Column

CUMMING, Iowa — The hardened boys who came of age in this dirt-poor farm hamlet during the 1950s had no illusions about their place in the world. Their extended Irish families taught them a reality as cold and brutal as a Midwest winter’s morning. They faced life at the bottom of the heap.

Within the Harkin clan, whose numbers teemed through the countryside, Tom Harkin and his family had it worst of all. His mother had died when he was 10 years old. An older half-brother was deaf. Tom was packed off on a lonely odyssey to live first with one half-sister, then another. When he returned four years later, his father, a struggling miner-turned-handyman, offered little solace. “If you’re waiting for somebody to give you something,” Patrick Harkin said, “you’re gonna be sitting in a rocking chair all your life.”

Beyond Cumming–a blur of weathered trailers and clapboard houses 20 miles south of Des Moines–lay hostile country. Norwalk, the nearest town, was resented, a symbol of everything Cumming was not. Norwalk’s farmers, Methodists and Republicans, prospered. Cumming, an enclave of Irish Catholics and Democrats, seemed locked in perpetual decline.

Only on Halloween nights did Cumming exact a measure of vengeance. Its teen-age sons stole into Norwalk, waiting until the streets were deserted. Then they tipped over outhouses. They blocked roads with bales of hay. They took wagons apart and reassembled them atop grain elevators. When the boys from Cumming swaggered home, Tom Harkin was often among them.

The victories were brief; adolescent pranks that are now faint memories. But Harkin’s Halloween nights served as a rudimentary political awakening, the first taste of what it was like to get even with his betters.

His harsh rites of passage in American Gothic country shaped a career that has taken him from a victory in a 1974 congressional race to a U.S. Senate seat and has now propelled him into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Those formative years continue to cast a shadow, having left Harkin with a class-conscious mind-set and a deep well of ambition, searing him with the belief that conflict breeds opportunity.

“Life was a struggle,” he says, echoing his father’s homespun philosophy. “You worked hard, you didn’t agonize over your situation. And when things didn’t turn out, well, then you carried on until you got another chance.”

That ethos–and Harkin’s stubborn triumph as a self-made man–might seem a blueprint for the making of a conservative. But coming to adulthood amid the John F. Kennedy generation, Harkin emerged an unabashed liberal. He seeks change through partisan combat, maintaining an abiding faith in the corn-belt populist causes he has championed all his life. And he tempers his idealism with a gut instinct for electoral survival.

As a presidential campaigner, Harkin flaunts heartland roots and hardball tactics that unnerve opponents. In the presidential race, he has been a scornful rhetorician, sarcastically damning President Bush as “George Herbert Hoover Bush” and primary foes as “microwave Democrats.” His voice trembles when he is on an emotional roll, eerily reminiscent of Hubert H. Humphrey’s excitable quaver. Quoting the Bible (Corinthians), Harkin likens himself to a trumpeter, insisting his message–a beneficent federal government combined with hard-eyed leadership–will produce “a strong, certain sound” to lead his party into battle.

“He’s got a raging forest fire in his belly,” says Roger Jepsen, a Bush Administration official who lost his Senate seat to Harkin in 1984.

Harkin decided to run for the White House early last year, telling intimates during the Gulf War that Bush’s soaring popularity ratings would not last and that a worsening recession was the best chance for an “old-fashioned Democrat” to compete and win.

“I don’t have deep pockets,” he says. “I don’t have a famous name . . . but I’ve got some pretty deep feelings and beliefs, and it seems to me this is a good time to see if other people have them, too.”

Clings to the Past

In an era when many Democrats are trying to forge a new synthesis to retake the White House, Harkin embraces the past. He cherishes the party’s whistle-stop vestiges, quotes dead presidents, mines ideas in the successes of past administrations. Just this past Friday night, on a nationally televised debate, he called for “a new New Deal.”

Harkin also politicizes his own past, using stories about his family’s hard luck to etch human faces on issues important to him. But in his eagerness to draw parallels, some critics say, Harkin has stretched and distorted details of his life and accomplishments. The examples, they contend, range from his record as a Vietnam-era airman to the importance of the role he plays in Congress.

Such questions about Harkin’s credibility reflect deeper concerns about the kind of leader he would make. Detractors say his combativeness and preoccupation with old ideas would be liabilities in a president.

Supporters counter that Harkin’s unshakable commitment to the verities of Democratic liberalism and his willingness to defend that philosophy tooth-and-nail have been his strengths, making him a formidable candidate and an effective legislator; in essence, a liberal’s Ronald Reagan.

A stern, flinty vision out of a Matthew Brady plate, Harkin, 52, insists his passion is mistaken for anger, yet he is loath to dwell on inner motivation. He is most at ease in his Colonial-style suburban Virginia home with his wife, a Washington lawyer, their two daughters and a small circle of friends and advisers. “I’m not one,” he says, “to sit and stew day after day about who and what I am.”

The portrait that emerges from Harkin’s own words, as well as from dozens of friends, associates and enemies, is of a man whose roots cradle, anchor and imprison him. As Harkin surveys the American landscape of the 1990s, it is always through Cumming’s black-and-white lens.

Heart of the Heartland

Southwest Iowa is the heart of the heart of the country.

It is a place of flat fields and grain silos, manure-stained work shoes and bib overalls, turkey hunts and steak frys. In summer, the air is alive with the buzz of combines. In winter, the machines lay idle in frozen corn stubble. Painter Grant Wood used area farmers–taciturn men with worn faces–as models for his Depression-era American portraits.

Scattered along the farmland’s fringe are ghostly earthen reminders that the region also once had an industrial base–coal mines, most of them sealed for decades, where miners toiled in black dust. In Cumming, it was the Orilla mine that lured outsiders.

Cumming has changed little over the years. Most of its 150 residents scrape by on low-paying jobs or on relief. A stunted water tower, barely higher than jack pines, marks the town for passersby. Visitors to American Legion Post 562 are warned: “Parking for Irish only. All others will be towed.”

That attitude “sounds mean and parochial,” says Robert W. Pratt, a Des Moines lawyer and Harkin intimate, “but it makes life more manageable for the people on the bottom. That’s where Tom comes from.”

It is how Patrick Harkin and his wife, Frances Bercic, dealt with the world. They met in Cumming in the late 1920s. He was a gaunt Irish miner at Orilla, she a Slovenian emigre whose first husband died, leaving two girls and a boy. The pair married in 1927, moving into a cramped one-story bungalow where they had three more boys. Thomas Richard Harkin, the youngest, was born on Nov. 19, 1939.

Weeks after his birth, the infant was scalded as his mother sterilized fruit jars. While he howled in pain, his frantic parents tried to decide what to do. There was no doctor in Cumming, and on the father’s pittance of a paycheck, a trip to a Des Moines hospital was out of the question.

“His two older sisters carried him around for days on a pillow so his raw skin wouldn’t touch anything,” recalls first cousin Martin Harkin. “That’s how poor they were.”

As a young child, Tom Harkin filtered out his poverty. The rest of the family was less sheltered. Frank, his deaf half-brother, had to be sent to a school for the disabled. Then the mine closed. All Patrick Harkin had to show for his years underground were frequent bouts of pneumonia. It was the start of black lung disease that would eventually kill him.

The father is described by neighbors as an austere man who wore wire-rim spectacles, argued during poker hands and brewed potent, illegal beer in his basement. “He felt the same way we all did,” says Joseph Kirvin, a longtime neighbor. “It was the Irish against the world.”

Frances Harkin, a willowy woman with a cleft chin inherited by her sons, pushed her brood to study hard. One fall day in 1950, she came in from gathering eggs, lay down on the couch and passed out, dying two days later of a cerebral hemorrhage. Her husband and the older siblings decided Tom should move into his sister’s home in Rock Springs, Wyo.

“Dad felt Tom needed someone to mother him and his sister could do it best,” says John Harkin, an older brother. Tom Harkin prefers not to dwell on what he felt inside.

In Rock Springs–another bleak mining town–folks rarely got along with their neighbors, least of all the miners’ children. Harkin, new in town, was fresh prey. “I just remember kids picking on me all the time and, by God, I had to stick up for myself and fight back,” he says.

Returning after three years in Rock Springs and a year with another sister in Dexter, Iowa, Tom Harkin was no longer the family’s baby. His father, now in his 60s, eked out a living from odd jobs. The boy had to pay his own way. Working after school and during summers, Harkin pruned weeds from bean fields, baled hay, hammered railroad ties, sweated under the sun with highway crews.

On school days, he caught long rides to Dowling High, a weathered brick Catholic school in Des Moines. Dowling’s pupils divided into a pecking order. At the top were affluent Irish kids from the westside of Des Moines. Then came poorer Italians. At the bottom were the country boys. Harkin was rarely taunted, but his sense of exclusion, already seeded by Cumming’s rivalry with Norwalk, intensified at Dowling.

“Some of the priests were always buttering up the rich kids,” says Chuck Hanrahan, a boyhood friend. “They wouldn’t give us the time of day. That kind of thing just burned Tom up.” Says Harkin: “They treated us like hicks.”

In class, he kept his resentment hidden. Like his older brothers, Harkin, an honor student, planned to study civil engineering, and after his senior year he followed them to Iowa State University on an ROTC scholarship.

“Politics,” he recalls, “was the furthest thing from my mind.”

The telescopic lens of a surveyor’s level gave Harkin his first sense of the world beyond Iowa. Using the instrument for a college class one day in September, 1959, he sighted a crowd, then the squat figure of Nikita S. Khrushchev. Harkin had been only dimly aware that the Soviet leader had come to the campus as part of a whirlwind U.S. tour. “They seemed to be having a lot more excitement than I was,” he recalls.

Kennedy Attraction

But it took the lure of military life and the election of John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race to jolt Harkin into abandoning his somnolent path toward an engineering degree. He returned from a summer on a Navy air base in Florida determined to become a fighter pilot. And after Kennedy’s election, “any of us (Catholics) who had ever tasted prejudice had to feel that the last barrier was gone.”

Harkin fell in with a group of students close to history professor E. B. Smith, an intellectual Democrat in the Adlai E. Stevenson II mold. When Smith ran for Iowa governor in 1962, Harkin volunteered. It was a lost cause, but he came away from a half-year of barnstorming smitten with campaign work.

“It was seat-of-the-pants politics.” says John Fitzpatrick, the strategist for Harkin’s presidential campaign and a former political science professor. “He had just got his flying license, and here he was, flying Smith into these small-town airports. It had to be intoxicating.”

Graduating with a government degree, Harkin’s military commitment kept him from using his new political connections. He was sent to Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba and put on flight duty, shadowing Soviet MIGs. From 1965 to 1967, he served at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan, testing and flying repaired aircraft damaged in Vietnam. He flew F-8s, the Navy’s nimble greyhounds, and learned to handle F-4s, fast, but lethally sluggish at high speeds.

