I Want To Be Elected

Welcome, democratic reader, as this week I share the joy of the ongoing election process here in California.

Yes, it's election season again. California has a wealth of elected officials: governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state treasurer, insurance commissioner, superintendent of public instruction, and controller. You might ask whether this helps and if it's useful; and I think the answer to that is basically no, but it's the way they do things around here.

And this is California, so it's highly likely that all of these posts will be held by Democrats. Just as with the Presidential election, candidates for the eventual ballot are selected via primary elections, and those are happening in just a couple of weeks. Excitingly, we have adverts all over our telescreens for these primaries, of various different levels of competency and production value. Not only that, but we have a ringside seat for one of these contests, as our neighbour Bing is managing the campaign of a candidate for our local Congressional district.

Perhaps the most obvious of these TV adverts is that for Malia Cohen, one of the candidates for Controller. Not only is this advert on a lot, but it's clear they spent a lot of money on it: there's the carefully colour-coordinated clothing, the nicely shot inserts, and the tight scripting. This is expensive stuff, and it's clear that they're serious. Either that, or they know they're going to lose the primary, and might as well spend all the money they've raised.

Of course, this is politics US-style, so what they're not big on is what these candidates will actually do. Elections here are about personality and character rather than ideas, because in most cases there isn't a huge spectrum of ideas that has a chance of getting elected, and where there is, the spectrum is so huge that the differences are obvious. I also doubt that anyone knows what the majority of these California elected officials actually do, so these elections are mostly about building political careers rather than public service.

What is intensely frustrating, and frankly incomprehensible to a European, is that all this democracy is seemingly powerless to stop tragic events like the school shooting in Texas this week. In fact, the former commander-in-chief of this country declared in response that "The existence of evil in our world is not a reason to disarm law-abiding citizens, the existence of evil is one of the very best reasons to arm law-abiding citizens", the logic of which completely eludes me. Now I know this blog is normally a place of good humour, but let me just remind you why the UK has not seen an event anything like this since 1996: it's because in the wake of Dunblane, our government had the good sense to enact what even Wikipedia calls some of the strictest gun control measures in the world, so strict in fact that there had to be special dispensation to allow the shooting events at the 2012 Olympics to take place in the UK (pistol shooters still can't legally train in the UK).

Sometimes, American colleagues ask me if it's safe in London before they travel there. A better question might be to ask whether it's safe to come back to the US.