It's Tuesday, July 30th, 2024, and you are listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the free world. I'm Jonathan Movroydis, Senior Product Manager at the Hoover Institution, and I'm sitting in the chair of Bill Whalen, the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism, so that he can answer questions and provide commentary about California
policy and politics in which he is well versed. Bill Whalen, in addition to being a Washington
Post columnist, writes weekly for Hoover's California On Your Mind web channel. Whalen is joined today by Lee Ohanian, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and professor of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ohanian also writes weekly about the policy environment of the Golden State for California on your mind a good day gentlemen Let's talk
about the latest developments in policy and politics in the Golden State Let's turn our attention to vice president Kamala Harris the presumptive nominee Of the Democratic Party for president of the United States Bill let's start off Let's talk about your column. That's coming out on Thursday on this subject. You note that the Trump campaign's decision to highlight Kamala Harris's record as district attorney of San Francisco. You recall that in
1984 Jean Kirk, Jean Kirkpatrick speaking at the Republican National Congress. Convention introduced the term San Francisco Democrats into the into America's political lexicon. The Reagan campaign that year would go on to trounce Walter Mondale in a
49 state landslide. Harris's record as district attorney is complicated, you write. In 2004, she pitted herself against the police union and U. S. Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein after pursuing a life sentence rather death penalty for the murder of San Francisco police officer To make matters worse, she didn't reach out to Espinoza's family in the course of these events. That's just one line of attack of Harris record that the Trump campaign may may pursue. Bill,
what else is there? And do you think the label of San Francisco liberal still sticks like it did 40 years ago? Hi, Lee. Hi, Jonathan. I think if the Trump campaign loses, it won't be for failing to introduce the phrase San Francisco liberal. You hear it just time and again coming out of either the president, his running mate, J. D. Vance or surrogates, all Wanting to tarnish her or tar her, I should say,
with with the the brush of San Francisco. It's interesting in this regard. You mentioned Jean Kirkpatrick 40 years ago also 40 years ago since we last had a native son or in this case a native daughter as a major party's presidential nominee. So the question is, if you're the Trump campaign and you want to score points at the expense of Kamala Harris, what do you do with her record? Do you focus on the vice presidency? Do you go back into her time
as the United States senator? She was a senator for four years before becoming vice president. Or do you go further back in the Wayback Machine to her six years as state attorney general? And then what you mentioned before that, Jonathan, her eight years as San Francisco DA. And so far it looks like the Trump campaign has landed on San Francisco in crime in this regard. The
Espinoza case was a bad moment for Kamala Harris. She was new to the job. She did not seek the death penalty, which was not a surprise necessarily because she was never a death penalty opponent, but the murder of this policeman, Isaac Espinosa, was a visceral moment in San Francisco. He was murdered with an AK 47. It's a sad story. He had married his childhood
sweetheart and just, just really gut wrenching. And what happened was at a funeral service, Dianne Feinstein, then the U. S. Senator from California and also a death penalty proponent at the time. She later changed her mind of the death penalty. She got up in the funeral, gave a speech and said words, the effect that no justice, no death penalty means no justice.
The police in the audience stood up and applauded. And it was a very embarrassing thing to happen to Kamala Harris compounded by what you mentioned Jonathan, that she held a press conference announcing her decision not to seek the death penalty and didn't have the courtesy of reaching out to the officer's widow beforehand. And it may come back to haunt her in this election. You if assuming the widows is around and willing to do this, she might appear in an ad. She
was very vocal about this in 2019. You could do with Isaac Espinosa, what we put, what Republicans did with Willie Horton back in 1988 and make him the face of a crime issue, if you will. At least to a larger question, I want to get least thoughts on this. How do you run against California in this day and age? You have just ample things you could get into.
You could talk about crime with Harris because she was California's top cop, or lead to perhaps you want to broaden the conversation and to say simply as California goes, so goes the nation under Kamala Harris. Welcome to a world of higher taxes, higher regulation, woguism, blah, blah, blah. What do you think, Lee? San Francisco provides such powerful visuals in terms of in terms of running against her. We've
all seen those. I think many voters have seen those. They're on media all the time. So there's a visceral reaction to you see what has happened in the Tenderloin and Sapa market. And it may not be entirely fair to pin that on her but they will. And I think that will
be effective. And then more recently, she has run into some issues regarding border. So last week, her campaign issued some talking points that were picked up by Corinne Jean Pierre, who is the White House Press Secretary, and Akeem Jeffries, who's the Minority House Leader. And those talking points are really out there to distance Harris from border issues. Border encounters under Biden and Harris have rose about three and a half times as high as they
were under Biden and Pence. And surveys show among voters that the border is now about the most important issue that they look at right now. So when you look at, when you look at that vulnerability for Harris so it's probably not surprising that the campaign Has been pushing this idea that the border issues really aren't Hamlet's fault. Now this has been a little bit hard to sustain because the Trump campaign is saying she was Biden's border czar.
And the Harris campaign is pushing back and saying, no, she wasn't the border czar. Now, the term border czar was never used by Biden. But in March 2021, he gave a press conference in which he gave her the lead responsibilities in terms of dealing with Mexico and Central America in stemming the flow of illegal migrants into California.