Plaudits as Pilot

Harkin mastered both planes and won loyalty from his enlisted crew. “He was the best pilot I flew with over there,” says Charles Hart, a Los Angeles aircraft firm employee who spent four years as a navigator at Atsugi. “He had great reactions and judgment . . . and he took great care of his troops. When he says he’s for the working man, he’s for real.”

During Harkin’s two years at Atsugi, Hart says, the young pilot made at least 15 trips to the war zone. “We usually stayed a few hours,” Hart says. “Just long enough to catch a flight out.” Harkin’s brief stays, mostly in Da Nang, became an issue years later when political rivals claimed he exaggerated his Vietnam experience on his resume.

Hart and James Glavin, a former Atsugi pilot now living in Kansas City, insist that though Harkin was never under fire, his war years were anything but cushy. The test flights to determine whether the repaired jets were battle-worthy, Glavin says, “were damned necessary for the war effort.”

On one F-4 flight at 45,000 feet, both engines stalled out. Harkin calmly waited until he could reignite, taking the plane down safely, Hart recalls. Another time, assigned to ferry an F-8 to the Philippines, Harkin was grounded because of a bad cold. The pilot who replaced him stopped in Okinawa to refuel. On liftoff, Hart says, the plane malfunctioned. Its fuel tank ripped away and was sucked into an engine. The ensuing fireball killed the pilot.

Allure of Sailing

“Anyone who thinks we had it easy is fooling himself,” Harkin says flatly.

Still, Harkin had enough leave time to sail a catamaran he and another pilot ordered from a Japanese boat builder with visions of sailing around the world. (Harkin now keeps a sailboat in a Bahamas vacation cabin he built several years ago and, at home, drives a white Corvette.)

His ambitious sailing plans were interrupted by budding romance. On a weekend trip to Tokyo, he met and pursued a Minnesota woman after hearing her flat Midwest accent. Ruth Raduenz, a strong-willed farm child with a literature degree, was on vacation from her job running an enlisted men’s club in Korea. Outside the Buddhist temple where they met, Harkin pressed her for a date. They married in Iowa a year later, in 1968.

Now an attorney, Ruth Harkin juggles mothering two daughters, Amy, 15, and Jenny, 10, and a career as a lobbyist with the influential Washington law firm once headed by political insider–and now Moscow ambassador–Robert S. Strauss. She is her husband’s closest adviser. John Frew, Harkin’s former Senate campaign manager, calls her “the smartest political spouse in the country. She’s lawyerly and gives timely, savvy advice.”

The couple spoke nothing of politics on their first dates. “He’d do so many funny little things,” his wife recalls. “On our second date, he made all these elaborate plans (for both of them) to climb Mt. Fuji. And I barely knew the guy.”

They stayed in touch by letter after she returned to Korea. She found a thoughtful, keen mind behind the airman’s Top Gun swagger. He began confiding doubts about the war. Harkin still supported its aims, but fellow pilots’ tales of botched operations and sorties over civilian targets had made him cynical about its progress.

“We all had anger about the way the war was being run,” Chuck Hart recalls.

Vietnam became the central focus of Harkin’s fledgling political career, the source of his first major controversy and the dominant issue of his early campaigns.

Moves to Capital

After a series of unfulfilled political jobs in Iowa, Harkin decided he needed Washington experience. Moving there with his wife in 1970, he was hired as an aide to Rep. Neal Smith (D-Iowa), whom Harkin had worked for during an earlier reelection campaign. Smith, known for his quiet influence in the House, then found Harkin a job as a staffer with a House committee studying the Vietnam War. Flying to Saigon that June with the committee, Harkin and two other congressmen went to the town of Con Son, where the government ran a prison for political opponents. The party talked their way into the compound and found 500 emaciated inmates shackled inside five-foot high “tiger cages.”

Recording the squalid scene by camera and on tape, Harkin gave the evidence to Smith. But on the plane back, Harkin wrote later in the Progressive magazine, he learned that the committee planned to make only a minor reference to the prison. In Washington, Harkin confronted Smith in the House parking lot and “grabbed the film and tape” from the congressman’s car trunk. Fired by the committee for insubordination after calling its report a “whitewash,” Harkin sold his photographs to Life magazine for $10,000, using the money to attend Catholic University law school.

Harkin’s friends and foes agree the incident was a telling one, an indicator of the aggressive conduct that continues to divide those who know him into opposing camps. Admirers paint him as a principled loner who identifies with underdogs and takes on political Goliaths.

“He’s able to relate to people who feel they don’t have any worth, who need someone to stand up for them,” says Rep. Lane Evans, (D-Ind.), who works with Harkin in the Populist Caucus, an affiliation of liberal Midwest Democratic congressmen.

‘Inch Deep, Mile Wide’

Harkin’s critics–not only GOP opponents, but some Democratic colleagues–say he is an ineffectual legislator given to grandstanding and motivated by publicity. “Beyond his farm-belt circle, he’s just not a key player in Congress,” says a former Democratic House member who requested anonymity. Says William Scherle, Harkin’s first GOP congressional conquest: “Tom Harkin is like the Platte River. He’s an inch deep and a mile wide.”

Harkin tested the waters to run against Scherle when he returned to Iowa in 1972 and became a lobbyist for a Des Moines Legal Aid office. Robert Pratt, who worked there, says Harkin sewed up support on the “rubber chicken” political dinner circuit and appeared at peace rallies–a stern figure in pyramid sideburns and wide ties, totally opposed to the war.

Scherle beat Harkin that year (though the challenger’s 45% total was considered respectable amid Richard M. Nixon’s landslide). Harkin blames his loss on trying to sound like a Kennedy clone. “I tried to be urbane and highbrow and intellectual and it didn’t work,” he says.

The night he lost, Harkin ranted for more than an hour at campaign workers, blaming them for failing to get out the vote, says Pratt, one of his volunteers. Intimates say Harkin is often easily angered, but rarely holds grudges. “He had every right to bitch,” Pratt says. “Those people didn’t do their jobs.”

Two years later, it was Scherle who raged. Harkin was among 75 Democrats first elected in 1974 as a national backlash to the Watergate scandal. Harkin credits his victory to “being myself,” learning farmers’ concerns and simplifying his approach. He now often shows up at small town events in jeans, flannel shirts and work boots.

The campaign was a model for later battles. Harkin criss-crossed the district and was miserly with campaign funds. Former press spokesman Phil Roeder recalls Harkin dawdling for a half-hour at a pharmacy jewelry rack before replacing a broken watch with a new $9 model.

Early in the ’74 campaign against Scherle, Harkin alleged that the incumbent had committed election infractions. They included the charge that Scherle had violated federal “franking” laws–regulations governing congressional mailings–by sending out overly large postcards to constituents. This was not the kind of restrained behavior GOP politicians in Iowa expected from Democrats, known for fielding intellectual moralists. Harkin fought. Hard.

“Anyone who goes into a campaign with him expecting any civility or rules is in for trouble,” says Jepsen, the Republican who lost his Senate seat to Harkin in 1984 and is now chairman of the National Credit Union Administration.

He Strikes First

When Harkin took on Jepsen in 1984, his campaign was again marked by preemptive strikes. Harkin, who had consistently voted as a congressman for social programs spurned by the Reagan Administration, expected the incumbent to use his record as an issue. So Harkin struck first, using television ads to label Jepsen as “Red Ink Roger” for his votes to raise the defense budget–a move Jepsen now acknowledges blunted his use of the spending issue.

The abortion issue also threatened to paint Harkin, a pro-choice advocate, into a corner. For much of the campaign against Jepsen, he was tailed by pro-life demonstrators. Convinced Jepsen was behind the protests, Harkin’s campaign sent out a blizzard of mailers the day before the election, making the spurious claim that the incumbent believed rape victims who had abortions “should be put to death.”

Harkin has no regrets. “It just frustrated the hell out of them,” he says, satisfied.

Tom Synhorst, a political consultant who ran the Senate campaign of Rep. Tom Tauke, Harkin’s most recent GOP victim in 1990, says that the two campaigns showed that Harkin “has a real knack for muddying the debate.”

His greatest flaw, foes say, is his selective exaggeration of his own past. Among a litany of complaints, they single out his military resume as his most grievous distortion. Scherle claims Harkin often told college audiences in 1972 that he was a “fighter pilot. He would describe skirmishes and everything else. Hell, he wasn’t in combat.”

Harkin was quoted in a book by Washington Post political writer David Broder as telling a congressional Vietnam Veterans’ Caucus in 1979 that “one year I was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions.” And in an April 1, 1980, statement carried in the Congressional Record, Harkin identified himself as a “Vietnam veteran in Congress.”

A Troubling Issue

Denying that he tries to mislead, Harkin has been scrupulous during the presidential race about his tour of duty. But he has been less than forthright on other matters. He has often cited the layoff of his deaf half-brother, Frank, as an example of how American workers too often are left “on the trash heap.” In emotional speeches that never fail to hush audiences, Harkin recounts how a union-busting campaign in the mid-1970s cost Frank Harkin his machinist’s job despite 23 years’ seniority. In the story’s climax, Harkin tells how his half-brother was reduced to taking a night job cleaning toilets in a shopping mall.

Harkin leaves the impression that his half-brother never rebounded from his job loss. In fact, Harkin helped Frank find a government job as a sorter at the Des Moines Post Office, getting him to apply under a hiring program for the disabled. Frank Harkin retired with a full pension in 1988. “I knew about the program and got him involved in it,” Harkin allows.

Similarly, in stump speeches, Harkin has described his father as a “yellow dog Democrat” and implied that his childhood home was a strong party household. But Harkin’s brother, John, recalls few family political discussions–”We didn’t talk about politics around the dinner table,” he says–and adds that Patrick Harkin was not an active party member. Even Tom Harkin acknowledges that his father was as much a supporter of Catholic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin and Communist-baiter Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy as he was a Franklin D. Roosevelt man.

Harkin dismisses doubts about his credibility as “all politics” and suggests that the press is “suckered” into reporting on the matter.

“These Republicans, they love to stick it to you and run dirty campaigns,” Harkin says. “But once you do it to them, oh my goodness, their skins are as thin as a piece of paper.”

Harkin’s partisan battles extend into his legislative career. As a senator, Harkin has consistently opposed Reagan and Bush administration bills. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action group rates his record on their agenda second only to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Last September, Harkin tried to play legislative Robin Hood with Bush’s defense budget, proposing to transfer $3 billion in military funding to social programs. Although the move would have breached the deficit-reduction compromise previously agreed to by both houses of Congress, Harkin insists that “the money was just sitting there. And I said, ‘Let’s take it out of defense and put it to good use.’ ”

The measure lost by a 69-28 vote.

