On Monday night, the four leading candidates, Adam Schiff, Steve Garvey, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee, took the stage to make their case as to why they should fill the late Dianne Feinstein’s seat in the U.S. Senate.
Here’s my analysis of each candidate’s performance.
Representative Barbara Lee did not do much to help her struggling campaign. When Lee starts a sentence, it really feels like even she doesn’t know how that sentence is going to end. She just keeps moving her lips until something comes out.
During her response to the question of whether President Biden should use his executive power to circumvent Congress and secure the border, Lee said: “Currently we need to make sure that we invest in cities and counties that are really uh helping uh immigrants given the governors’ abilities to send immigrants to other states and what they’re doing is dividing residents from immigrants.” How does this answer the question? It doesn’t. What does it mean? No one knows.
Lee also took the opportunity to double down on her $50 minimum wage proposal citing a United Way report, which states that a family of four in the Bay Area requires $127,000 to just barely get by. The argument here is simple: people need more money, so let’s make employers pay them more money. As nice as this sounds, Lee completely ignores all of the evidence that higher minimum wages just end up producing more inflation.
Companies are forced to increase prices, so any extra money you get is negated by having to spend more money on the goods and services you need. This is only one of the many negative effects it would produce. Lee stands by her $50 proposal either because she’s ignorant of the economic effects or because she wants to say something that sounds nice to voters who themselves do not understand how her proposal would hurt them. Obviously, neither explanation is good for Californians.
There’s not much to say about Steve Garvey. He is as ill-equipped to be a senator as I am to be a Danish princess. He seems like a nice guy and I love the Dodgers, but ideally, a senator should have extensive knowledge of the legal system, economics, foreign policy, and much more. Why does a retired baseball player think that he’s equipped to be a senator? The answer is arrogance and ignorance. Hearing him speak only reinforced this.
Turning now to Representative Katie Porter, much of what she said came off as pandering and delusional. When asked about California’s sky-high cost of living and wealth inequality, Porter mentioned that her own children are wondering whether they’ll be able to afford to live in California when they grow up. She’s a congresswoman and a tenured law professor at an elite university. Her children will attend elite universities and live more comfortably than most Californians dream of.
But this is beside the point. Why must she state such a blatant lie? If she’s not lying to us then she has been unnecessarily terrifying her young children about their future. She could also just answer the question without bringing in this disingenuous sentimentality. But that’s what politicians do. They use cheap rhetorical tricks like this to make you feel like they care about your issues.
It gets worse when we look at her claims about inequality. When pressed to answer the question about wealth inequality, Porter claimed that the workers “who are creating the value[…]are not receiving enough to live on.” Trying my best to extract an argument, I suppose she may be claiming that because the workers create the value, they deserve a larger share of the profits.
This is a reference to Karl Marx’s Labor Theory of Value where the value of goods and services is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it. It entails that workers are the ones who create the value in an economy. The labor theory of value has long been disproven and rejected by most economists. In short, it’s overly simplistic and therefore fails to explain the reality of value creation. It’s probably not the best idea to place someone in power who’s policy preferences rest on a misunderstanding of basic economics.
Representative Adam Schiff’s performance on the other hand was marked by incessant time-wasting recounting long and irrelevant personal anecdotes, like about his father being nicknamed “Boca Eddie.” That particular anecdote featured in his response to the question of why the homeless population in Los Angeles County has multiplied by ten times since he took office. He avoided a difficult question because there was really nothing he could say in his defense. With such limited time to answer, an honest person would try to eliminate unnecessary information to get their point across, not distract us with boring stories.
Finally, Schiff had the opportunity to acknowledge that both Biden and Trump are too old to be president. Instead of honesty, Schiff praised the work of Joe Biden and went on a long rant about all of the things he himself has done while in Congress. We need our leaders to be able to depart from scripted party lines and acknowledge plainly visible facts such as Biden and Trump both being too old for office – Schiff can’t do that.
Political debates are never anything short of ridiculous charades where candidates lie, refuse to answer questions, and engage in virtually no actual debate. This California Senate debate was no different and realistically, there’s little else we could have hoped for.
Rafael Perez is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.