So it's a little rich to say, oh no her responsibilities were just, Cubby hold into an academic issue of trying to identify why people are coming to the United States. So yeah, so look, she was not the border czar. We're not a Slavic monarchy. We don't call people czars. She'd be the czarina, if you really want to be technical about it. But if you look at the media at the time, she was called the point person on this, the point person on looking at the core reasons why people migrate from
Central America and the United States. She may say she's not the czar, but unfortunately she owns it. This is the challenge of running as an incumbent vice president. It's worth noting that she is running against the current of history here. George H. W. Bush managed to be elected as Ronald Reagan's incumbent vice president in 1988. Otherwise, you look at Al Gore in 2000, you look at Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Richard M. Nixon, who we'll talk about later in the show,
all running as incumbent vice presidents in the past 65 plus years. Yeah. And each one loses, and that's because they cannot detach themselves from an administration that is either tired or unpopular. Now, is a Biden administration tired? I wouldn't quite use that word because it's only been around for four years. The president's not popular, and a lot of his policies are not popular, starting with immigration. So again, Lee,
we get to this question of if you can take California. And pick it up and use state policy as a bludgeon in other states because California is what it's a sanctuary states Cisco is a sanctuary city That doesn't play too well in swing states across america that have a much different view when it comes to border security No, border security in california with california being a sanctuary state and in particular san francisco hiring having very strong sanctuary laws
it's really shining a spotlight on that And Bill, what's interesting to me is that it wasn't just Democratic Party leaders who were picking up on these talking points about, oh, she was never the border czar, her role was very narrowly focused on identifying the quote, root causes of migration. It wasn't just Democratic Party leadership who was repeating those talking points, it's
the press. The press has been running with that. And, What I find really intriguing about that is is that there is a report that was produced by Harris in 2021, just a few months after Biden tapped her to do this on the root causes of migration from Latin America to the United States. And Bill, when I read that report in and this is detailed in my California on your mind column
that, This coming out today. I would, I was really surprised by this because the report reached some really strange conclusions about why people are coming from Latin America to the United States. Bill, do you know what the number one reason is according to the Harris report? Government corruption is the number one reason why people are leaving Latin America
and coming to the United States. Government corruption. Really? And yes, really. That was the number one reason why people are leaving Latin America to come to the United States. Not economic opportunity, not personal safety, that's not family unity, but government corruption? Government corruption. And now there have been a lot of surveys and polls done of immigrants to the United States, and when asked why they are here, they say, okay, you hit the nail on the head, economic opportunity.
When a migrant comes to the United States, typically their wage rises between 100 percent to 200 percent immediately. entering the U. S. labor market. And after that it grows very rapidly and rises up to the point in which it's about the same as those workers in the same demographic group, but who are born in the United States. So there's just an enormous attraction to come to the United States and it's economic opportunity. Within, I'm in the Harris in, in the Harris tent.
There's a lot of discussion about it's climate change and it's sexual violence and gender issues. These never come up in these surveys. The surveys are really all about joining family and economic opportunity. So it's not at all surprising that border encounters went up. They simply miss the most obvious reason why people come to the United States. Life is life is better here. Life is just much more economically, economic, what?
gratifying in the United States. I know Jonathan wants to circle back to Kamala Harrison crime in Proposition 47. But firstly, I want to give you another thought on California here that I've been playing with the past few days. As I mentioned, it's 40 years since Ronald Reagan last ran for office, last California to be a presidential nominee. And it's interesting, Lee, if you and I got into a car in Brentwood, And started at where Doug Emhoff
and Kamala Harris live. They live in a very nice home in Brentwood, which is a very nice community on the west side of Los Angeles. Lee, ten minutes later, we would go down, after driving down Setset Boulevard, we would be at Ronald and Nancy Reagan's old home in the Pacific Palace age. You might remember it was the the GE home of the future. Everything was electric.
And I think they had a hard time selling it later as a result of that. But the point is You're traveling back in time, going from 2024, Los Angeles to 1984, Los Angeles, California, a much more Republican state back then. If you look at just the celebrities piling behind Harris right now versus Ronald Reagan's Hollywood connections, which would have been, I would have
argued would have been like Jimmy Stewart and much more old Hollywood, but. In this regard, it's 100 years since Calvin Coolidge ran in 2024, in 1924, excuse me, and the phrase keep cool with Coolidge. Now, I don't know if Democrats are going to try to keep cool with Kamala but they're certainly
going to sell you on the idea that Kamala is cool. It's how you have to push back against a lot of the social media she's done, which she's out dancing and cackling and looking kind of frivolous, and I think that's one of the important narratives of this campaign. She is really one of our first social media candidates in that regard is. Big long record on social media. But Lee, would there be anything in the Trump campaign and her opponents to go
after her simply on life in Los Angeles? If I were a Republican opposition researcher, I'd be looking high and low for footage of her coming out of Erewhon or saying that Erewhon is the place to go to and just ridicule her for 18 smoothies and just, ridiculous cost of living where she is in Los Angeles. Do you think there's potency there? There might be she, her the home she lives in is in one of the most expensive neighborhoods
in Los Angeles. And the lifestyle that she and Mr. Emhoff lead is remarkably different than what's led by 90 and a half, 99 and a half percent of the rest of the population.
