MICHAEL BARONE: California Dreamin’ Ends with, ultimately, Empty Reservoirs and Homeless Tents.
Back in 2011, high-speed rail officials sought advice from SNCF, the French rail operator. But the firm withdrew from California in favor of “less politically dysfunctional” Morocco, where it helped complete a high-speed system in seven years.
California in its golden years made the movie “Casablanca.” Today, Casablanca is better at building public works than California. The state that within six months completed two major bridges across the San Francisco Bay can’t properly route phone calls in Tuolumne County.
Taking a workable system and making it fail requires a particular talent. Reading between the lines, one sees little among California’s well-paid public-sector union ranks of the pride I once noticed in a state employee years ago. Instead, there is an eagerness to extract still more from the state’s private-sector success — SEIU is pushing a supposedly onetime wealth tax on the very rich to boost current employees’ benefits — and a complacent indifference to whether the work actually serves its intended beneficiaries.
Will the politicians astride this rot pay a price? Harris was the Democratic nominee for president in 2024, and Newsom leads in polls for the nomination in 2028. But a countertrend may be visible in the theoretically nonpartisan June 2 primary for mayor of LA. The (sparse) polling shows LA Mayor Karen Bass way below the 50% needed to win reelection next week, and former reality TV star Spencer Pratt overtaking the left-wing council member initially expected to be her chief challenger.
Pratt’s house was burned down in the January 2025 Pacific Palisades fire, which struck as Bass (despite promising in 2002 to take no foreign trips) was headed to the inauguration of the president of Ghana. Pratt’s cheeky ads lampoon Bass’s left-wing policies, which have produced empty reservoirs and streets full of angry, drug-addicted homeless people.
Empty reservoirs and acres of homeless tents — that’s what California’s once-proud public sector has been producing.
As Glenn wrote yesterday at his Substack, “Why don’t Democrats like Spencer Pratt? Because he’s standing up for normal things, and the political system in L.A., as dominated by Democrats and their satraps for decades, has made a point of not delivering those normal things.”
Butt Bass has won the coveted endorsement of, err, Jane Fonda:
Unexpectedly!
From 2020: Karen Bass’s Long March from Communist Fringe to Biden’s VP Shortlist.
UPDATE: “She’s caught the Pratt.”