A tireless crusader on foreign human rights issues, Harkin has traveled on several high profile fact-finding trips to Latin America–brushing aside Republican criticism that he is a meddler. On a trip to Chile to look into allegations that opponents of the military government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet were being murdered and imprisoned, Harkin wound up in “yelling matches” with a Chilean air force general, said former Rep. Toby Moffett of Connecticut, who also went.

“This was at a time when bodies are floating in the river,” said an admiring Moffett. “Tom kept saying, ‘Where are all the missing people?’ Maybe he wasn’t diplomatic, but someone had to speak up for those people.”

Among his legislative accomplishments, Harkin is proudest of his shepherding of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, a bill he pushed as chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Subcommittee. The act mandated sweeping new legal protections and public access for the disabled, winning Harkin a reputation as their voice in the Senate. He even gave part of his final floor speech in sign language.

“He held the coalition together,” says Patrisha Wright, executive director of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund. “And he didn’t get on the bandwagon at the last minute. He’s always been there.”

Yet despite Harkin’s identification with the bill, both Wright and Senate sources say that Sen. Kennedy was just as instrumental in getting consensus for the bill and guiding it to passage. And when the legislation was first introduced in 1988, congressional sources note, the original Senate sponsor was former Connecticut Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr.–not Harkin.

“If you listen to him, he’s the father of it,” a knowledgeable Democrat says. “He takes credit for it in public, but the rest of us had to keep it alive in private. He was an emotional catalyst, sure, but that hurt us as much as helped us.”

Harkin’s maverick stands have alienated legislators on both sides of the aisle. Early last year, he introduced a resolution requiring congressional authorization for the Gulf War–against the wishes of ranking Senate Democrats who wanted to take a more cautious route during a period when President Bush had overwhelming popular support.

Harkin acknowledges that Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) was “a little bit” annoyed at his public show of mutiny. But he says “no punishment came from it.”

Sticks With Causes

His willingness to stick with issues long after they have become lost causes is also a hallmark of Harkin’s legislative style. Aides in both parties say he is effective in wearing down opponents by offering up minor amendments and stalling late-night hearings when other legislators are impatient to adjourn–though they add that Harkin has muted this style a bit since ascending to prominent roles on several Senate committees.

Critics point to his legislative track record as evidence that Harkin is too much the ideologue to make an effective national leader. “He’s totally pragmatic in trying to get elected,” Jepsen says. “But looking at him as a (member of Congress), you wonder whether he’d be able to work with people.”

Harkin’s supporters minimize that portrait as one-dimensional, insisting Harkin has matured over the years. “He can be persistent,” says former Michigan Rep. William Brodhead. “In that sense, he’s our Reagan. But he’s shown that he can be practical when he needs to be.”

In his office, Harkin keeps a rubber stamp marked, “Bullshit,” a reminder of the petty concerns that have obstructed him during his career. Early in the presidential race, he used the word frequently as a graphic symbol of his–and voters’–frustration with the American scene. But Harkin toned down its use after audiences–often, elderly voters–were offended.

“I guess I can hit people in the face sometimes,” he says, only slightly ruefully.

Lately, on the campaign trail, he has been hitting again. Mired deep in the polls, yet publicly unruffled by his standings, Harkin has taken on opponents as if the mere act of being ornery might win him the presidency.

He realizes it will take a profound political shift not only among Democrats, but among American voters, for his campaign to succeed. But with a faltering economy, he says, “the timing is right for a Harry S. Truman-type of a populist to get through to the American people.”

After a dozen years of Republican rule, he banks on the assumption that the country is ripe for a return to the vision put forth by his holy trinity of Democrats–Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy. As the self-proclaimed messenger of that vision, Harkin sees little need to tailor it for what many in his own party see as a different era.

His role, as he has seen it throughout his 18 years in elected office, is to nudge that vision forward through the tough, partisan conflict he relishes.

And then?

“I’ve always believed that people vote first with their hearts and then, if you’re lucky, with their minds,” he says. “But you’ve got to reach their hearts first. That’s what I’m trying to do–talk to people on a gut level.

“Once you’ve done that,” he says, “the rest should follow.”

A Candidacy Shaped by Early Struggles

Background

Born: Nov. 19, 1939, Cumming, Iowa.

Education: Iowa State University (1962). Catholic University of America Law School (1972).

Military Service: U.S. Navy pilot, 1962-1967, stationed in Cuba and Japan.

Family: Married since 1968 to the former Ruth Raduenz. Two daughters, Amy, 15, and Jenny, 10.

Career: Elected 5th District Iowa congressman, 1974. Served five terms. Elected Iowa senator, 1984, and reelected, 1990.

Campaign Themes

Short Term:

* Support legislation requiring companies to adopt policies providing up to 12 weeks of unpaid family leave for childbirth, adoption or serious illness.

* Increase funding for the Head Start program.

* Support legislation giving workers the right to strike without fear of losing their jobs.

* Oppose “fast-track” consideration of U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement.

* Push legislation instructing U.S. members of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to oppose aid for countries spending more on their militaries than on development.

Long Term:

* Eliminate the trade deficit within four years.

* Provide college education for any American who agrees to serve a stint in a new national volunteer force.

* Order defense cuts that would save $420 billion over the next decade, investing much of it in economic rebuilding and renewal of the nation’s infrastructure.

* Reduce the number of American troops stationed in Europe to 25,000 from 280,000.

* Cut the number of strategic nuclear warheads to 1,000 from 12,000 (contingent on agreement of a similar reduction by Russia).

* Create a national health care plan by June, 1993, guaranteeing affordable coverage for all Americans. Specifics of the plan have not yet been provided.

The day after the state’s Senate primary, I was at a gym in Michigan when I overheard a brief exchange about the results of the close race.

The small group of voters were all elderly and white. Most of them expressed disappointment that Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens lost. Most of them questioned victor Abdul El-Sayed’s ability to win in November against a Republican. One of them called El-Sayed — a born and raised Michigander who attended the University of Michigan and ran the Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services for the largest county in the state — “a radical.”

For a few seconds, the group went quiet.

The only sound heard was the echo from the dog whistle that was just blown.

The prejudicial rot at the heart of that comment is just one of the challenges facing El-Sayed in November, however it is the most significant.

MAGA Republicans may complain about identity politics, but they aren’t afraid to use them. During the primary campaign, both Republican gubernatorial candidates in the state continuously ran ads characterizing immigrants as violent criminals. That will likely continue. El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, is endorsed by President Trump, who has been making racially offensive statements for more than half a century.

That’s documented as far back as the 1973 lawsuit the Nixon administration filed against him and his family for racial discrimination, and it’s documented as recently as the octogenarian’s latest social posts about people from Somalia and Haiti. Not to be outdone by his boss, Vice President JD Vance started his fearmongering during a supposed anti-fraud event this week. The 2028 presidential hopeful quipped “God forbid, you’re going to have President El-Sayed in three years” — a thought I had not considered until he said it.

Many of us hadn’t given El-Sayed much consideration at all until recent months. When Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) announced he was not seeking reelection in January 2025, El-Sayed was not considered a strong contender to replace him. Many establishment Democrats believed former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who quietly moved to Michigan after running for the White House in 2020, or Stevens, were the party’s best shot of holding on to the seat and helping Michigan do its part to flip the Senate.

They discounted El-Sayed’s chances in large part because they misread the moment we are in. The days of performative campaign endorsements, huge war chests and strongly worded posts started fading noticeably in 2016 — after Jeb Bush dropped out of the race early despite having north of $100 million at his disposal. Yet over the last decade, establishment Democrats have continued to replay the same playbook with mixed results. And in totality, Tuesday’s primaries in Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, Virginia and Washington are a mixed bag with no clear message beyond whatever you read into these facts: El-Sayed is a Muslim who has criticized the government of Israel, and yet he won a Democratic primary. Even so, the chatter before and after the vote is more revealing than the primary outcome. (On Tuesday, roughly 2 out of 10 eligible voters in the state cast a ballot in Michigan. Sweeping interpretations of El-Sayed’s narrow victory are rather bold when 80% of voters didn’t participate.)

Questions about his electability have little to do with his résumé — the Rhodes scholar led Columbia University’s research on global population health — and more to do with him being the son of Egyptian immigrants who prays five times a day. The president takes photos holding an upside-down Bible and has a 22-foot gold statue of himself, but it is El-Sayed’s faith that should worry good Christian folks?

Over the weeks leading to Tuesday, we saw entire interviews with El-Sayed — an epidemiologist — that dwelled solely on his thoughts about Israel, while voters in his state were dealing with a cyclosporiasis outbreak. He has plenty to say on other topics. Getting “money out of politics” is not only central to his campaign messaging, but also is an actual grassroots ballot initiative in Michigan. Yet the talk about El-Sayed mostly orbits around one foreign policy topic.

To be clear: The issue for establishment Democrats isn’t that something like “Medicare for all” is too radical of an idea to champion. Both President Obama and President Clinton campaigned heavily on healthcare, and history views them both as centrist. No, the concern is how easy it is for Trump, Rogers and other Republicans to “other” El-Sayed, so when he does question our spending priorities it can be painted as un-American or antisemitic. As a result, election analysis is indirectly being dictated by his identity, all but ignoring he’s one of the top healthcare experts in a state still reeling from a foodborne illness.

What El-Sayed and his supporters are questioning isn’t Israel’s right to exist. They’re wondering why the United States, the richest of all the developed democracies, is still the only one that does not guarantee healthcare to its citizens? The list of nations that do guarantee access includes Israel, which receives billions in U.S. aid. For a doctor who has written a book on healthcare access and co-authored about 100 scholarly articles on health, that line of questioning doesn’t seem radical at all.

It is who is doing the asking that unnerves some.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

SACRAMENTO —  Gov. Gavin Newsom will soon leave office without gaining the support of fellow Californians for his most ambitious climate project: the banning of new gas-burning car sales by 2035.

Newsom issued an executive order in 2020 taking new fossil-fueled passenger vehicles off the California market nine years from now.

But roughly two-thirds of Californians think that’s a lousy idea, according to a poll released last week by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

Among likely voters, 65% oppose the termed-out governor’s edict and just 34% support it. The opposition among infrequent or nonvoters is even stronger.

Negative attitudes are especially stiff in inland California — particularly the Central Valley — and among middle-class people with incomes between $40,000 and $100,000, those over age 55 and Republicans.

Opposition to being denied new gas vehicles has grown substantially since 2021, when Californians were evenly divided over the issue.

But the state’s anticipated next governor, moderate Democrat Xavier Becerra, is more in line with Californians’ thinking on gas cars than is Newsom.

Becerra told me during his primary election campaign that Newsom’s 2035 goal is not realistic.

“We can’t make it by ‘35,” he said. “But we can make it.” Sometime in the future.

The fact is lots of people can’t afford electric vehicles because they tend to cost more than cars fueled by gas.

