General Discussion

It was really strange. As the Prospect notes, it was an open secret. Like Spacey or Weinstein in Hollywood, if you moved in Bay Area political circles, you knew the guy was a total sleazebag at best with a bevy of scandals just waiting to burst forth.

And then he started getting endorsement after endorsement, moved up in the polls, and the party seemed totally fine with this.

When he announced, my political friends - none of whom went to work on his campaign - were messaging amongst themselves. They couldn't believe the audacity of it. He worked fine as a media personality, but just in reaching for that office, he was guaranteeing future shit.

And what sticks in my craw a bit is this is California. It's not some random red state where maybe you have one or two viable Democrats to run in a race, so you're sitting there like, "Well, this is the best we've got, so we kind of have to go along with it and pray nothing happens." We have a deep, deep bench of Democratic politicians who did not have this bomb waiting to go off. That's what makes it crazy. With so many options, the party at the highest levels went with this ragingly sociopathic misogynist.

In California.

A friend in Long Beach who worked for Maxine Waters for years joked, "Who does he have blackmail on?"

It's a question people in the know in California politics have been asking from the word go. And I still kind of want an answer on this one. Why did they line up behind him like that? In this day and age, with social media and all the rest, open secrets do not remain secrets for long once some critical mass was reached.

The man could have ended up our general election candidate. They really played a lot of unnecessary dice with this election.