There's no doubt you can paint a picture of her as an elite. She is. And there is the sense I would think there would be material there within the Trump campaign to paint her as, the old school, the missing liberal and that the way she lives is not the way the rest of the people live and she can afford some of the luxuries of of the trappings that she has whereas most people can't. I have, by the way, good friends who live in the Palisades, and they just really don't like
this candidacy. It's something personal against her. They just need to drive to and from work and go places, and when she is now a presidential nominee, she gets a huge entourage with Secret Service, and just, it complicates things. It's the woe of living in an area like this, where you have a lot of Democratic fundraisers and a lot of high level Democrats coming or going. Just traffic gets tied up. It does, there's one way in it's Sunset
Boulevard and I shouldn't say just one way in, but that's really the direct way. And yeah it's it is two lane road going both sides. And there's an awful lot of people who live there and work there. So yeah, I can imagine that that's an hours long tie up. And speaking of Sunset Boulevard Lee, I have gone this far on the podcast and not mentioned Nora Desmond, the movie California is ready for its closeup.
Bill, in your in your upcoming piece for California on your mind, you mentioned Proposition 47 as a potential vulnerability for Vice President Harris in this campaign. Specifically Proposition 47 reduces, it was a 2014 measure, which reduces felony thefts to misdemeanors for stolen property valued under 950. You write that initiative, some argue triggered shoplifting sprees in California's cities. She didn't take a formal position on Prop
47. So how could that be a vulnerability for her? Jonathan, state attorney generals write the title and summary for a California initiative. So they have the power to determine what as a voter. And this is highly problematic because we have partisan attorney generals who have their leanings. Years and years ago, I think it was the 2000 election, there was a school choice matter. It was a school voucher matter. It was on the ballot. Tim Draper, the venture capitalist,
put it on the ballot. It was a universal school choice. And Bill Lockyer, who was The attorney general at the time, and just a long time democratic player. He the title, I think the title was public funding for religious schools, which is just really a good way to chum the waters when it comes to the school choice debate. Harris in 2014, as you mentioned, did not take a
stand on proposition 47, which was championed by one Newsom endorsed it as well. So she took a pass on it, which is curious that she was the top state attorney general, but she did write the title in the summary. And in the summary, there's very explicit language saying that a prop 47 passes, it will reduce crime in California. Now we fast forward a decade to 2024. After several years of this spectacle, we've seen in towns like Los Angeles and San Francisco of
looting of pharmacies and so forth. And it would seem there's a direct corollary between prop 47. And the idea of making theft not a felony crime, police just don't chase down the bad guys anymore. But Lee, I think you've written about this for California on your mind several times, just the effect that Prop 47 has had on California communities.
Yes, so was 10 years ago that California voters approved 47 and it was known as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act and it passed with, I think, close to 60 percent approval and it essentially reclassified a bunch of felonies, theft, fraud, forgery for amounts under 9 or 50 possession of a lot of illegal drugs for personal uses, misdemeanors, and the theory was of That this would free up money by not having these people go
to jail, this would free up money for other types of for other types of programs because California is notoriously expensive for keeping prisoners. Right now, our our annual cost of a prisoner in California, I think it's about 135, 000 per year. Believe it. Believe it or not. So people people bought into that. But it really just hasn't really worked out that way. Particularly in places such as San Francisco and L. A. where Where where theft is
has risen substantially. And and so now at this fall, we're going to be looking at we're going to be looking at the California, the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act which qualifies for the ballot and bill. I know that you followed the backstory on this and all the intricacies and the details, but yeah. Our governor and the supermajority in the Assembly and the Senate tried very hard, did not, they did not want this ballot proposition to be coming in
front of voters but try as they might in many different ways and guises. It is going to be up there in November and it's going to it's going to reclass, reclassify, classify a lot of those a lot of those misdemeanors back to felonies. It does add the interesting provides though, and I think it's one that's, is well thought out that that those on drugs can have these can have these charges expunged from their record if they complete a drug rehabilitation
program. So I think that's very sensible. But the law hasn't worked out, certainly hasn't worked out the way it was presented. Yes, the state saved some dollars in having fewer prisoners, but there's trade offs. It is, in economics, we always say it's about trade offs, and the trade offs is fewer dollars spent in the prison system, but quality of life has has declined substantially in a lot of our cities and urban areas.
Essentially, so the governor was caught up in this effort in Sacramento by Democratic lawmakers to put an alternative on the ballot to undermine this initiative, and then he pulled the rug out from under it at the last hour, just walked away from him and he literally got on a plane and went to, I think he went to the did he go to the Biden debate in Atlanta?
He was just Did not participate, just walked out, walked away from it and left people wondering, gee, thanks for letting us hanging, but also got into this, uncomfortable question of, where's the governor's head these days? Is he really instant Sacramento? Is he more involved in national politics? And if I may spend a minute on that one thing about Kamala Harris is presumptive nomination is that she's upset the apple cart,
the order of things here in California in this regard before. Nope. Biden announced that he would not seek reelection. We would have assumed what? Biden Harris ticket runs in 2024. They win or they lose. Either way, Gavin Newsom maybe looks at running for president in 2028.