Besides, there’s an inconvenience of having to pull off the road for a 40-minute recharging stop on a long trip — if you can find a vacant recharger.

And “electricity is not cheap. It often depends on the time of day,” notes PPIC Polling Director Mark Baldassare, who owns an electric vehicle and says he likes it.

Newsom has been hawking electric vehicles since he came into office, like some slick TV pitchman — his goal being to greatly reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

The governor and the Legislature recently appropriated $135 million to motivate Californians to buy new or used electric vehicles.

First-time EV buyers will receive $3,500 rebates on vehicles with manufacturer’s suggested retail prices of $50,000 or less. Used car buyers will get $1,750 off if the sale price is $25,000 or less.

Automakers will pay for half the incentive costs — obstensibly, at least, if they don’t just secretly add their tab to the vehicle price.

This smacks of a huge taxpayer giveaway to manufacturers if the state isn’t careful. Is it really the state’s job to sell cars? Shouldn’t it be the automakers’ responsibility to offer competitive prices? Whatever.

Newsom’s plan partially replaces a $7,500 federal tax incentive for new EVs that President Trump and the Republican-led Congress allowed to expire last year.

California already leads the nation in EV ownership, with around 1.3 million vehicles registered. That’s more than five times the No. 2 state, Florida. And it’s not just because California’s population is much larger. We also lead in per capita ownership.

There’s plenty of contradiction and hypocrisy in the divided minds of Californians, as highlighted in the lengthy PPIC survey into their views on environmental policies.

People strongly favor fighting climate change — at least in concept — until it adversely affects them directly. That’s just human nature.

Asked what they consider the most important environmental issue facing California, those surveyed placed wildfires first, followed closely by global warming.

Baldassare says what struck him in the poll was “the disconnect between what people support in policies and what they’re prepared to do.”

“Two things are going on in California now,” the pollster continues. “People have their long-standing concerns about the environment. But they also have immediate concerns about affordability.

“When it comes to what people are willing to do, they’re worried about living costs and particularly the cost of energy. It’s something we’ve noticed even more this year. It affects the political and economic landscape.”

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed support Newsom’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero “as soon as possible, but no later than 2045.”

And there’s overwhelming support for taxing corporations based on the amount of carbon emissions they produce.

Roughly 60% favor requiring all electricity to be generated with renewable energy — such as wind and solar — by 2045, although support for that state edict has dropped by 15 percentage points in the last six years.

Paradoxically, people aren’t willing to pay more for electricity produced by renewable sources. Roughly 60% reject that idea. Ten years ago, almost that many told PPIC pollsters they were willing to pay extra.

And today they’re not nearly ready to surrender their option of buying a new gas-fueled automobile.

For one thing, they’re not convinced there’ll be enough charging stations to handle a lot more EVs. Twice as many people are not confident of that as are confident, the poll found.

The California Energy Commission reported in January that there were more than 200,000 public and private EV charging stations in the state, plus 800,000 chargers in homes. The state is helping to add more along highways.

Becerra has pledged to take a fresh look at several controversial Newsom projects, including the pokey bullet train. There’s much uncertainty about the pending new governor.

But there’s one pretty good bet: In 2035, sales of new gas cars will still be getting a green light.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Trump escalates election attacks, threatens California over voter data
Bringing back competition: Too many congressional races are over before they start. Here’s a remedy
The L.A. Times Special: Trump’s voter fraud speech was bait. Stop biting

Until next week,
George Skelton

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As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and role model.

Then came Donald Trump.

Now, in Cohn-inflected McCarthyesque style, President Trump is channeling his tutor yet again, baselessly labeling his political enemies — all Democrats — as communists as he looks ahead to the fall’s midterm elections. Once more Trump shows that his catchphrase “Make America great again” means regressing, this time to Trump’s formative 1950s and the McCarthy era that sadly helped define it.

In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of “communist” or “communism” reached double digits each time. (As that implies, the president didn’t set aside his divisive rhetoric even for the nation’s 250th birthday.)

“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall.

Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.)

Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.

Now that Trump is exploiting a few victories lately by left-wing democratic socialists in Democratic primaries to paint the entire party as communists, it’s time to review the record — his record.

A hallmark of communism is government ownership of companies and control of the economy, at the expense of private property and free markets. In just over a year, Trump has used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to buy shares for the government in a growing list of private companies — U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse and more — citing national security. The companies don’t always welcome their new stakeholder; at a minimum, they rightly fear it for the demands the government could make about prices and production.

“It’s what Putin did,” the estranged Republicans at the Lincoln Project posted online Monday. “Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”

“What began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control,” free-market economist Veronique de Rugy wrote in The Times last October of Trump’s actions. “The power to ‘partner’ with business is the power to control it.”

Comrade Trump’s first big government grab, and a model for those to come, was in June last year, when he wrested a permanent “golden share” in U.S. Steel in return for approving its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel. The company’s charter was revised to give the U.S. president extraordinary veto power over nearly a dozen corporate activities, including closing or relocating plants, supply-chain decisions, even pricing.

“We have a golden share, which I control,” Trump told reporters at the time, in words I never thought I’d hear from a president of the party once associated with free markets.

Just last week, Trump boasted to CNBC how he’d extracted a 10% stake in beleaguered chip giant Intel last August, after first demanding that its chief executive resign. “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company.’ … Somebody said that’s not very American. I said, ‘No, I think it is very American, actually.’ And I’ve done that with other deals.”

And so he has.

The Pentagon is now the largest stockholder in struggling MP Materials, a large rare-earth mine in California, and guarantees a 10-year price floor for its output that stunned competitors. The administration has since taken shares in other rare-earth companies. The Commerce Department took an option for an 8% stake in Westinghouse, to spur construction of nuclear reactors, and has the right to 20% if the government decides the company should go public. The government takes a 15% cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ AI chip sales to China.

As much as anything he does, Trump’s direct intervention in private enterprise invites the question “What if Biden/Harris/Obama did that?” The answer, of course: Trump and Republicans would cry “Communist!”

Trump’s actions are the sort Americans generally have only seen during economic emergencies or major wars, and then rarely. I covered the frenzied and ultimately successful response to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the U.S. auto, insurance and housing industries. Behind the scenes in the Obama White House (and George W. Bush’s at the outset) was constant, angst-filled debate about any actions smacking of government takeovers and a determination that interventions be temporary, unlike Trump’s schemes. (For all the still-lingering unpopularity of the banking bailout, the Treasury — the taxpayers — got all the money back and then some, and exited the business.)

Trump’s economic big-footing isn’t the only way in which he resembles the commies Americans know best, and whom he so admires: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un. There are also the images of himself everywhere, monuments planned, drearily long and self-adulating speeches and interference in the nation’s cultural, educational and legal spheres and — worst of all — in elections.

At Rushmore, Trump closed with a demand that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act to restrict voting. “We do that and we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said, speaking of course about Republicans.

One-party rule through central government election finagling? Now that’s a communist.

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SACRAMENTO —  Could the Declaration of Independence be signed today by this crop of political leaders, particularly the one who occupies and defaces the White House?

Not just sign, but sincerely mean it.

Especially the guy who bangs a wrecking ball against the historic East Wing to make room for an incongruous ballroom monstrosity, who mars the sacred Oval Office with gold glitter and paves over the lovely Rose Garden.

But never mind these displays of egotism and tackiness that currently blemish landmarks throughout the nation’s capital, including the National Mall, traditional site of the annual July Fourth fireworks.

Back to my central question: Would there be enough patriots today to affix their John Hancocks to a rebellious document that bravely concludes:

“For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Political leaders would very likely sign the more famous preamble that includes this passage, widely regarded as the most important sentence in American history:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those words probably would poll well and make salable talking points in local town halls. Even if the notion that all people are created equal would be recognized, as it was 250 years ago, as merely a lofty, hypocritical pie-in-the-sky goal. After all, the eloquent document’s principal author, Thomas Jefferson, owned 600 slaves.

We’ve made a world of progress since then on equality. But clearly President Trump and much of America today don’t agree that all people are created equal and guaranteed the same right, for example, of due process in court. People such as undocumented immigrants — the tired, the poor and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

But that’s a heated and politicized 250-year-old debate that will continue indefinitely.

For me, the most striking and sincere sentence in the Declaration of Independence is the last one, in which 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, unanimously pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”

“It was not a throwaway line,” notes UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar. “It was an acknowledgment that they were committing treason. It showed how deeply committed they were.”

The nation’s founders understood that in British King George III’s view, they were traitors. And if their rebellion failed, they’d be targets for execution.

“We must indeed all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” Benjamin Franklin supposedly told delegates.

In fact, nine of the signers died during the Revolutionary War from disease, prison hardships or combat wounds.

An estimated 6,800 U.S. soldiers died in combat and more than 8,500 were wounded. An additional 17,000 Americans perished.

Several signers sacrificed their fortunes, some to help pay for the war.

Gen. George Washington — an immensely rich Virginia planter — refused to accept a salary as commander in chief of the Continental Army. He bought much of the ammunition and fighting gear himself, then was reimbursed after the war.

Sacred honor? That meant what it said back then. The revolutionary leaders proved their character with sacrifice and bravery.

The nation’s first president, Washington, could not tell a lie, according to myth. Of course, he routinely lied during the war to deceive the British. But our 47th president, Donald Trump, is a pathological liar who seems to prevaricate daily.

Would Trump pledge his fortune to the cause of liberty?

That’s hard to imagine of a president who uses the office to promote and prosper from his own brand name. And whose income ballooned to $2.2 billion in 2025, his first year back in the White House after being booted by voters in 2020, a humiliation he still doesn’t have the integrity to acknowledge.

“President Trump is using the office to enrich himself and his family in ways we’ve never seen before,” Chemerinsky asserts.

Pledge his life? Please!

This is a man who once faked bone spurs to avoid the military draft. OK, he wasn’t the only young fellow who dodged combat in the unnecessary Vietnam War, which claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans.

But Trump has called America’s war dead “suckers” and “losers,” according to former aides. He denies it.

There’s no question he expressed contempt for the late Sen. John McCain, who spent more than five years as a North Vietnamese prisoner. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

The Declaration of Independence was about severing the chains of a British monarchy and creating a government powered by the people with checks and balances.

Trump has attempted — often successfully — to govern as a monarch, ignoring the checks and balances of Congress and the judiciary. He has gotten away with it because bullied Republican congressional leaders have mostly rolled over like lapdogs.

But we may be seeing the early signs of a mild revolt against the king as Trump sinks further in the polls and we draw closer to the November elections.

That’s sort of what the founders had in mind: a government deriving its power “from the consent of the governed.” And when citizens are subjected to “absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

So could the Declaration be signed today? Hard to say. There’s no King George hovering over us. Only a wannabe king.

