2012 national mortgage settlement up from an initial top offer of $4 billion to $18 billion, helping an unknown but large number of Californians evade foreclosure.

 

Between 2013 and 2015, her office recouped more than $1 billion for the state’s major public employee retirement funds after banks and rating agencies lied to greatly overvalue mortgage-backed securities.

 

She also secured a 2012 agreement with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and HP to require all apps they sell to display clear new privacy policies – and then she created a state privacy enforcement unit to seal that deal.

 

Her record was less noteworthy as vice president, partly because Biden assigned her impossible tasks, like fixing conditions in Latin America that encourage illegal immigration. That assignment did not come with the power to make any improvements.

 

So the Harris image as a lightweight, promoted in part by her cackling responses in some interviews, can be misleading and other candidates for governor would be wise not to underestimate her.

 

But there remains that key question: How interested is Harris in pursuing the state’s problems all the way to solutions, from the fate of the partially-built bullet train to the pesky and expensive issue of caring for indigent immigrants?

 

No one really knows, perhaps not even Harris. That’s what makes this question so vital in a campaign where other candidates like former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former state Atty. Gen. and federal Health Secretary Xavier Becerra are known for their strong interest in taking on major issues. Candidates like former state Senate President Toni Atkins and former state Controller Betty Yee are similarly known for strong focus.

 

If Harris runs and debates them all, plus Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, they will surely be trying to paint her as the lightweight of her reputation and not the accomplished politician of her reality.

 

Which makes running a big risk for Harris, who could lose out as a major national player if she enters this race, regardless of whether she wins or loses.

 

  

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    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

LET AGING FEINSTEIN SERVE OUT HER TERM

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “LET AGING FEINSTEIN SERVE OUT HER TERM”

 

        Since her election to the U.S. Senate in 1992, no politician has done more for California and its people than 88-year-old Dianne Feinstein.

 

        Without Feinstein, there would be no national parks in the redwood country of Northern California or the parts of the Mojave Desert thick with Joshua trees. There would be far fewer federal gun controls. Much more untreated sewage would flow into the Pacific Ocean daily.

 

        Several more California military bases would be shuttered, likely including the Lemoore Naval Air Station and the Seabee base at Point Mugu in Ventura County. The protections of the federal Violence Against Women Act would not exist.

 

        The list goes on and on, from clean air measures to the largest appropriations for California ever gained by any senator. It’s why Feinstein has not had a serious Republican challenger in decades.

 

        But that’s not enough for the far left in California politics. Feinstein, 88, is too old to serve out her term, ending in late 2024, they say. The former San Francisco mayor is insufficiently alert to do her job.

 

        These are similar to charges leveled against Feinstein by leftist former state Senate President Kevin de Leon when he ran against her in 2018 and lost badly. De Leon, now a Los Angeles city councilman and seemingly about to lose again in a bid to become that city’s mayor, miscalculated then. He figured his ageist arguments would resonate with the bulk of Democratic voters that year, but it didn’t happen.

 

        De Leon’s complaints, and those of other “woke” politicos in the state, amount to this: Feinstein does not line up often enough with the ferociously progressive “squad” of House members which now leads her party’s left wing. She is too friendly with Republican senators she has known for more than a generation, and even compliments them once in a while.

 

        They claim that De Leon’s 2018 charge has come true, that Feinstein suffers from cognitive decline due to her age. The San Francisco Chronicle reported this spring that several unnamed former Senate staffers say Feinstein can no longer fulfill her responsibilities without help from her staff. Never mind that the same can be said of most other senators half her age or less.

 

        The fact is that Feinstein has never cast a vote differently than she intended. She has never backed a cause without conscious intent. There is no proof – only hearsay – that her mental state is beneath common Senate standards. Whether she’s as professional and creative as she was at 60 is not at issue, merely whether she’s up to senatorial snuff, and only gossip suggests otherwise.