If Kamala Harris loses in 2024, he probably has a better shot at the nomination because she's If she's an incumbent vice president in 2028, she has a pretty good shot at the nomination, as we just saw, because I saw she just nearly locked it up. Now for Newsom, you have to be thinking otherwise. You have to be thinking, okay, maybe I now have to wait until 2028, so I have to go back and look at my record. But what if he wants to step up before 2028? And here,
let me throw an idea at you. I'm going to take credit for this, if it actually pans out. She gets elected president in 2027, Gabby Newsom joins her cabinet as transportation secretary. Now, why would he do this? A lot of California politicians have tried to get
the job of transportation secretary. You might remember back in 2012, Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, just tried like crazy to become the transportation secretary in the second term of Obama. Tried so hard, in fact, he wore out his welcome. They didn't give him the job, if you will. And you are a perhaps part of the job right now, because there's a question relief is interested in, and I think, but secondly, you're looking for
something different. And thirdly, something that politically could be advantageous. Transportation secretary is a pretty good job in D. C. Because you get to travel around the country, hand out money, get involved in the lifeblood of communities. Not a bad way to go. So maybe Gavin doesn't have a Washington in 2027 2025 just the way we anticipated. Bill, the way you describe those those job responsibilities, get out and travel, talk to people that's Gavin. Yeah he does the, he does that
about as well as anyone. Yeah, the question is, would he want to be a cabinet secretary? Having been, being an executive is a very heady experience. Maybe you don't want to report the president. We don't know if he and she get along very well together. He and Kamala have a lot of ifs, but I'm just throwing it out there.
But again, it does get back to this question of what Newsom does with the remaining time in his office, which I think leads us into the issue now of his homeless executive order. Next week Governor Newsom issued an executive order, which Bill has just mentioned, about states, for state agencies to begin the removal of homelessness camp encampments from California streets, following a U. S. Supreme Court decision in June
that permitted an Oregon city to take in homeless people for sleeping outside. The executive order, quote, directs agencies to move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them and provides guidance for cities and counties to do the same. And then Newsom continues, there are simply no more excuses. It's time for everyone to do their part.
He does have that right, Lee, as you write in your California on your mind piece last week, the Golden State managed to blaze through 19 billion to cure homelessness over the past five years. And in that time to increase its homelessness. population by 20 percent. Bill, why is Newsom doing something about this now? Is it the fact that SCOTUS has given him the green light? Or turning back to your early question, are there bigger politics at play down the road?
We'll let Lee take the hammer and talk about the policy here. I'll take the low road and talk about the politics in this regard. I do think now that he is out of any 2024 scenario. He needs to be looking at how he finishes the rest of his time in office the last two years, and he's probably thinking ahead. Lee and Jonathan this regard. If I go out in the great beyond and start talking about California, my record, what are they going to ring?
What are they going to hang around my neck? The first thing they hang around his neck, and I'll defer to Lee after this is homelessness. So Lee has got to do some now solve their homeless problem by sweeping up the streets as simple as that. I wish I really wish. I don't think it's really going to do much of anything.
I view it as really more like window dressing at this point. I think it it shows him being very proactive after the after the grant ruling by the Supreme Court, which essentially so with the Supreme Court Argued is that prior, the prior policy was you can't clear encampments unless you have an open bed available for the individual. The Supreme Court now says, Nope. You can clear the encampment whether you have an open bed or not. So that's essentially what.
What has happened? And so Newsome took the press conference and said he's very as Gavin can be. He was very very vocal, very hand wavy. There's no more excuses. We're going to do this and we're going to get it done. And I'm issuing executive order. But Bill, as far as I understand, this executive order is it's largely window dressing. That doesn't compel cities or counties to do this. I don't even think that. He's
provided really many incentives or carrots. So it sounds great I wish it would work, but I don't think it's really going to make much of a difference Your reaction was curiously here in the bay area. I'm just south of san francisco london
breed. Thank the governor great idea She said it's worth noting. She's up for re election this year and she owns the homeless issue in san francisco So I think she is in favor of most anything that looks bold But lee you go down to your los angeles loves reaction down there basically told the governor to buzz off You They did over one third of the state's homeless that we know of are in L. A. County and L. A. County says they're really
not gonna do much of anything about that. But what's just particularly grim about the homeless situation in California is that we've spent 24 billion between 2019 when Newsom entered office and 2023. And for years Republicans had been pushing for an audit of homeless programs because we've seen this increase in the number of homeless over time despite spending more and more. So last year, finally there was a, finally when there was just so much pushback from
voters and not just Republican districts but Democratic districts. There was a bipartisan advance to the state auditor that, that that, that provided an audit of homeless spending between 2019 up through 2023. The report was issued earlier this year, and that report ended up saying that so little data is collected and and analyzed that we tried to carefully study several programs. But we really couldn't because the data is just
not there. The auditors report is very damaging. It simply says you've spent 24 billion on this and you don't even collect any data to provide us with the ability to track spending to see what's working to see what's not working. It was really an embarrassment. And when this report was issued, Newsom pushed the blame on to counties and cities that Sacramento was Sacramento's fingerprints weren't on this whatsoever.