But, yes, I suspect there’d be a signing. Independence is a dominant gene in America’s DNA.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: What you should know about the $351.7-billion state budget Newsom just signed
Go your own way: Facing setbacks and resistance, Trump presses bid to reshape elections on multiple fronts
The L.A. Times Special: More money and patience could help California’s vote count

Until next week,
George Skelton

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SACRAMENTO — President Trump was handed a golden opportunity to upstage Gov. Gavin Newsom in Newsom’s own state on an issue of critical importance to Americans everywhere. But Trump naturally blew it.

The governor and the Democratic-led state Legislature shined.

Trump was victimized by his own self-centered obstinance and inhumanity. And Republican congressional leaders were left looking embarrassed and wimpy.

The issue was housing affordability — the lack of it that is stifling the American dream of homeownership everywhere, not just in California.

In Sacramento, the Legislature lopsidedly passed an $11.25-billion bond proposal aimed primarily at providing government subsidies for building affordable housing. Newsom immediately signed the measure last week, just beating the deadline for getting it on the Nov. 3 election ballot.

“In California, we don’t turn away from the needs of our people,” Newsom boasted in a prepared statement, taking a veiled shot at Trump, his favorite political target.

This came just after both houses of Congress, with members working collaboratively in a rare bipartisan manner, overwhelmingly passed a landmark bill aimed at boosting housing supply. The measure removed regulatory barriers, upgraded federal programs and incentivized new home building.

A Trump “promise kept,” the White House proclaimed.

Whoops! The president then suddenly flip-flopped. He canceled a planned bill-signing ceremony, torpedoing the legislation, an opportunity to gain sorely-needed points for the GOP heading into the fall elections and a chance to outboast Newsom, arguably his most annoying political antagonist.

Trump said he wouldn’t sign the housing bill unless Congress approved his unrelated voter ID legislation, which has practically no chance of passage. The least of his concerns seemed to be struggling homebuyers and renters.

As of this writing, it wasn’t clear what Trump would ultimately do. Nothing ever is certain with him. Shocked and confused GOP congressional leaders even held back sending the president the bill, then ducked out on holiday recess.

At the California state Capitol, by contrast, the governor and legislative leaders were united, working off the same page and successfully negotiating a final agreement on housing help.

As icing on the cake for voters, $1.25 billion was added for the popular CalVet loan program for military veterans. Their home loans are repaid through mortgages, costing the state nothing.

But the remaining $10 billion would need to be paid off by taxpayers over 30 years — at an estimated $580 million annually, bringing the total bond cost to about $17.4 billion, including interest.

Putting this in perspective, the Legislature just passed a $352-billion state budget for the fiscal year starting July 1. Of that, $7.5 billion will go for retiring debt on $73 billion in bonds. And the state has voter authorization to sell $38 billion more in bonds.

During legislative floor debates, some Republicans objected to the additional borrowing.

“We’ve got record revenue, why do we need to borrow money?” asked Assemblyman David Tangipa (R-Fresno).

That was answered during the Senate debate by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon (D-West Sacramento), one of the measure’s principal jockeys.

Building affordable housing “simply is impossible, it can’t be done without this bond” to finance government subsidies, Cabaldon told colleagues.

Developers are subsidized so they can build at a cost that will result in affordable consumer prices, mainly rents in this case.

Some Republicans also objected to inserting the CalVet money for voter appeal. Assemblyman Carl DeMaio called it “window dressing.”

CalVet funds normally are acquired through very small, separate bond measures.

But in the end, only a few Republicans voted against the big bond, which was officially authored by the Assembly Speaker and the Senate leader to display political muscle.

To their credit, the Legislature and governor in recent years have been whittling away at regulatory obstacles to home building. But many cities still balk at rezoning residential neighborhoods to make room for new multifamily dwellings.

The bond proposal is mainly designed to generate affordable rentals for poor people. More money was added at the end for affordable student and farmworker housing.

There’ll be a separate bond proposal on the November ballot that goes in a different direction but doesn’t conflict. It would help middle class homebuyers. And that measure wouldn’t cost taxpayers a cent.

“Housing supply is not just about poor people. It’s not just about homelessness,” says the middle class initiative’s originator, former legislative leader Bob Hertzberg, a Los Angeles County Democrat.

His proposal would authorize $25 billion in revenue bonds. Like the CalVet program, those bonds would be repaid by homebuyers through mortgages — not costing the state anything.

Under the plan, a homebuyer could borrow most of the money needed for a down payment on a newly constructed single-family home or condo. Typically, a 20% down payment is required. Under Hertzberg’s proposal, 17% could be borrowed. Regular lending institutions would arrange the second mortgage.

To be eligible, a homebuyer’s income could not exceed 200% of the area’s median income. In L.A. County, that would be around $213,000 for a family of four, Hertzberg figures. The home would need to be the owner’s primary residence.

The November ballot will be bursting with state propositions — 14 in all, mostly very complex, running the gamut. Besides housing, there’ll be proposals for a billionaires tax, voter ID requirement, local tax limitations and fast-tracking of public works.

Voters could just throw up their hands and reject everything.

“At some point, voters are just gonna say, ‘I don’t know about all this stuff. There’s a lot of stuff,’” says Dan Dunmoyer, who heads the California Building Industry Assn.

California’s housing affordability crunch won’t be solved by just two bond packages. But they’d help.

We and all of America could also use some help from our seemingly unconcerned president, who enjoys free public housing.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Newsom, California Legislature reach $351.7-billion budget deal
Money (That’s what I want): Controversial billionaire tax proposal will appear on November ballot
The L.A. Times Special: Here’s a clue about these mystery books: ‘Papa’ may be California’s next governor

Until next week,
George Skelton

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SACRAMENTO — Winning elections — or achieving any success — often is about being in the right spot at the right moment. Getting lucky and capitalizing. Xavier Becerra is a textbook example.

Becerra’s moribund campaign for California governor was flatlining in early April when he got a shocking break. Five women publicly accused the Democratic front-runner, Rep. Eric Swalwell, of sexual misconduct, including rape. He denied the allegations but quickly quit the race and Congress.

And Becerra surged, leaping from his political deathbed to Democratic front-runner in the contest to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, ultimately earning one of two gubernatorial slots on the November ballot.

That’s assuming the agonizingly slow vote count in last week’s primary election holds up, and it’s virtually inconceivable that it won’t.

But Becerra didn’t suddenly just get lucky with Swalwell’s demise. He has capitalized on life-altering sudden good fortune much of his life.

There was a fortuitous incident in high school that substantially upgraded Becerra’s higher education and undoubtedly his career.

Becerra, the son of Mexican immigrants whose construction worker father didn’t go past the sixth grade, was pulling down good grades at McClatchy High in Sacramento when he was invited to a summer program at UC Davis for promising students of color.

One day he saw a classmate toss some wadded paper into a waste basket.

“What’s that?” Becerra asked.

“I was going to apply to this college, but now I’m not,” the kid replied. He had screwed up on a final exam.

“Give it to me,” Becerra said.

It was an application form for Stanford University. Becerra filled it out and “got it in the mail at the last moment,” he recalled to me years later.

He was accepted. His working-class family was able to send him to the pricey, private university thanks to scholarships, federal aid and after-school work.

“I didn’t know where Stanford was until I rode there with my mom,” Becerra told me.

Becerra got a B.A. in economics at Stanford, then earned a law degree there. That ultimately landed him a job as a deputy state attorney general.

He eventually was elected to Congress, filling a vacant central Los Angeles seat when longtime Rep. Edward Roybal retired. He served 12 terms, rising to the No. 4 Democratic leadership position as party caucus chairman.

A big career break came just before the 2016 election. Becerra was back in Sacramento campaigning for two congressional candidates and was invited to a nonpolitical reception. Also attending by chance was Gov. Jerry Brown’s top aide, Nancy McFadden.

McFadden was impressed. They wound up having a long private talk in a corner. Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris was about to win a U.S. Senate seat and Brown would be appointing her replacement as AG.

“What about Xavier?” McFadden thought to herself, she later told me.

McFadden suggested Becerra to Brown, who didn’t really know the guy. But Becerra’s resume stood out and Brown phoned him. There was an instant liking.

“It wasn’t a hard decision,” McFadden recalled. “It just made sense.”

So, Becerra became California’s so-called top cop, a post he really hadn’t been seeking.

But it was the perfect job for Becerra because goofy Donald Trump became president at the same time. Becerra — often with other Democratic state attorneys general — filed 123 lawsuits against the Trump administration and won the vast majority.

The suits ran the gamut of issues, and one was particularly highlighted: Trump’s efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

Fast-forward to Joe Biden’s ouster of Trump in 2020 and the newly elected president’s search for Cabinet members.

Biden needed a health secretary and was drawn to Becerra partly because he had helped jockey Obamacare through the U.S. House as a congressional leader and had staunchly defended it in court as California attorney general.

Without being appointed AG, Becerra might be running for House reelection in November instead of now seemingly having an easy shot at becoming California’s first elected Latino governor.

Becerra got a huge break in the gubernatorial race when two potential heavyweight contenders concluded the job wasn’t worth running for. Either person would have been heavily favored to win.

Former Vice President Harris decided to retain the option of seeking the presidency for a third time in 2028.

Sen. Alex Padilla opted to keep his comfy job, which opens lots of doors to national cable news sets and doesn’t require running vast, nerdy state bureaucracies.

But “if it hadn’t been for Swalwell’s demise, Becerra never would have made the top two” list of vote-getters in the primary, veteran Democratic strategist Garry South says.

Why did Swalwell’s collapse benefit the mild-mannered, low-key Becerra much more than any other Democrat?

“People are looking for something stable,” he told me several weeks ago. “Everybody likes pizzazz and glitter. Then all of a sudden their hero falls from grace. And they look for who they can trust.”

That trust is built on an impressive resume and likability.

Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer, who has never held public office, spent tens of millions of dollars attacking rival Becerra in TV ads. But it apparently didn’t work because he lacked credibility. Steyer came across to many voters, I suspect, as a wild-eyed meanie.

He would have been better off spending his negative ad money on positive spots promoting himself and becoming more likable.

Likability is a candidate’s No. 1 asset. We learn that as grammar schoolers in class president elections. It beats a billion dollars every time — at least in California.

Now Becerra is on the verge of another break — facing Republican former Fox news commentator Steve Hilton in a lopsided fall contest. Californians haven’t elected a Republican to statewide office in 20 years.

Becerra merely needs to remind voters that Hilton is endorsed by Trump — a nice break gifted by the president.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Becerra advances to November, moves closer to becoming California’s first elected Latino governor
This just in: 2026 live primary election results
The L.A. Times Special: How a simple mix-up fueled false conspiracies about L.A. vote count

Until next week,
George Skelton

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SACRAMENTO — Regardless of the final vote count, Xavier Becerra’s pre-primary sprint to the front in the race for governor was remarkable and historic.