 

        But that won’t satisfy the “woke” Democratic left in this state, which is impatient to take over Feinstein’s seat, especially since it was thwarted when Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed the somewhat technocratic Alex Padilla to the state’s other Senate seat, vacated when Kamala Harris became vice president.

 

        Padilla, California’s first Latino senator of the modern era, did not satisfy the far left because he’s not a Black woman and they figured the seat he took essentially “belonged” to a Black female like Congresswoman Barbara Lee or former legislator Shirley Weber, Newsom’s choice to replace Padilla as secretary of state.

 

        They want Feinstein out now so Newsom can appoint someone of their choice to her seat, giving that person a leg up on prospective Senate candidates like Reps. Adam Schiff of Burbank (leader of one Donald Trump impeachment) or Katie Porter of Irvine, both moderates more in the Feinstein mold.

 

        The fact is that the campaign to replace Feinstein will start this fall, the moment the November election is over, regardless of whether she is still in office or not.

 

        Too bad for De Leon that the last four years have pretty much eliminated him as a serious candidate. If he can’t finish in the top two in his own city’s mayoral primary (and he will not), how can he be a strong statewide candidate for a more significant office?

 

        The bottom line: The wise thing and the fair thing to do is let Feinstein serve out her term, and so what if she needs a boost from her staff once in a while.

 

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    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

IT’S A MISTAKE FOR STATE DEMS TO FEEL SMUG

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “IT’S A MISTAKE FOR STATE DEMS TO FEEL SMUG”

          There’s a certain smug quality about the California Democratic Party as it heads toward a primary election likely to produce more intra-party runoffs than ever before, possibly ranging right up to the ballot-topping race to succeed Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate.

          But just because there may be as many as 30 runoffs pitting Democrat vs. Democrat this fall does not mean all is hunky-dory for this party, which before this spring’s big registration rush to vote for Bernard Sanders for president had gained only about 75,000 registered adherents since 2012, despite California’s significant population increases.

          Yes, Democrats do enjoy a 17-point registration advantage over Republicans, one reason both major parties have considered this state “safe” for Democratic presidential candidates for two decades. But no, Democrats are not justified in crowing about it.

          That’s because mid-May figures from Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla, California’s top election official, demonstrate that typically in recent years, when new voters register, they sign up as “no party preference (NPP),” refusing to identify with either party.

          The rise in NPP registration from 21 percent of the total in 2012 to more than 24 percent today is completely unprecedented and represents an almost total rejection of both parties. Yes, Republicans have actually lost hundreds of thousands of their adherents to the NPP column, far more than Democrats have lost, but Democratic numbers are not growing much despite the party’s expensive and labor-intensive outreach and registration efforts.

          This could have great meaning in the primary, where polls show that in the minds of many likely voters, Hillary Clinton represents the traditional Democratic Party, while rival Sanders has become the latest emblem of change.

          The last time she ran for president – in 2008 – perceptions were similar, but NPP registration was far lower. So Mrs. Clinton won a big plurality in California that spring, enough to keep her going through months of losses to “hope-and-change” symbol Barack Obama in other states.

          This time, California votes almost last, and as usual its vote will have only symbolic meaning. Since NPP voters can cast ballots in Democratic primaries, but not Republican ones, their impact will be felt far greater on the Democratic side.

          Many of those NPP voters are young people only recently eligible to participate – the same kind of voters who gave energy and manpower to Obama’s campaigns. They could create a stark generational split in the Democratic vote.

          The trick for Democrats this fall will be getting those young NPP voters to turn out again in November.

          Academic studies indicate that it’s highly unlikely the new voters would go Republican in the fall, as very few voters switch parties during an election year even if the candidate they liked in the primary has lost. But they might stay home unless Mrs. Clinton can motivate them in a way she has not so far.

          So Democrats appear just as flummoxed by the NPP phenomenon as Republicans. Both parties sometimes react to the reluctance of youths to choose a party by reminding new voters of what happened many years ago.

