As the signatures that qualified the Gavin Newsom recall election for a statewide vote began arriving in big numbers at county recorder\u2019s offices around California, the governor soon realized he could no longer ignore the threat.<\/p>\n
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Rather, it was time for him to speak up, and also to begin seeing this as the opportunity of a lifetime to establish a brand as a courageous, defiant Democrat who will not be intimidated.<\/p>\n
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That\u2019s why just two days before the St. Patrick\u2019s Day deadline for submitting signatures, Newsom began emailing past supporters regularly to declare he will not take the clear threat to his job and his future lying down.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI\u2019m going to fight because there\u2019s too much at stake in this moment,\u201d he declaimed. \u201cI am not going to be distracted from the critical work (needed) to move us forward in California. That means getting more vaccines in people\u2019s arms, more people back to work and more kids back in the classroom.\u201d<\/p>\n
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By listing those three categories, he essentially announced he would take on every theme the recall organizers have raised against him.<\/p>\n
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One charge is that he hasn\u2019t gotten coronavirus vaccines out fast enough. Yet, by the time signatures were verified, more than two-thirds of all adult Californians had received at least one shot, a higher percentage than in any other state. Sure, Newsom admitted in his State of the State speech a month earlier, he\u2019s made mistakes. But California, with 12 percent of the national populace, has suffered less than 10 percent of the national death toll.<\/p>\n
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With 143 deaths per 100.000 population, California has done far better than Republican-run states like Massachusetts, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi and the Dakotas, all with death rates exceeding 210 per 100,000 persons. That comparison grows more favorable to California every day.<\/p>\n
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Has saving lives been worth the economic sacrifice? That depends on the priority you place on human life vs. people\u2019s earnings.<\/p>\n
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Newsom also started sending kids back to school en masse in early April, partly enabled by more than $6 billion in state funding he pushed through the Legislature.<\/p>\n
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Would any of the leading Republicans in the current recall replacement field have done as well? No one can be sure, but none has presided over an effort even close to the size of what Newsom organized.<\/p>\n
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Also, none of the significant entrants, those with followings including more than their friends and neighbors, is a Democrat. That\u2019s important in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans almost 2-1. For this recall to win, it will have to draw a big majority among no party- preference-voters, but in every recent election, a majority of them went Democratic.<\/p>\n
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That leads Newsom and the state\u2019s Democratic Party organization to label the effort to oust Newsom \u201cthe Republican Recall.\u201d Major national figures from all wings among the often fractious Democrats are publicly opposing the recall, even though a rejuvenated Newsom could interfere with their own president ambitions.<\/p>\n
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Among the recall opponents are Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who drew 37 percent of the vote in last year\u2019s California presidential primary election; Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who came in third last year; appointed California Sen. Alex Padilla; Orange County Rep. Katie Porter and Georgia\u2019s voter registration leader Stacey Abrams.<\/p>\n
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New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, once a Stanford tight end, said \u201cDefeating this cynical Republican recall will be one of the most important priorities for Democrats this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Newsom, thus, has already done much of what he needed to do to emerge as his party\u2019s hero, rallying its major figures, getting vaccinations out and pinning the toxic-in-California Republican label on the effort to dump him.<\/p>\n
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Now he merely needs to affix the Donald Trump tag onto it, too. Given the links between the ex-president and GOP hopefuls like John Cox, Kevin Faulconer and Richard Grenell, that shouldn\u2019t be too hard.<\/p>\n
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For sure, if other Democrats are already calling this a Republican power grab, it won\u2019t be long until Trump \u2014 the least popular Republican presidential candidate California has seen since Barry Goldwater in 1964 \u2014 is involved, like it or not.<\/p>\n
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\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, \u201cThe Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government\u2019s Campaign to Squelch It,\u201d is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the signatures that qualified the Gavin Newsom recall election for a statewide vote began arriving in big numbers at county recorder\u2019s offices around California, the governor soon realized he could no longer ignore the threat. Rather, it was time for him to speak up, and also to begin seeing this as the opportunity of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_theme","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_angie_page":false,"page_builder":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[37,39,40,50],"class_list":["post-6669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-finance","tag-government","tag-health","tag-schools"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}