Here’s a low-key 68-year-old candidate who excited no one. And that apparently was a major strength. He was easygoing, non-threatening and a safe bet.

He also had an impressive resume — former U.S. health secretary, California attorney general, longtime congressman and state assemblyman. This seemed to attract voters.

People perpetually badmouth politicians. That’s in the American DNA. And in California, there’s always loud anti-Sacramento jabber. But voters tend to prefer politicians with Sacramento experience when electing governors — unless a celebrity entertainer is available.

Politics is cyclical, however. In the past six decades, Californians have gone from electing fascinating Govs. Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown to selecting uninspiring George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis — then returning to headliners like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brown again and Gavin Newsom.

Now we’re ready for boring Becerra?

The last pre-primary poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies found Democrat Becerra leading the pack. But he was closely trailed by Republican former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton and Democrat billionaire Tom Steyer, a hedge fund founder turned climate activist.

The large field of candidates wound up with those three leading — Becerra drawing 25% support, Hilton at 21% and Steyer with 19%.

A later Emerson College poll also found Becerra in front but Steyer and Hilton in a statistical dead heat: Becerra 28%, Steyer 22%, Hilton 21%.

The top two vote getters will qualify for the November general election.

In contrast to earlier hot speculation about two Republicans — Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — finishing in the top two and locking out any Democrat from the November ballot, the final IGS and Emerson polls showed that an opposite scenario was possible. Two Democrats could conceivably advance to the November voting.

As campaigning neared an end, Becerra apparently tried to help Hilton attract more MAGA support to prevent Steyer from edging out the Republican. Becerra would be a shoo-in over any GOP opponent in November, but could face a tough fight facing Steyer with his bottomless checkbook.

The games-playing involved Becerra running a statewide digital ad subtly reminding Republican voters that Hilton was President Trump’s “favorite” candidate for governor. The spot asserted that Becerra is “Trump’s worst nightmare.”

Steyer would be Becerra’s worst nightmare in a general election brawl.

Another major poll completed a few days earlier by the Public Policy Institute of California found the same basic rankings as the IGS survey, but with Steyer a bit further back.

Becerra was leading with 23%, followed by Hilton at 20% and Steyer at 15%.

Every independent poll found Becerra surging from irrelevancy in March to leader of the pack by late May.

It’s “one of the most unusual gubernatorial election campaigns in modern California history,” IGS poll director Mark DiCamillo says.

Particularly unusual was the April frontrunner, then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), abruptly withdrawing after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and assault, which he denies.

Most of Swalwell’s voter support soon went to Becerra, which helped him attract campaign donors and endorsements by interest groups.

Becerra, who had been moseying along the race track, suddenly got a second wind. And voters sensed a breath of fresh air.

“Voters are exhausted by Trump. He makes it hard to sleep at night. ‘Cool and calm’ win,” says Chapman University political science professor Fred Smoller. “People want a candidate like a no-drama Becerra.

“The fact he has a charisma deficit may in fact be his political asset.”

But Becerra also has other assets, notes UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser — ”legislative and executive experience…. He was safe and predictable.

“And he’s second only to Gavin Newsom in opposing Donald Trump.”

Yes, a calm temperament appeals to voters fatigued by political fire and brimstone. But California Democrats also want someone who will fight back against Trump’s policies.

Becerra repeatedly points out that as state attorney general, he sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times and won the vast majority of cases.

“Becerra has caught the attention of Democratic voters who overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump,” says PPIC Poll Director Mark Baldassare.

How overwhelmingly? Ninety-five percent disapproval by Democrats in the latest PPIC survey, 70% among all likely voters.

Becerra “stood out from the rest of the candidates because of his background as attorney general,” Baldassare adds.

“And look at the other candidates. You can’t name one who has had experience in Sacramento.”

Longshot former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was once state Assembly speaker, but that was nearly three decades ago.

Among the last nine California governors, only Schwarzenegger and Reagan have been elected without serving prior Sacramento stints.

Becerra also has another asset: He’d be the first elected Latino governor in California history. He finished the primary campaign with a comfortable lead among Latino voters, as well as Asian American.

As Becerra’s political stock rose, Democratic rivals — especially Steyer — tried to portray him as incompetent, touched by scandal and a Chevron tool. But the mud didn’t seem to stick.

A natural Becerra strength is likability.

DiCamillo recalls what his mentor, the late legendary pollster Mervin Field, used to say about how voters choose between candidates for governor or president.

“It’s a highly personal choice,” DiCamillo says, quoting Field. “People put more mental energy into choosing a top-of-the-ticket candidate than any other.

“It’s like trying on a new suit. If it doesn’t fit well, you don’t buy it. You’ve got to be comfortable in the feel.”

Many California voters apparently feel that way about Becerra — nothing flashy, just plain but comfortable.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Becerra leads governor’s race, with Hilton and Steyer in tight contest for second spot, poll finds
Money honey: Record-setting outside money pouring into California governor’s race
The L.A. Times Special: Voter guide to the 2026 California primary election

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Just one of the nine Supreme Court justices thought it was appropriate for Roger Goodell — whose primary job as NFL commissioner is to protect the league — to decide whether the NFL’s hiring practices are still racist.

And it happens to be the same justice whose close friend is an NFL owner.

In fact, the friendship between Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Arizona Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill dates back decades, to high school. So when President Trump nominated Kavanaugh for the highest court in the land, Bidwill used the team’s official website to advocate for his confirmation. Not sure how the “stick to sports” crowd feels about it, considering how they react when players express opinions, but it felt like an overreach to me.

Obviously when a decision related to NFL owners came before the court, Kavanaugh should have recused himself. But by now we’re used to justices ignoring their own ethics rules. What I find most disturbing in this instance is Kavanaugh’s dissent.

Here’s how the hiring discrimination case came to be: Former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick texted the wrong Brian with congratulations for getting the New York Giants’ head coaching job, according to a lawsuit filed by former Dolphins head coach and former Patriots assistant coach Brian Flores, who is Black. In the 2022 suit, Flores said the Giants interviewed him for their vacant head coaching job under disingenuous circumstances. How can we tell? Because Belichick’s congratulations came three days before Flores’ interview with the Giants. The team had apparently already decided to hire Brian Daboll, who is white.

The NFL has spent the last three-plus years attempting to settle the dispute through NFL-controlled arbitration and fought to keep it out of court. The league lifted its appeal to the Supreme Court after failing to get Goodell in position to handle it via the lower courts.

In addition to the damning text exchange, Flores also has history on his side.

During one 60-season stretch, the NFL had no Black head coaches. To address the glaring discrepancy, the league established the “Rooney rule” in 2003, requiring teams to interview at least two minority candidates for head coach and other senior management vacancies.

Prior to that, most teams interviewed only white men.

The results have been mixed.

Yes, more minority candidates get interviewed now — perhaps after a white man has quietly been chosen for the job, but still … they get interviewed.

And yes, Tony Dungy and Mike Tomlin, both of whom are Black, not only got hired but also led their franchises to Super Bowl victories after the rule was put into place.

Still, two decades into the Rooney-rule era, roughly a third of the league’s owners had never hired a minority to lead their team. This includes the century-old New York Giants, who after firing Daboll at the end of the season, hired another white man to take his place. This is the backdrop of the discrimination lawsuit filed by Flores.

And still Kavanaugh felt this case could be handled internally by the organization that allowed it to happen.

Even Clarence Thomas, a judge known for ruling against anything that helps Black people, thought the NFL should have to defend itself in court.

Consider this: The year before Flores filed his suit, the NFL settled a different discrimination lawsuit for $1 billion. That case arose because for decades, to help determine the payout from a concussion settlement between retired players and the league, the NFL used “race norming” — a methodology that assumes Black players are less intelligent than white players, making it more difficult for Black men to prove brain damage than white men. In a league that is roughly 70% nonwhite, the racist practice saved the billionaire owners millions.

Or how about this: After the Supreme Court ruled that Duke Power Co. used a controversial cognitive test to prevent Black employees from getting higher-paying jobs back in the 1970s, the NFL began using it. The league kept it in place until 2022.

And still Kavanaugh felt the league should handle Flores’ case.

I’m not sure what factors the justice was considering before his dissent, but it could not have been league history.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

SACRAMENTO — Like millions of Californians, I haven’t voted yet in the primary election. That’s because I can’t decide who should be our governor. Here’s what I’m thinking:

It’s an underwhelming field. But one of these Democratic contenders will very likely replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in January.

Based on the latest polling, a Democrat — probably Xavier Becerra — will qualify for the November general election ballot. That Democrat will face a Republican — very likely Steve Hilton.

It’s inconceivable that a Democratic gubernatorial candidate would lose to a Republican in this polarized, deep blue state. That means we’ll actually be choosing the governor in next Tuesday’s primary. You can dismiss the November face-off as essentially moot.

My mail ballot, like millions of others in California, has been sitting on the kitchen table for weeks.

As of this writing, I only know who I’m not voting for. And that’s either of the two Republicans: former Fox News host Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. That’s not because they’re Republicans. I’ve voted for plenty of Republicans — for governor, senator and president.

But Hilton won’t acknowledge that President Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. And anyone who doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to Trump and recognize a basic fact of our democracy shouldn’t be trusted as our governor.

Bianco disqualified himself by buying into Trump’s persistent lies about election fraud and seizing 650,000 ballots from last November’s Proposition 50 voting. The sheriff wasted taxpayer resources and, moreover, doesn’t have any vote-counting expertise.

Now for the Democrats:

It has been a disappointing campaign — a missed opportunity to seriously discuss crucial issues such as the need to become more self-sufficient locally on water supply, significantly improve wildfire prevention and regulate the coming AI menace.

I’ve winced during televised debates and TV ads at ugly attacks against opponents.

For a while, I considered casting my vote for the Democrat ranking highest in the polls. I thought that in a large Democratic field, the vote could be splintered and only two Republicans would qualify for November. But that now seems inconceivable because three Democrats dropped out.

Anyway, an individual’s vote is too precious not to be used for the candidate considered best for the job.

These are my thoughts on who that might be:

Becerra, 68. He’s the Democratic front-runner and seemingly the safe choice. Not a huge risk taker. He probably wouldn’t screw up and make things worse. He might even marginally improve some stuff.

Calm and understated. Decent. Likable. He brings an impressive resume with the experience and knowledge to handle the job: a former U.S. health secretary, California attorney general, longtime congressman from Los Angeles and a state assemblyman.

Unfortunately, he has often been too vague about what he’d do as governor. That’s largely because he’s not the sort who rushes into things. He wants to first “scrub” the matter. Not a bad trait.

He should have better answers, however, for accusations that he was derelict in Washington for releasing thousands of undocumented immigrant children to sponsors who exploited them as laborers — and also for a scandal involving his top aide who pilfered Becerra’s campaign account. Becerra said he didn’t know about it. But he should have.