          Mrs. Clinton, for example, has difficulty comprehending that feminist appeals have not worked well with young women voters, who take for granted the status she helped win for them via her efforts in the 1970s and ‘80s, long before she became a national figure.

          Younger voters, male and female, tell poll takers they are more interested in what they believe a Democrat might do for them in the next few years. This message from youth, both registered Democrats and those with no party preference, is one reason Mrs. Clinton this year has adopted a more strongly liberal tone than ever before. She strongly stresses immigration reform, increased wages and voting rights.

          None of that is likely to change the pattern of new voters steering clear of all political parties. Which means Democrats can’t be smug, any more than the shrinking GOP should be depressed. For the tide moving toward no party preference is not yet fully understood by either party, and if they make wrong moves, the errors could redound for years.

         

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    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

NEW NUMBERS SHOULD EASE INTENSITY OF FRACKING DRIVE, DEBATE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2014 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “NEW NUMBERS SHOULD EASE INTENSITY OF FRACKING DRIVE, DEBATE”

          There’s a huge political implication in the big difference between 13.7 billion barrels of oil and 600 million.

          Similarly, there's meaning in the gigantic difference between 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 6.4 billion (the average California household uses about two to three cubic feet of natural gas per day).

          Taken together, it’s the difference between fueling the entire United States for several years and fueling it for only about one month.

          Those are the differences between the amount of oil and gas the federal Energy Department in 2011 estimated lies trapped in the rocks of California’s Monterey Shale geological formation and what it now says can actually be recovered using current technology at today’s prices.

          The gigantic Arabian- or Oklahoma-style resources first said to be available from the Monterey Shale, which stretches south from San Benito County along the western side of the San Joaquin Valley all the way into Southern California, gave rise to a strong drive for massive hydraulic fracturing. Better known as fracking, this technique sees many thousands of gallons of water and acid injected under high pressure deep into the ground, where it blasts apart shale rocks holding oil and gas deposits.

          The 2011 Energy Department estimates, repeated in 2012 and 2013, gave rise to a boom mentality and changed the political balance of environmentalism and job creation in this state.

          Gov. Jerry Brown, who consistently champions measures fighting climate change, refused to back an outright ban or moratorium on fracking in California despite concerns over both production of greenhouse gases and possible pollution of ever-more-vital ground water aquifers.

          Onefactor:A USC study contended that full-blown fracking of the Monterey Shale would spur 2.8 million new California jobs in what seemed like it could become the biggest boom here since the Gold Rush era.

          The author of that study has told reporters the reduction of about 95 percent in official estimates of what can be readily extracted from the Monterey Shale would similarly cut his job-creation forecast.

          Through its information agency, the Energy Department explains the massive cut in its expectations for the Monterey Shale by saying rocks there are warped more than in other heavily-fracked areas like Ohio, North Dakota and Pennsylvania. Earthquakes did this. The convolutions they produced in subterranean rocks would make it far harder to extract oil by any current method than previously thought, the EIA said.

          Of course, any estimate that can change by 95 percent in one direction seemingly overnight and for reasons that were long known prior to the initial estimate is not likely to remain stable long. Nor can it be considered highly reliable.

          So the oil industry says it wsill keep driving for fracking, trusting that oil company scientists will devise ways to tap resources the firms have lately rushed to control.

          The politics of all this are still murky. With the latest estimate of Monterey Shale resources now pretty similar to what’s known to exist in untapped offshore California oilfields, logic says a fracking moratorium would cost no more jobs than the current moratorium on new offshore oil drilling.

          In short, environmentalists may argue that a moratorium – embodied in a bill now active in the Legislature – makes as much sense in one place as the other. And Brown, a decades-long supporter of the coastal oil moratorium, might just go along since for the moment, the bottom has fallen out of fracking job-creation forecasts.

          So far, Brown has said nothing, and since he’s surely aware any fluctuating estimate can change right back to where it was before, he’s not likely to anytime soon. Former U.S. Treasury official Neel Kashkari, fighting to be Brown’s Republican opponent this fall, has for months made all-out fracking a centerpiece of his economic platform and has yet to change his stance.