Now, the governor had been, according to Kevin Kiley formerly in the state assembly the governor have been stonewalling this audit for a long time and You now have at least 180 000 people in the state who are homeless it's probably closer to 200 000 because it's just it's hard to find them.
And Sometimes there's just guesses that are made and bill last a couple of weeks ago, I did a I did a public event in Los Altos, not too far from Stanford where the other speaker was Newsom's senior policy advisor on homelessness, a woman named Hefsa Keke who's a former social worker, and she's now advising the government on homelessness policies.
And Bill, I have to tell you, when I when I walked away from that meeting, it was remarkably depressing because The state just doesn't have any kind of handle on what the economics of of what's going on with homelessness are of what the sensible initiatives would be. And I suggested to her some really simple statistics, such as there are about two and a half million people who live in households that pay over 50 percent of their pre tax income on rent.
If one little thing goes wrong in these households, they're not going to be able to make their payment. If that's just 1 percent of those households have something bad happen, that's an additional 25, 000 people every year into homelessness. We're simply never going to get out from under this. And what the state needs to understand is, we're never going to get out from under this, and they need to start spending money much more wisely and keep track of that.
For more UN videos visit www. un. org But I also asked her I said why are we spending a million dollars per apartment unit? On homelessness housing. You see this throughout the state in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica. Santa Monica just approved a 120 unit apartment complex just three blocks from the beach that's going to cost about 125 million to build, over a million dollars per unit, and you're three blocks from Santa Monica Beach.
And I asked her, I said, why are we doing this? Shouldn't we be asking local governments? To have some accountability over this because we're building home. We're building housing for the homeless at a cost about 14 times greater than the median home in the united states I didn't get an answer from that. So it's This this could bankrupt the
state as we go, going into the future. So Lee, 24 billion over a period of time, almost population by my math has increased about 20 percent in California at least. So throwing dollars at the problem nearly is not the solution. Do you is anybody out there offering a creative alternative here? In terms of just re channeling money or just coming up with a policy that is non fiscal. In other words, their way to address this other than just blasting billions and billions of dollars at it.
Yeah as as I've studied the issue, there's really if you want to make progress, there are two things you have to do. One is you have to increase psychiatric bed capacity enormously within the state. Newsom's policy advisor, she didn't know that, About one out of eight homeless are paranoid schizophrenic about one out of ten are bipolar about one out of eight are severely depressed. This comes down to about 000 people within the state who simply
need to be in person psychiatric treatment. And again, we talked about San Francisco. These are the people in the Tenderloin and South of Marquette. near Civic Center. They need substantial psychiatric treatment. So you have to, you have to confront that fact that there's about 70, 60 to 70, 000 people who are in dire need of psychiatric treatment. And the other thing is that you can't just expect everybody who wants to live in California has the
right to live in California. There's a lot of low income households in California that simply have no realistic chance of living anywhere. In the Los Angeles area in San Francisco, San Diego along the coasts, we need to build housing and more affordable areas.
I did a couple of back of the back the envelope calculations that I suggested to her, which is if you build in the if you build in the Inland Empire and the San Joaquin Valley, Central Valley and you use a manufactured housing, which is homes that are built in the factory from start to finish. You ship out a home that's ready to live in, you put it in Modesto, that's about 150, 000. That, not a million dollars, that's about 150, 000 for up to a family of three. That's a home
that people in those income classes could afford. But the, the state of California is going to sink very quickly if we continue to spend 800, 000, a million dollars plus. And a single apartment unit. And yet there's no one in Sacramento that's asking questions about this. The rest of the country is throwing up their hands and saying, what did the people in California doing? And so if I was advising the Trump campaign, that's another thing I would take a look
at. Not only just the homeless, but just look how money is being wasted on that. Evan, this is a smart politician guys. And he understands that if he is going to be. Buried by an issue in California, it's going to be the drawing images of encampments,
homeless encampments across California. Let me briefly tell you about an encounter I had with homeless since the other day, then we can move on. I'm in my local Safeway, it's a very nice Safeway, a large one, one of these places where if you come from another country, you marvel at what America offers. And I'm in there mindlessly going about my business, and this woman is walking down the main road. One that runs parallel to all the checkouts. And I look at her and I
noticed something rather intriguing about her. She is wearing what appears to be a leotard or a unitard or a, some sort of surfing outfit, only she's pulled the top off it. She's walking around the Safeway topless. Barefoot talking to herself, mumbling in a strange language. And everyone's just looking at her. She's walking about the store. She's headed to the ice cream place to get some ice cream,
if you will. And I was just thinking to myself, somebody just takes a video footage, this photo of this crazed person walking around topless and Safeway. Welcome to California, and that's, and I think that's part of the image the governor has to push out, and maybe that's why he is out there so boldly cleaning the streets, but, I think with all things with DUSA, it always starts with a very bold pronouncement, a very bold plan, a very bold plan of attack, but
then the question is, how does it get executed? I'm just saying if six months or a year from now we're doing this podcast, it'd be very interesting to see what kind of progress we can point to. Another bold plan that has been dogging Newsom is the 20, 20 an hour fast food employee minimum wage law that was put into effect earlier this year. A recent survey of 182 limited service restaurant operators in the state found that 98 percent have raised their prices,