Becerra would be California’s first elected Latino governor. Like many California Latinos, he’s the son of hardworking Mexican immigrants who took advantage of their opportunity to seek the California Dream.

Tom Steyer, 68. Here’s the liberal firebrand who wants to shake up Sacramento.

The question is whether he has the ability and knowledge to pull it off. Steyer wants to split up the private utility monopolies and lower consumers’ electricity bills. And how’s he going to do that? We really haven’t heard.

He’s a billionaire who has never held public office and is trying to start at the top by spending $200 million of his own money to buy into the governor’s suite. California voters have always rejected such candidates.

I’ve got nothing against billionaires. In fact, I think it’s a noble use of their money to participate in democracy and try to fix the state.

But in Steyer’s case, his recent unrelenting attack ads against surging Becerra — now his chief campaign rival — are disturbing and seem like overkill. He’d be better off telling us how he plans to improve our daily lives.

Katie Porter, 52. I find her refreshing, despite a feisty personality that grates on many voters.

She’s a former Orange County congresswoman and longtime professor of consumer law who’s plenty smart.

What I like is she has done her homework, is very conversant on most issues and is specific about what she’d do as governor.

OK, some of her goals are probably beyond financial reach: single-payer healthcare, free college tuition and free child care.

But she’d shake up Sacramento and that’s needed. She’d stand up to special interests. And she’d be California’s first female governor.

Could she work well with the Legislature? Probably well enough, given a governor’s immense power to reward and punish.

Matt Mahan, 43. The centrist San José mayor hasn’t spent enough time in his current job to prove himself to voters beyond the San Francisco Peninsula. And he entered the race too late.

He’s not quite ready. Knock again in a few years.

Antonio Villaraigosa, 73. He might be the best potential governor of the lot.

He understands Sacramento as a former Assembly speaker and urban problems as an ex-Los Angeles mayor. He’s a no-nonsense guy who has been leveling with voters..

But age discrimination is a problem, although he’s only five years older than Becerra and Steyer. And he hasn’t held office in many years. His time is past.

For me, it’s time to pick up my ballot and decide who should be California’s next governor.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Voter guide to the 2026 California primary election
Money, it’s a gas: Billionaire Tom Steyer’s $192.4-million self-funded California gubernatorial bid shatters records
The L.A. Times Special: Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt need Latinos, not Trump

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Tuesday night, America voted in primary elections and the big winner was President Trump.

One after another, his enemies — and by that I mean anyone who has ever done anything other than grovel — were defeated in elections across the country.

Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican, was perhaps the most high-profile to go down in flames. Massie, you may recall, joined with his California Democratic colleague Ro Khanna to campaign for the release of the Epstein files, which made Trump big-mad since his name is in them a lot.

The Trump-endorsed candidate Ed Gallrein won instead.

“You are ruled by the Epstein class that cares nothing about you,” former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, also a victim of Trump’s ire, posted on social media after Massie’s loss. “Tonight the future of the Republican Party was destroyed.”

But was it? Or is it simply now crystal clear that it is a party that will follow its leader, no matter the consequence — even personal ruin? And if Trump still wields this much power over his base, what does it mean for the November general election?

“Republicans are united behind President Trump,” RNC spokesperson Kiersten Pels told Politico. “While the media tries to manufacture division, Republicans remain focused on delivering results for the American people and building momentum heading into 2026.”

As much as I’d like to believe Greene has a point (I can’t believe I’m saying that), all signs instead indicate Pels is, at least mostly, right — the Republican party is alive and well, by Trump’s standards, anyway, and may be gaining momentum for a November none of us will ever forget.

Tuesday’s proof

Gallrein wasn’t the only Trump-backed Republican to win voter approval. Trump also saw his candidates win in places including Idaho, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Georgia.

And in Texas, Trump threw down another retribution bomb by endorsing state Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn. That race will go to a runoff next week, with Paxton’s chances significantly boosted.

And in case there’s any doubt on why Trump is choosing his favorites, just check out his reasoning in his own social media post for that endorsement. Spoiler: It has nothing to do with the good of the country or even the Grand Old Party.

Paxton, Trump wrote, is “someone who has always been extremely loyal to me,” even trying to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. Meanwhile, Cornyn “was not supportive of me when times were tough.”

So personal loyalty is the name of the game, and Republicans seem more than willing to play it.

Still, there has been some chatter that ousted lawmakers including Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who just lost his primary to a Trump candidate, could gum up the works for Trump in their remaining months. Cassidy voted with Democrats this week on a war powers resolution to at least slow down Trump’s Iran offensive.

Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it. Recent polls have shown Trump’s approval ratings to be down in the dumps, but not with Republicans. They still love this guy.

A poll by Echelon Insights this week found that 74% of GOP voters view Trump favorably. That’s about the same percentage of people who love Costco and NASA, and who doesn’t love Costco and NASA?

Add to that a Wednesday poll from Quinnipiac University that found that while 64% of voters disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy, 73% of Republicans actually approve — for real. They are OK with $6 gas and beef priced like gold.

Granted, that’s down from 88% of Republicans loving this economy a month ago, but still, three-quarters of Trump’s base backs this dumpster fire of financial mismanagement and looting.

In the same poll, 80% of respondents said congressional Republicans should be doing more to work with Trump, while 13% said they should be standing up to him.

Folks, Republicans are not turning away from this president — they are embracing not a party, but his one-man rule, and doing it with a big, warm bear hug.

Get to November

What does all that mean for the November election? Not a whole lot of good for Democrats, but I’ll start with one possible bright spot: Texas.

Yes, Texas — where, if Paxton does beat Cornyn, Democrats will do a happy dance. That’s because Paxton is seen as the more extreme candidate, plagued by scandal, and would be running against the increasingly popular everyman-preacher man James Talarico. If Talarico prevails, he would be the first Democratic to win a statewide office in the Lone Star state since the 1990s.

But on the national front, there is very little reason to believe any Republicans will break with Trump, as voters or candidates. That means it will come down to gerrymandering and independents, neither of which is especially hopeful for Democrats.

In the Echelon poll, 68% of independent voters said they believed the country was on the “wrong track,” with more than one-third citing the economy as their most important issue. The Quinnipiac poll found that only 26% of independent voters who responded approve of how Trump is handling the job of president.

But.

Both polls found independent voters also did not approve of the job Democrats are doing in Congress — almost three-quarters had a bad impression. Despite all of the middle-ground voter animus toward Trump and those he backs, Democrats apparently have done almost nothing to capitalize on it.

The takeaway is that the voters who will decide November — at least in the remaining places where maps are not rigged — really don’t like any of their choices, and may just hold their noses and vote for whoever seems least-worst.

If he finds a way to bring prices down, that could be Trump‘s GOP.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Trump’s Spring Revenge Tour Routed G.O.P. Foes. But Fall Headwinds Loom.
The deep dive: A gray wolf has entered Sequoia National Park for the first time in a century
The L.A. Times Special: San Diego attackers’ hate manifesto targeted many groups, sought ‘destruction of political system,’ sources say

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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President Trump, it’s well known, is into gold. Every day brings new evidence that he’s thoroughly enjoying the “golden age” he pronounced in his inaugural address — as few other Americans are — with stock trades, crypto profiteering and much more, even a new taxpayer-financed slush fund to reward his allies.

As for me, I’ve gone into silver. That is, I constantly look for the silver linings in Trump’s heinous acts.

One silver lining, of course, is his cratering job-approval numbers in the polls, especially among the young and Latino voters who made his reelection possible. But here’s another: By his humiliating failure to bring Iran to heel, nearly three months after starting a war that he said would last weeks at most, Trump has brought new, more positive attention to what he again this week derided as “Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.” (The emphasis on “Hussein” is Trump’s, always.)

The president, along with his Republican cheerleaders, counts his first-term abrogation of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a signature achievement. This week, yet again, he falsely claimed that had he not done so, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. In fact, his action in 2018 taking the United States out of the multinational deal subsequently led to Iran’s rebuilding of its nuclear program, the emboldening of the Iranian hard-liners now in power and the Middle East morass in which the United States is now mired.

That quagmire has left Trump seeming desperate for a deal — almost certainly a worse deal than the one Obama struck. Call it JCPOA Lite.

If he were able to get Iran’s sign-off on the sort of detailed, restrictive agreement that Obama and other world leaders won 11 years ago, he’d be trumpeting himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker. (He does that anyway, but his record proves otherwise.) Instead, by his own failure to date, Trump has invited reconsideration of the very agreement he decried as the “worst deal ever” on his march to election and reelection.

No sooner was the 2015 deal signed than Trump and Republicans succeeded in defining it as a giveaway to Iran that assured, not hindered, its development of a nuclear weapon to threaten Israel and the world. Opponents condemned the agreement for not addressing Iran’s other threats, notably its support for militant proxies throughout the Mideast. Some Democrats, notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, were among the foes. Other Democrats, cowed by opposition to the agreement by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and pro-Israel lobbyists, were all but mute in the pact’s defense.

Now some Democrats are belatedly finding their voice (and, post-Gaza, some willingness to defy Israel). Along with nonpartisan experts, those Democrats are drawing comparisons between the 2015 agreement, flawed yet successful, and Trump’s promised yet ever-elusive alternative. What’s ironic for Israel and Netanyahu, still implacably against negotiating with Tehran, is that they could end up, under Trump, with a nuclear deal that gives Iran more leeway than the hated JCPOA did.

As Americans are being reminded, the 2015 deal wasn’t just between Iran and Obama, as Trump has long suggested; other signatories were China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the 27-nation European Union. Reconstituting that group would be all but impossible today.

The pact’s 159 highly technical pages and five appendices — a far cry from the short-lived one-pager that Trump officials teased earlier this month — required Iran for 15 years to limit its nuclear program to civilian purposes, forfeit more than 97% of its enriched uranium and submit to intrusive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure compliance. In return, Iran gradually got relief from some, but not all, international economic sanctions and access to Iranian funds that were frozen after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Presumably, after 15 years, the agreement would have been extended somehow.

By all accounts, including those of Trump’s first-term intelligence and national security officials, Iran was complying when he abandoned the deal. Its “breakout time” for building a nuclear weapon was about a year — time enough for the world to intervene — instead of two to three months. Now, though the president boasts he barred Iran from having that weapon by breaking the Iran nuclear deal, he incessantly tells Americans that he went to war against Iran on Feb. 28 because it was on the brink of a bomb — never mind that he also said he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last summer, a program that was in a well-monitored box until he first took office.

If you’re confused, you’re paying attention.

A month ago, Trump posted online that he was close to a deal “FAR BETTER” than the 2015 accord. “I am under no pressure whatsoever, ⁠although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!” To several reporters, he suggested he in fact had a deal and that Iran had agreed both to suspend its nuclear activities and to forfeit all of its enriched, near-weapons-grade uranium.

