His situation is the exact reason I never want to be in a leadership position with adults. You try to do the right thing, you get spit on. You go with the popular thing, things inevitably go awry, you get spit on.
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Anytime a person in power tries to be responsible when the masses don't want to be, they get ass-canned.
Eh. I realize you guys aren't as tied in to how it went down here in CA, but it's not that he got in trouble for "trying to do the right thing".
Dude was flailing. I honestly think he got the initial lockdown right... And then got everything else wrong.
It'd be one thing if I could say, as someone who has followed this stuff closely, that he was following the science in what he was doing. But he wasn't. It was like every time the numbers changed, he locked down without really evaluating WHERE the risks were. Shutting down outdoor dining, haircuts (everyone masked), nail salons (everyone masked), when there was no evidence that those were primary avenues of spread. Kowtowing to the teachers unions who didn't want to return to schools when all the science said that schools weren't the primary avenues of spread.
Then he lost the PR battle. Whole counties--including many high population counties--basically said they just refused to enforce anything Newsom said. He ended up getting into a kerfluffle over Thanksgiving gatherings--which is something that he needed to say--but did so in such a tone-deaf way that he came off looking like an ass. And then the French Laundry thing happened which made him look like a GIANT hypocrite, and like there was a different set of rules for the elites than us lowly serfs.
The issue is that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. His only tool was a lockdown, so everything looked like a lockdown opportunity. But people got sick of it, got sick of him, and then just simply tuned him out.
If he had been a lot more forthcoming and treated Californians like adults, focusing on the key avenues of spread and trying to convince us that we need to mediate our behavior to avoid it, I think it would have gone better. Instead he treated us like children and any time the cases rose, told us we were grounded--while he went off and played.