89 percent have reduced employee hours, and 70 percent have conducted layoffs. Lee, can Newsom dig himself out of this hole and peel off any potential labeling as a San Francisco liberal? Should he decide to seek Higher office in the future. Jonathan he's put out factoids in which he's made claims such as higher wages
are great for everybody, fast food jobs are rising. And this is misleading. What we know is that the survey that you just referred to which was done of over a hundred franchises. All of nearly all of them are raising prices. Which is something the government, the governor doesn't talk about and year over year, California fast food prices are up about 8 percent compared to a little over 3 percent in the rest of the country. So no, it's not good for
everyone. They're just a simple economics is. If you raise a business's cost, they pass it on to consumers, and that's what exactly what we're seeing. Consumers are paying the price for this. Profit margins in fast food are really small 7%. McDonald's, maybe 9%. They have a very effective formula for how they do this. That's the cost of capital. You really can't squeeze those margins much thinner So all that happens is that just
prices go up to consumers. So simply a transfer Of income from those who buy fast food to those who produce fast food and jobs are going down Shift lengths are going down overtime is less the latest data. Showed that there's about a thousand fewer jobs In in restaurants in California. Now, this is really all restaurants in California, not just fast food. I have not been able to find a data series that's just fast food for California down about 1000. It may be much more than that
because fast food is about 57 percent of restaurant jobs in in California. So I don't so again, I think this will be pinned on him. And again, just he's a master at at turning numbers around. His latest pronouncement was he was very upset with the Wall Street Journal. He's very upset with Fox for reporting these types of statistics that are negative about the law. The numbers are what the numbers are. Prices are up. Jobs are down. And fast food, the
franchisees many of them own just one franchise. It's an entrepreneurial model. Those people are feeling, those people are feeling squeezed and it's an entrepreneurial model that more, this more proportionally represented by those in the Latino community, Asian community, Black community, what people would call underrepresented minorities. So they're being squeezed as well. It's certainly not the win that, that Newsom has been advertising.
Yeah, but Lee, this caught my attention because governors get attacked from all sides, and they have to decide where they push back and how hard they push back. And anytime he gets attacked on this topic, he pushes back very hard. He goes online, he throws data, as you mentioned. He wants to really undermine his critics on this, and I suspect that's because, to get to the politics of this, he understands this is just a very bad thing to be charged with, to be seen
as the enemy of fast food, if you will. Personal anecdote. I was in South Carolina in July, hanging out with my sister and her four grandsons, and I took them to lunch at Chick fil A one afternoon. Cost me about 80 bucks because these little guys just like to order a la carte off the menu. And before you know it, you blazed through a lot of money. So I think people associate
fast food with cheap times out. They don't see that in this age of inflation. And so if you're the governor who's in favor of the 20 minimum wage, you could be linked to higher food prices. You got a problem. So I think that just simply explains why he pushes back so hard of this narrative. It's just gum on the shoe. It just will not leave.
No, Bill. And, he pushed back very hard on the allegation that the fast food law was providing an exemption for one of his political supporters who owns a lot of Panera Bread franchises. There was a carve out for Panera within the law, and Newsom said no, it's not a carve out. Then
why was it in there in the first place? And, he did a he did an interview with Old Time NBC reporter in L. A., Conan Nolan where he just was absolutely not giving an inch just about how ridiculous and outrageous this suggestion was that there was any kind of pay for play. And yet, those who were involved in the in the negotiations of The final stages of the fast food
bill say absolutely. That's what was involved that there is this carved out for Panera Bread, and it was for a politically important donor for the president for the governor. Yeah he'll keep fighting it lead. It's what he says versus what people see when
people see higher prices. They linked it to Gentlemen, this coming month, August, marks two large milestones for presidents who have California and Quaker, religious Quaker roots, and that is Herbert Hoover, whose name our institution bears, whose 150th birthday
anniversary is commemorated on August 10th. And the other is Richard Nixon, whose resignation will have taken place 50 years ago on August Eighth following the Watergate affair the Hoover Mission Library and Archives has been commemorating both milestones with exhibits, exhibitions, and events, event series. Bill, I understand that you'll be talking about
Hoover's life and legacy in an upcoming podcast. Yes, I did a podcast yesterday with George Dash, who has written multiple biographies on Hoover. And I wanted to do so because as you mentioned, the 150th birthday is coming up, there'll be a celebration at the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, where he was born and where he is now. Rest in peace. But what I want to talk about with George was just the totality of this man's life. He was on the planet for 90 years. To the extent
most people know about it's two negative consequences. One is the Great Depression. The other one is the market crash. But they don't understand the life he led, and it's just a fantastic American life story of a kid who was born into a Quaker household in Iowa. As you mentioned, his parents he is orphaned when he's 10 years old. He has to move to Oregon. He then ends up at this new universities experiment in education called Stanford University. He's a
member of the pioneer class of 1895. His wife, Lou Henry Hoover graduates three years later for the first 40 years of his life. He is a man of the world. He is a geology major at Stanford. He goes off and he makes a fortune in gold mining in Austria. He's involved in mining operations in China. He works out of London. So up to 1914, he is very successful in the world. Then you go into a second phase of his life, which has to do with humanitarian efforts.