Preposterous claims, given Iran’s current government, and Tehran promptly denied them. It was a sign of Trump’s squandered credibility that few, if anyone, believed him in the first place. Nor have folks believed his more recent talk of imminent success; oil markets, too, have learned not to trust the president, as prices at the pumps attest.

On Tuesday at the White House, amid a noisy tour of the billion-dollar-ballroom construction site, Trump told reporters he’d been “an hour away” from striking Iran again that very day but Mideast leaders asked for more time for negotiations.

Don’t hold your breath.

But for the tragic consequences, Obama might be enjoying some justifiable schadenfreude about Trump’s travails.

“We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of the enriched uranium out,” he told Stephen Colbert in an interview last week. Both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agreed that Iran was abiding by the nuclear limits, Obama added, “and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.”

That sure doesn’t sound like the “worst deal ever.” It wasn’t.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
Threads: @jkcalmes
X: @jackiekcalmes

SACRAMENTO —  The Democrats’ mantra this election year — especially among wannabe governors — is that the richest Californians should “pay their fair share.” But by any objective measurement, they already do.

I’m referring to state taxes, not federal. It’s a valid argument that the most prosperous Americans should kick in more to the federal government, particularly after President Trump and the Republican Congress lowered taxes for the wealthy, who already had a pretty good deal.

But it’s a different story in California, where state government lives off the well-heeled. Yet, never-satisfied liberal Democrats and public employee unions constantly cry for more.

In fact, an unexpected surge of $16.8 billion in state tax revenue, mostly due to the stock market boom and capital gains earnings, is bailing out Gov. Gavin Newsom and allowing him to claim a balanced budget as he prepares to depart Sacramento and run for president in 2028.

The state Franchise Tax Board recently reported which income groups pony up the most taxes. The more money you earn, the steeper your income tax burden. Of course, that’s the way it should be. But California pushes its progressive tax system to the extreme.

We’ve got by far the highest state income tax rate in the nation at 13.3%.

In 2024, the latest year for which there’s complete data, the top 1% of California taxpayers accounted for 40% of the total state income tax revenue, the FTB reported. But they earned just 24% of the taxable income. To be in the top 1%, your annual earnings had to be at least $973,000.

The top 0.1% kicked in 21% of the tax, while earning 12% of the income. To be in that megarich class, you needed annual earnings of at least $4.7 million.

By contrast, middle-class families with incomes between $73,000 and $139,000 paid 9% of the state’s income tax take.

This doesn’t mean we should weep for the rich and demand more from the struggling lower middle class.

But the problem with Sacramento living off the wealthiest taxpayers is that they’re unreliable. Their fortunes flourish in boom times and fall when the economy busts. When the stock market sneezes, California state government catches pneumonia.

If the state treasury is overflowing, Democratic lawmakers tend to spend freely, expanding programs and creating new ones. Then when the cache inevitably shrinks in bad times, the policymakers’ usual response is to essentially turn their eyes.

Rather than sharply whack spending and raise taxes, they gimmick up the budget with borrowing, deferred spending and crossed fingers. And they dig the hole deeper.

For decades, under Democratic and Republican governors, we’ve sorely needed to update our archaic tax system to make it less volatile and more dependable.

A reform that makes lots of sense is to extend the sales tax to services primarily used by businesses. They could deduct the cost on their federal tax returns. And California state and local governments would steadily collect several billion dollars annually. Some income and sales tax rates could even be lowered.

California also has the nation’s highest state sales tax rate at 7.25%. Combining state and local sales tax rates, we have the seventh-highest at 8.99%.

Taxing deductible business services makes sense to many politicians — but only privately. They’re too weak-kneed to seriously consider it in public. There’d be winners and losers and high political risks.

When Xavier Becerra, the current Democratic front-runner in the June 2 gubernatorial primary, entered the race a year ago, I asked him about extending the sales tax to services, as all other states do. He wanted nothing to do with it.

“We need to stabilize our tax system in California with a more steady source of revenue,” he told me. “But I’m not a fan of the sales tax to begin with. It lands on working families.”

He was not interested in exploring a possible tax on services that didn’t hit working families.

Becerra, a former California attorney general and U.S. health secretary, added: “Before we start exploring new taxes, we should explore existing budget spending. We have to scrub the budget.”

In revising his new budget proposal last week, Newsom proposed $5.1 billion in modest tax hikes on businesses — even as unanticipated revenue was surging. He asked the Legislature for a limit on corporate tax credits and a tax on digital software.

He also proposed to trim $3.7 billion from Medi-Cal healthcare for the poor.

Newsom proposed spending $349.9 billion in the next fiscal year and asserted that budgets would be balanced for 18 months. But after that, he and practically everyone else in Sacramento foresee deficit spending without extensive fiscal restructuring.

But you don’t hear a peep about that from leading Democratic candidates running to replace Newsom. Most are talking about imposing significantly higher business taxes to pay for new or expanded programs.

Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer wants to close “the corporate tax loophole.” What he’s talking about is gutting Proposition 13’s property tax breaks for commercial holdings. He’d make it easier to reassess when partners sell their portions of a property — a commonly called “split roll” that would treat commercial property differently than residential.

That was tried in 2020 and rejected by voters.

Steyer also supports the billionaire tax that’s expected to be on the November ballot. It would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of California’s 200-plus billionaires.

To their credit, no other gubernatorial candidate supports this misguided proposal. Practically all the $100-billion windfall would flow solely into healthcare while causing fed-up super wealthy to flee the state.

Former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter would raise taxes on the most profitable corporations to pay for free child care and college tuition. They’re both good causes but of questionable fiscal feasibility right now.

Rather than pushing rich investors and job creators out of state, we should be encouraging them to stick it out in California and continue to pay their fair share.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Who won and who lost in Thursday night’s California gubernatorial debate? Our columnists weigh in
TikTok dough: The Steyer campaign pays influencers. Their posts don’t always make that clear
The L.A. Times Special: Steyer campaign staffer linked to video of rival Katie Porter berating staff

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Ahead of President Trump’s arrival in Beijing on Wednesday for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, longtime China expert Kurt M. Campbell offered a novel way of watching the two leaders’ high-stakes faceoff. Think of it not as nation-versus-nation or army-versus-army, but as the sort of “single combat” celebrated in ancient literature, along the lines of David and Goliath in the Bible or Achilles and Hector in “The Iliad.”

“This one has the feel of a geopolitical heavyweight matchup,” Campbell, chairman of the Asia Group strategic consulting firm, wrote in Foreign Affairs this week.

Unlike in their initial get-together early in Trump’s first term, both men now are seasoned leaders in their separate ways — Xi an unchallenged dictator, and an envious Trump seeking to be. Both act with few immediate checks on their power, though Xi acts strategically and Trump impulsively and transactionally. And both, as leaders of super-powers, have the capability to shape the economic and security fates of a wary world.

That world, Campbell concluded in his essay, is “eager to see whether the two leaders emerge driving together in the chariot, or with one dragging the other behind,” as Achilles did the vanquished Hector.

However the Trump-Xi meeting ends, Trump is no Achilles going into this match. In fact, in the six decades of U.S.-China relations, perhaps no American president has entered the summit arena in a weaker position than Trump, the would-be strongman and artiste of the deal. Worse, his weakness — and by extension his country’s — is mostly self-inflicted.

Trump had postponed what was intended as an early April meeting in hopes of striding triumphantly into Beijing as the conqueror of Iran, a China ally. Instead China is receiving him as a “giant with a limp,” in the phrase of its Communist Party-controlled Global Times newspaper.

Trump’s Mideast war, the sort he’d promised never to start, lingers for a third month in a costly stalemate — $29 billion and counting — that has humiliated the president in the public words of Germany’s chancellor and the private thoughts of many more global leaders, Xi likely among them. Trump can’t “project the same arrogance” as he did visiting China in 2017, a former Chinese army officer, Yue Gang, told the New York Times.

At home, the conflict has caused gasoline prices and inflation to spike while tanking Trump’s already depressed polls. A newly released CNN poll conducted April 30 to May 4 had 65% of Americans disapproving of his overall job performance and a whopping 70% against his handling of the economy — the issue that arguably got him elected. With experience, American consumers and soybean farmers now know that they, not the Chinese, have paid for Trump’s beloved tariffs.

The president’s standing at home could hardly have been helped by his parting words to reporters at the White House. Asked “to what extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal” with Iran, Trump blithely replied, “Not even a little bit.” He added, in the sort of political gaffe that journalist Michael Kinsley defined as telling the truth: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

He’s already a loser in the negotiations with Xi. For weeks the Trump administration has unsuccessfully urged China to use its leverage to goad Iran to accept a peace on Americans’ terms or, at a minimum, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, given China’s self-interest as Iran’s biggest oil customer by far. As China scholar Henrietta Levin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press, “I don’t think China has any interest in solving the problems the U.S. has created for itself in the Middle East.”

Not least, perhaps, because China has seen that, by the Pentagon’s own reckoning, the war has depleted U.S. stockpiles of weaponry after thousands upon thousands of strikes against Iran. And that has further raised questions in China and beyond about whether Trump would have the United States come to the defense of Taiwan, the self-governing, U.S.-armed island that China claims as its own.

After all, the thinking goes, if the United States can’t bring a lesser power like Iran quickly to heel, how might it fare against a near-peer such as China, especially with a diminished U.S. arsenal and Mideast distractions?

It’s mostly a mystery what the leaders’ talks might yield. In a break with diplomatic tradition, though not with Trump’s seat-of-the-pants style, apparently little planning went into this super-power summit — another reflection of a distracted U.S. side. Still, with a number of tech, agribusiness, finance and aerospace chieftains in tow, Trump and his team are hoping for a few politically appealing deliverables, such as sales of U.S. soybeans and Boeing aircraft, to give the president a lift back home.

But don’t look for progress on the longstanding issues dividing the United States and China over trade and military dominance in the Pacific region. And as for another of those perennial issues — climate change and clean-energy technology — the U.S. under Trump has willfully surrendered global preeminence to China, ceding markets for solar, wind energy, electric vehicles, grid storage and more in his backward-looking, ostrich-like obsession with drilling oil and mining coal.

Whatever hyperbolic claims Trump makes for his China trip, the outcome of the summit (on top of his quagmire in Iran) should at least be this: retiring the myth of Trump the deal-maker and savvy businessman.

If he were such a visionary, Trump would be prodding the nation to global leadership in technology and clean-energy investments, not reversing past progress and paying companies billions of taxpayers’ dollars to stop clean-energy projects. In markets worldwide, the future is now and America is forfeiting the game to China.

In this contest, Trump is letting Xi drive the chariot. Unfortunately, average Americans are the ones being dragged through the dust as China rides into the 21st century.

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