Make New York Post a Preferred Source California Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra celebrating at an election night watch party in Sacramento on Nov. 3, 2026. Nathan Weyland for CA Post This year began with so much hope for the Golden State, where Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton were mounting eye-catching insurgent bids for the mayoralty of its largest city and governor’s mansion, respectively.
In failing blue states such as New York, Minnesota and California, decades of Democratic mismanagement seemed like they might serve as a countervailing force to the widespread dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled federal government.
What’s more, Pratt and Hilton were running savvy campaigns focused less on preaching conservative values than on solving California’s problems.
But with the GOP’s bottom falling out in Texas, South Carolina and Mississippi, it stood no chance of defying the already long odds in the land of Hollywood, Berkeley and San Francisco.
Still, hope paradoxically lives on, because the state has handed the keys over to a man who just about everyone agrees is bound to be a disaster as chief executive — and maybe one so catastrophic as to finally compel Californians to try something new.
On this point, Hilton and progressive ex-Rep. Katie Porter are agreed.
A recent CNN segment featured the ideologically opposed pair tsk-tsking Xavier Becerra over his continued caginess about what he intends to actually do as governor.
Host Elex Michaelson noted that Becerra ran a largely substance-free campaign before allowing Porter and Hilton to take their at-bats.
“As a Californian, I have questions!” declared Porter.
“I need a commitment that my children are going to be able to afford to live here . . . we are less than two months from Gov.-elect Becerra leading the state.”
For his part, Hilton couldn’t help but burst out laughing after watching a clip of Becerra tip-toeing around making commitments of any kind, before marveling at his inability to articulate his agenda.
The truth that they put their finger on is this: Becerra is uniquely unsuited to the task before him.
Neither a pragmatist nor an ideologue, Becerra is something much more dangerous in what has degenerated into a one-party state.
Becerra was rewarded for his slavish devotion to the Democratic cause — as exemplified by his creepy abortion infatuation, his insidious manipulation of ballot initiatives and his weaponization of the California attorney general’s office to target conservative groups — with an appointment to run President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Under Becerra’s brand of “leadership,” HHS lost track of tens of thousands of migrant children in one of the most troubling scandals of the last decade — and that’s just the moldy cherry on top.
According to congressional investigators, he was “invisible” during the COVID-19 pandemic, “asleep at the wheel” during a baby-formula shortage and violated the Constitution by failing to “reappoint key NIH officials,” thus “putting their jobs, the decisions they’ve made, and the billions in funding they’ve approved in legal jeopardy.”
The reviews from his own fellow Biden administration alums are devastating.
As Becerra rose in the polls this summer, a number of them went on the record to bash him.
A third observed that “he wasn’t cut out for” the cabinet because he “didn’t know how to handle” a crisis.
“He would go to brief the president and was not prepared at all, almost to the point where it was an embarrassment,” the source recalled.
CNN’s Xochitl Hinojosa, formerly the Biden Justice Department’s communications director, recalled that Becerra was, in sum, “not effective in governing.”
What could go wrong putting such a luminary in charge of the world’s fourth-largest economy?
Becerra is a talentless empty suit who will prove to be a complete nonentity in Sacramento.
The ascendant far left of his party will continue to push for more extreme versions of the same policies — more permissiveness of antisocial behavior, more taxes, more regulation, less order and less energy abundance — that have wreaked havoc on a once-great state.
Becerra will roll right over for these regressive radicals while doing . . . whatever it is he always does right after cashing a fresh taxpayer-funded paycheck.
But while he has a penchant for being invisible, four years from now the rotten fruits of his work — or lack thereof — will be far from it.
Under Becerra, California might just hit rock bottom. And finally be ready for something new.
