Please Not the Billionaire: Porter or Becerra for Governor

CALIFORNIA DREAMING -- Now that Eric Swalwell is out of the California governor’s race, hopefully the attention will turn to the two Democratic candidates who should have been the focus all along: Xavier Becerra and Katie Porter.

Becerra has the longer career in California politics — as a state assemblyman, U.S. congressman representing East Los Angeles, attorney general of California, and cabinet secretary for President Biden. Porter is newer to public service, having been appointed by Kamala Harris when she was California attorney general to be the state’s independent monitor of banks in a nationwide mortgage settlement. Porter went on to represent Orange County in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Becerra and Porter’s styles are very different: He, the more quietly competent consensus-builder; she, the in-your-face professor who holds corporate power to account.

Both have the potential to be very good governors.

Apparently the current occupant of the governor’s office — Grandstander-in-Chief and Corporate Democrat Gavin Newsom — is nonplussed by Becerra and Porter. That figures, and is just fine. It’s time for a change of style as well as politics in our less shiny golden state.

What about Tom Steyer, the billionaire candidate who’s spending money like a drunken venture capitalist to acquire the governor’s office? The problem with billionaires is their egos ultimately get in the way of their noblesse oblige, and their contempt for people not on their level bleeds out.

Please not the billionaire. Becerra or Porter for governor.

(Cary Brazeman is a former neighborhood councilmember and former candidate for city controller of Los Angeles.)