It’s official: Salvation!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen and especially fellow members of the media, Tim Donnelly is running for governor.
He may be a polarizing figure, but I believe he has already achieved a bipartisan consensus, at least among California’s Fourth Estate. And that consensus is: there is a God, and he loves us.
Before Donnelly’s official entry in the race, we were facing a snoozer of a gubernatorial election, with Jerry Brown certain to win re-election while facing maybe a nominal challenge from Abel Maldonado. We might have had to pay professional attention to such an election (I can’t call it a “race” or a “contest” and be accurate), but no one else would.
But now Donnelly is in, and, while we’re still facing a certain Jerry Brown win with no horse race drama, it won’t be quite so snoozy, since we’ll at least have one character in the race. And given the character of this character, we’ll be able to provide the public service of showing the total gap between his incendiary, attention-seeking comments and California’s 21st century reality.
He’ll rail against immigrant hordes, and we’ll be able to point out that net immigration to California has been zero for years and that immigrants are pillars of the community. (In many parts of Southern California, they’ve been here long than the native U.S. citizens). He’ll talk about a supposed lack of guns in the state, and we’ll point out the millions that are in hands of people who have demonstrated they shouldn’t own guns, Tim Donnelly among them. He’ll attack supposedly out-of-control spending, perhaps in press conferences held in a Sacramento decimated by years of government cuts and layoffs. He’ll rail against the oppressive dictatorship of the state and we’ll keep on writing stories about same-sex marriages and marijuana farms.
All the corrections would be helpful to the body politic. And Donnelly will keep offering opportunities in an interesting way that makes news. Heck, in announcing his candidacy, he promised to bring freedom back to California, which was surprising news since I hadn’t noticed its departure.
And there will be lots of fun questions. Will candidate Donnelly recapture his Minuteman roots by policing the border? Will he carry a gun while campaigning? How, exactly, will he bring the sexy back, as he promised to in a campaign video in which he said, “right now the only thing sexy to me in California is my wife”?
Of course, Donnelly’s entry isn’t such good news for one class of people of California. They’re known as Republicans. And Donnelly, if he advances past the spring’s gubernatorial general election to the November runoff (yes, media friends, that’s how you accurately described the top-two elections – there are no primaries anymore), he could get enough attention to discredit, or at least set back, any efforts to update the state GOP’s brand.
That, of course, would be a form of justice, given the party’s willingness to exploit fears about California, its government and its population, and take hostages in the legislature, instead of seeking to rebuild the broken governance system.
Now, the Republicans are afraid, and they are about to be held hostage to this candidacy.
God, you see, works in mysterious ways.