This is relief for famine in Belgium and later relief in the Soviet Union, starvation there. So you see a personal side of him, one who wants to help people. Let's skip past the years, Washington, the presidency, that's another topic for another day. George Dash and I got into was his post presidency, which was in part a very big pushback against collectivism. He was just very alarmed by the New Deal. What with Hoover is at all times a lot of intellectual
thought. He's a very pernicious writer. He's very busy for his whole 90 years. And, oh, by the way,
I forgot to mention, 1919, he forms the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace. Anyway, it's a very large, very colorful life, and it just doesn't get its due because you associate him again with the market crash and the Depression. Before this podcast going into Richard Nixon a little bit, I spent more than a decade at the Richard Nixon library and I was thinking about some parallels between our time and the Nixon era and just a few facts Nixon and the vice
presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, roughly the same age when campaigning for the presidency both Kamala Harris and Richard Nixon both campaigned for president after having served as U. S. Senator of the Golden State. And vice president United States and for Nixon year that year was 1960 against JFK. Donald Trump and Richard Nixon both have been nominated by their party three separate times Republican party three separate times. And for Nixon, those years were 1960,
68 and 72. Richard Nixon, like Donald Trump, both won and lost closely contested elections. For Nixon, it was 1960 and 1968, which he won in 68, and then both men made improbable political comebacks. Like 2024, Nixon was elected during a year that saw a president decline to seek another term. You saw anti war protests and a democratic convention in Chicago. And like Trump, Nixon had faced impeachment and legal issues following his time as president.
And like Biden, Nixon's political life ended after having lost support of his own political party. Back in 1974, which is 50 years, 50 years on. And I add a couple of notes there, Jonathan. Unlike Donald Trump, Richard Nixon handled the 1960 results gracefully. He could have easily challenged Illinois and turned the country into a real crisis, but he said, no, it's not worth doing at the expense of the nation. One other parallel that we can go back to Nixon
here, Herbert Hoover died on October 20th, 1964. Do you know who was born on October 20th, 1964? Connolly Harris. So interesting, Bo. But no, Jonathan, I'm curious as to how the Nixon library handles the resignation, because again, with Nixon, you have this very rich life. I think Nixon lived what, 81 years, I believe, and you can go into his, what led him to Duke, and then what led him into public service. You can talk about his time in Congress,
in the House and the Senate. You can talk about the Vice Presidency. You could talk about being banished in the early 1960s and having this really unlikely comeback in 1968. You could talk about the innovative presidency, and you could focus on Watergate as a tech sector. But how does the library segregate this one moment in time, this resignation? Is it something, it's not something you celebrate, obviously, but then again, it's
such a large event, you can't ignore it either. Yeah, it's interesting. In 1990, when the Nixon Library was founded, it was founded as a private presidential library. It wasn't a presidential library, it wasn't part of the National Archive system of libraries, so for various
legal issues. Relating to Nixon's resignation in 74. But then in 2007, so the original, there was an original Watergate exhibit there that was back in 1990 that was actually written by co written by Richard Nixon and one of his post presidential aides at the time. So it was really, the Watergate exhibit was really written from Nixon's perspective on the whole. On the whole issue, he does admit to making mistakes, but he largely, his viewpoint is that his his
enemies were out to. Destroy his presidency. Fast forward to 2007, the National Archives assumes control and redoes they don't do it. They don't redo the whole library, but they, redo just one of the one of the exhibits and that's the Watergate exhibit. So that was a source of, tension between the National Archives and the private Nixon Foundation and the family didn't like the way Nixon was overall portrayed. But in 2016, something interesting happened.
There was a change of leadership at the library and there was more of a coming together between the National Archives and the Foundation and there was a campaign to redo. At the Nixon Library. So the idea was, is to show a really interesting portrayal of Nixon's times. It's not a hagiography, it shows the president's tenure, Wharton warts and all. But it sh really focuses on the success of the of the administration. Things like the all
volunteer force and Title IX and all that other, all the other stuff. But it focuses Watergate. That one Watergate exhibit that didn't change. it focuses it within the context of the political events at the time. So as soon as visitors come in to see the to see the library, the first exhibit they come into is 19, is the tumultuous decade of the 1960s and the Vietnam War. So they get to see what exactly, the events that kind of led to the political context of Nixon's presidency.
I don't think there'll be commemorating the 50th anniversary this year. I know there'll be Debuting a book there written by about Pat Nixon, First Lady Pat Nixon suffered a stroke after the administration ended that book is called The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, that, that'll actually be an event Heathley will actually be at Hoover on August 8th to talk about that talk about the book,
that book as well. But I think. Yeah, I grew up in Washington D. C. And when I was 14 years old, that's the year that Nixon resigned. And my father, who was really good about understanding what was going on in history and
making sure that his idiot son saw these things unfolded. Remember when I was nine years old, he put me in the car and he drove me over to the Pentagon so we could see the peace protest, the Earth Day protests that were going on. I remember he took a photo of a G. I was waving the peace sign. Just a great photo. But on the night before Nixon resigned, my father told me to get in the car and we drove down to Lafayette Park, Lafayette Square. And you wouldn't believe
what our show was that night. We were just Nixon haters running for us and they were They had oil drums and banging drums and celebrating and dancing around because Nixon was out the next day. My father said to me, just, I want you to see this because you may not see it in your lifetime, Lee, we do see the Nixon resignation pop up in a couple of regards when Biden went on the air the other day to supposedly explain why he was not running though. He never got around to it.