          Even so, the drive for fracking has definitely been changed. For the ratio of fracking risks to benefits has now shifted radically – at least for the next year or so – nor are the stakes as high as they were before the late May day when the Energy Department radically changed its tune.

          -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

BULLET TRAIN PLANNERS SHOW SIGNS OF WISING UP

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“HSR PLANNERS SHOW SIGNS OF WISING UP”

For years since the 2008 passage of Proposition 1A gave planners of high speed rail in California the prospect of spending $9.9 billion in state bond money, they have seemed bent on a single path: spending as much as possible.

They’ve gone after and gotten billions more in federal help, they’ve chosen some of the most expensive possible routes for their system extending it to areas where the main Los Angeles/San Diego to San Francisco runs are unlikely to pick up many paying passengers. They made a laughing stock of themselves by choosing an extinct small town (Borden) in Madera County as one terminus of their projected first leg of the project. And their cost estimates have been labelled unrealistic lowballs by every competent analyst who examined them.

But now, at long last, with congressional Republicans threatening to hold up much of the promised federal aid, the state’s High Speed Rail Commission is beginning to show some sense.

The first sign of this came in early May, when the bullet train visionaries revived the possibility of taking a direct route between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, passing near the hamlet of Grapevine, now mostly known as a truck- and rest-stop along Interstate 5 at the northern foot of the Tehachapi Mountains that separate much of Southern California from the Central Valley.

Reopening the issue does not mean the HSR system has abandoned the idea of its north-south trains making a northeastward loop into the Antelope Valley cities of Palmdale and Lancaster. But it does suggest that these locales may have been included in the plan presented to voters as a political ploy to draw votes in areas that might not otherwise be interested in financing a train between two huge urban areas.

The possibility of running the bullet train almost straight north paralleling I-5 through the mountainous section that also carries the “Grapevine” tag because of the convoluted roadway that preceded today’s wide and mostly straight freeway opens other significant questions.

If the HSR commission is looking for the most direct, money-saving route for its new tracks north of Los Angeles, why not find the same thing elsewhere?

Why run trains through the center of the San Joaquin Valley, over the Pacheco Pass to Gilroy and then along U.S. 101 to San Jose rather than using a more direct route following I-5 north along the western edge of that valley, then heading over the Altamont Pass into the San Francisco Bay area?

Doing that would eliminate many miles of hyper-expensive track, obviate the need for pricey stations in Bakersfield, Fresno, Merced and San Jose, and remove the threat of a huge ditch or high viaduct bisecting some of the most productive farmland in America. Build the system along I-5, where a freeway already cuts through cotton fields and other cropland, and you’d save what now looks like years of dispute.

Build it away from the San Francisco Peninsula, where resistance to the proposed viaduct cutting through cities like Palo Alto, Menlo Park and San Mateo grows steadily louder and firmer, and you would not only save money and avoid conflicts with the existing Caltrain commuter system, but you’d save many billions, as land prices are higher on the Peninsula than almost anywhere else in America.

Using the Altamont Pass would also allow bullet trains to link with the existing Bay Area Rapid Transit system around Livermore, with BART running special non-stop fast trains into its existing San Francisco stations – also alleviating the need to construct a station in The City. Any passenger time lost by switching trains would be made up for by being deposited at convenient San Francisco locations.

It’s true this would leave much of California out of the high speed rail system, but most current estimates indicate the passenger load from places like Fresno and Merced would be too light to justify the costs of stopping there.

The main purpose of this system was always to provide a high-speed link between Northern and Southern California’s major urban centers, with other places added to make the plan palatable to more voters. Those detours would make the eventual ride take longer, possibly driving away customers.

But no possible change is definite yet, and some of the more sensible ones have not even gotten a minute of commission discussion.

Until that happens, and Californians are given solid financial and passenger load information, this project will never again enjoy the public support it got at the polls three years ago.

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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