Keeping Promises

One thing politicians rarely do is to keep campaign promises.

Everyone knows it.

But the thing is, those promises serve an important purpose, which is to make the voters in those areas feel emotionally like their candidate really cares about their issues, and allow them to vote from their emotions rather than their logic.

So, it's become tradition in every American election for the candidates to descend upon their voter base and promise the sun, moon, and stars - or even better, as witness recently, to promise to Make America Great Again, which appeals to emotion, offers nothing substantive at all, and is easy to argue later.

That is not to say that the candidates have any intent whatsoever of keeping those promises; again, it's become tradition for campaign promises to be ignored after the election, to the point that it's become a cliche; "as solid as a campaign promise" being a good description of, say, quicksand.

So, I have to call out victories in that regard where I can. Hold onto that thought; the road to get there is going to be twisty.

California is currently in the throes of a number of various crises.

Homelessness has become a plague - indeed, it's such a massive problem that the CDC is worried that a literal plague might result.

Los Angeles has an immense trash disposal problem. In fact, California as a whole has a huge trash problem thanks to China changing the rules for recycling, which has resulted in huge amounts of formerly recyclable garbage being stranded in increasing strained facilities statewide.

Rats, and rat fleas, are becoming an issue.

The California pension system is collapsing.

The California budget is unsustainable.

The California deficit is almost half a trillion dollars.

So, California is a huge base of support for Democratic presidential hopefuls. Those electoral votes are required for any Democrat to win the Oval Office; without California, Democrats will simply outright lose every election.

Which means it is - or should be - obvious that Democrat presidential candidates should be devoting a huge proportion of their time to California, and ignoring states that they won't win in a hundred years.

It came as a bit of a shock, then, to the Democrat voters in California that the entire field of candidates for the 2020 election have been effectively totally silent on California's issues.

California voters are pissed off, and so are their newspapers.

They're important, dammit! Why aren't their candidates paying attention to them?!

The answer is a little involved, and I don't want to get ahead of myself, so let's take a detour into California history for a sec.

See, with only a couple of exceptions, the California governor has been a Democrat since 1978.

The California legislature has been majority Democrat since 1959 except for 4 years.

California has been almost exclusively under Democrat control for decades. This is why it's seen as such a bastion of electoral votes for the presidential election; California has voted for the Democrat candidate in every election since 1988. 

This, in fact, for a substantial part of the last several decades has been a trifecta control, in which one political party controls the state house and senate and the governorship at the same time; allowing that party to pass its chosen bills and legislation effectively without interference or meaningful opposition by the other party.

All to the good, you may be thinking; all the more reason for Democrats to be loyal to their constituents.

Wellllllllll, about that...

See, the policies and legislation that have brought California to its current state have, almost without exception, been Democratic policies.

You can't argue that; the Republicans haven't had a sufficient majority to pass legislation without the Democrats signing off on it since the 1950s.

So the problems California is facing aren't a product of a vast right-wing conspiracy, and that's a huge problem for the presidential candidates.

Those problems are a kiss of death for them, and they know it.

See, this is where I have to give credit where credit is due. The Democrats in California kept their promises, and that's why they're being ignored.

They kept their promises, and put in place the exact programs and ideas they promised to, and the results stand before us: their ideas don't work.

They result in homelessness.

Disease.

Vermin.

Trash.

Appalling debt.

Poverty.

Economic ruin.

In fact, the only reason the poverty numbers in California look as good as they do is that California has been steadily losing poor people, and gaining rich people, for years. Often by farming their poor out to Texas. This does make the poverty numbers - and the numbers on education - look better, but it doesn't do anything to address the problems, for example the fact that even wealthier people are now starting to feel the bite of California's outlandish housing costs.

California is in a massive crisis.

And the Democrats running for president can't touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Because they don't have any solutions for those problems.

Their campaigns - all of them - are predicated on exporting those same policies and ideas to the rest of the country.

As long as they can pretend those problems don't exist, they don't have to open themselves to a question they can't answer, which is "if it didn't work in California, why would it work for the whole country?"

And they know perfectly well that Californians will, again, wind themselves up in another election cycle, charge off to the ballot boxes, and vote for whichever Democrat ultimately gets the party nomination, regardless of whether that person has even touched base with them or not; regardless of whether that person has ever tried to help, or not; because anything is better than electing a Republican.

So, they don't care; they don't, because there's no compelling reason they should, and their political survival depends on them pretending California doesn't exist until Election Day.

If you're bankrupt, what you need more than anything else is a higher credit limit.

Maybe this is just me, but I'd be looking at California as a test case for anything the Democrat presidential candidates say on the campaign trail, because...

...This is what happens when they keep their promises.

Are those the promises you want kept?