I was have expecting him to announce that he was resigning for the presidency altogether. But the other thing which kind of persistently is the notion that when Biden was going through his struggles, you had this conversation about who's going to do what happened in Nixon. Remember, a couple of Republican senators and Republican congressmen go to him in the White House and say that, basically you're out of options. So the question was with the Democrats. Do
the same with Biden. Would there be a delegation on Wednesday, Joe, we love you, you got to go. No, it seems to me that even though things are 50 years in the past, they're still relevant in this day and age, really. Yeah, Bill, they are. And interestingly, last month when I was spending some time at Hoover Jonathan and I bumped into each other at a Hoover event that was a a historian's a historian's presentation about Nixon.
And it was both live at Stouffer, at the Stouffer Auditorium, and it was also on Zoom. And at the end of the presentation, when the historian was taking questions guess who calls in by phone? Former White House Counsel John Dean calls in. I, and I think he was under the age of 40. When he was when he was White House counsel, all those all the, I think now he's in his mid eighties, maybe mid to late eighties. But sure enough, John Dean calls in with
an excellent question as well. Jonathan, John Dean's probably the most welcome, but not the most welcome guy at the Nixon library, I'm guessing. It's an interesting the whole context of Watergate as I talked about earlier is really interestingly portrayed as is the presidency of Richard Nixon in general. And one thing I'd like to note is that about Richard
Nixon is the the post presidency. Is really, you mentioned the post presidency of Herbert Hoover, the post presidency of Richard Nixon is really interesting because he he wrote not, he wrote eight books in his post presidency, but serious books, and he sought the presidents from George W. Bush to Bill Clinton, really sought his counsel. So before he died in In 1994, he was his advice was on, especially on foreign policy and you go on fact finding trips to
Russia and China and things like that was really invaluable to his successor. But all that's taught up all at the Nixon Library, and I suggest our listeners go down to Yorba Linda and check it out. Before we end this podcast if I can add one more Nixon story, I worked for Pete Wilson when he was governor of California and Pete Wilson is tied into Richard Nixon in this regard. Wilson graduated from the Berkeley law school in 1962. He actually was a
driver on the Nixon gubernatorial campaign. And a few years later, as a young lawyer in San Diego, He was approached by the Nixon world to work for then Vice President Nixon, who was thinking about running in 1960. It was about 1965 or so, Lee and Jonathan. And a meeting was arranged and Wilson goes in and he sits down with the great man and Nixon starts talking just about ambitions and what he wants to do. And this is how Nixon met Pat Buchanan, by the
way. He was just going around the country, looking for talented young men to come work for him. So as the governor has told me the story they're having a conversation about national politics. And then Nixon finally turns into and says Pete, what And Governor says good to see you, Mr. Vice President. I'm thinking about running for an assembly seat. And then as he says, you can literally see a light bulb go up over Nixon's head. And it's Pete, tell me about the
district. What's the registration right now? What are the issues? And he quickly goes into this campaign political move. And I think that's an important thing to know about Nixon. For all the people want to focus on White House and the character flaws. This is a man with just a brilliant mind in so many ways, just a brilliant policy, a brilliant foreign policy figure, a man who was very innovative on the domestic front, but also a
man who really reveled in politics in that regard. So go figure. You go sit down with a former vice president and a very serious world figure and the next thing you do, you just get caught up in the intricacies of calculating the assembly seat. By the way, then that story Nick said, worth the effective, if that's what you want to do, you got to go seek your dream and run. And the Governor Oskar half jokingly says, I'm glad he did that because
who knows where I would have been a decade later if I'd stayed with him. End of story. You know what gets lost in Nixon's Watergate legacy is just a remark. What a remarkably intelligent person he was. And it hearkens back to a time of politics when the extremely intelligent people did run at the national level. Not that long ago, I was looking at YouTube video of the Nixon Kennedy debates. It's an eye, it is an eye opener particularly when it's juxtaposed
against the debate we we most recently, we've most recently saw. Two extremely intelligent people who were discussing foreign policy issues, nuclear warfare issues national policy issues. To an electorate in 1960, there was much, on average, much less educated than today. I encourage people to take a look at that. Google. Google Nixon Kennedy debates, and it's an eye opener and about that debate. John Kennedy was what?
43 years old at the time, and Richard Nixon was born four years before John Kennedy. So these air very young postwar generation, and it really is a general election. Whereas I think if you look at this, even though Biden has talked about being a transitional president, Kamala Harris is at the baby boom, since 1964. So she may be different from the president in terms of style and presentation, but policy change, we really don't shift.
Anyway, to be continued, gentlemen, as always, this has been an interesting hour of timely analysis, gentlemen. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Lee. Thanks, fellas. You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, the Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the free world. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you might hear it. And if you don't mind, please spread the word, get your
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Bill Whalen and Leo Hanian write every week. Again, this is Jonathan Movroydis sitting in Bill Whalen's chair this week. I'll be back for another episode of Matters of Policy and Politics. Thank you for listening. This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom. For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts, or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.