How Much Can Recall Of Chesa Boudin Tell Us About National Mood?

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1418996
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Means nothing other than showing how piss poor the media is at their jobs, but I doubt they want that to be the narrative.

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How Much Can Recall Of Chesa Boudin Tell Us About National Mood?

Nothing. All it tells us is that california has idiotic recall rules that can be gamed by money to remove elected officials by fewer votes than elected them in the first place, less than a year after they were elected.

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How Much Can Recall Of Chesa Boudin Tell Us About National Mood?

It tells us very little about the “national mood”.

But it tells us everything we need to know about the cool-kid’s table in the middle-school cafeteria to which (most of) our political press has lazily degenerated.

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PLEASE listen to Citations Needed. They have a 30 minute response that, IMHO, is on point:

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Trust me on this. San Francisco politics can tell you exactly NOTHING about national politics. Zero, zilch, nada, nichts, …

San Francisco is a world unto itself and their politics are an unstable blend of laissez faire, empathy, entitlement, hubris, socialist urges and a desire not to be accosted or assaulted on the streets or on the N-Judah by people who are demonstrably mentally ill.

I truly love San Francisco, despite the invasion of the big-spending Tech bros, but I have seen dangerous people on the street who made me cross the street in the name or self-preservation.

So, every now and then, the empathy urge whipsaws to the self-preservation urge and someone is elected to “clean up the streets”.

Never works. Most people can’t embrace the cruelty that would be necessary to do this through law enforcement (which is what happens most places) or the expense and curtailing of individual freedom necessary to do it through comprehensive, mandatory mental health treatment (which happens exactly nowhere in the US that I know of).

Crime and homelessness are tough problems and it’s easier to find a scapegoat than to commit to actually doing something.

Just my opinion.

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I agree that this doesn’t mean anything. Other progressive DAs are winning. He was just poor at selling. Also, San Francisco is a mess and people are impatient. San Francisco is known as a crazy liberal city, and it has that, but there are a lot of people just trying to live there and not be accosted on the street by crazy people, or have to walk out into the street to avoid the stream of urine running down the sidewalk from a tent village.

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Spot on.

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Maybe that Democrats need to be better at messaging, and that the News Media sucks at every level in keeping us informed on what is happening.

One of the teevee commercials was some loser republican decrying the economic disaster of Biden, even though that’s not true at all. But it gets traction with some because they don’t know otherwise because the media fails at every turn to inform people of the truth.

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Sitting at SFO right now. Pretty calm In here.

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Two points on this

  1. The problem was the SF police. They’ve been extorting the city by not only refusing to enforce laws but also by propagandizing – telling everyone in the City to not expect them to do their job; as long as Boudin is AG, they’ll be sitting on their hands. This is police corruption and needs to be called out as such

  2. The media’s “Why this is bad for Biden/Dems” reflex is getting really frustrating

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Public transportation rule number 1: AVOID EYE CONTACT

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Can we take a break from using progressive to mean the same thing wherever it’s used?

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Well by the whistling past the grave here, it’s pretty clear November is going to be a bloodbath, followed by assertions that if only candidates were yet more (insert Activist Preference Here) it would have been different.

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Democrats being better at messaging is just a saying the media keeps saying to cover their failures.

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Boudin getting booted out had nothing to do with anything outside of San Francisco and everything to do with the locals getting freaked out about the obvious and increasing number of homeless people, particularly aggressive ones. Boudin was targeted as being responsible, regardless of the complexities of the issue and any inside politics.

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It’s been their framing since Fox News started winning ratings.

Sadly news is trying to compete with entertainment by removing the “news” part.

As a result…

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Edited for accuracy

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“Whistling past the graveyard” was my reaction also to the dismissive tone of this article as well as most of the comments here. Concern about surging urban crime rates is widespread, and spans the ideological and racial spectrum. Increasing numbers of Democrats, including many African-Americans, favor stronger, more assertive responses to urban crime.

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…and always will be. It is not a new thing.