The California wildfires have doomed Kamala Harris’s political comeback

In the months since November’s election, the American Left has had little to comfort itself with but dreams. Donald Trump is riding back into the White House more popular than he’s ever been – and with Republican majorities in the House and Senate to boot.

Among those dreams: Kamala Harris reviving her political career by succeeding Gavin Newsom as governor of California, and then one of them delivering the Democrats out of the darkness come the 2028 presidential election.

But progressives’ dreams are so often punctured by reality, and reality arrived in Southern California this month.

The human cost of the wildfires still ravaging Los Angeles is incalculable. Numbers – staggering as they may be – cannot accurately describe the devastation.

It’s similarly difficult to appraise the political cost yet to be paid.

Natural disasters are natural disasters. In and of themselves, they’re not an indictment of local officials or governments. Yet in the case of the wildfires, there’s more than enough blame to go around.

As, bizarrely enough, Donald Trump has been telling us for years – forest management is one of the niche topics the former and future President enjoys expounding upon – the risk of such fires can be mitigated.

And yet under the current state budget signed by Newsom, California cut $4 million “from a forest legacy programme aimed at encouraging good management practices from landowners”, “$5 million from CAL FIRE fuel reduction teams”, $28 million from “funds provided to multiple state conservancies to increase wildfire resilience,” and more. All in, Newsom rubber-stamped $105 million in cuts to fire prevention programmes, according to National Review’s Jim Geraghty.

Lest you chalk those cuts up to frugality, consider that Newsom boasted about signing a $54 billion climate bill a few years ago and has championed further spending on a high-speed rail project that has been in the works for close to two decades, is expected to cost billions, and is still barely under construction.

To his credit, shortly after taking office in 2019, Newsom did announce a “California Vegetation Treatment Programme”. To his shame, though, a 2022 investigation found that “the glacial pace of environmental approvals under CEQA may lead to a much worse outcome – extreme wildfires obliterating these areas”.

The only saving grace for Newsom is that his failures are outnumbered and outweighed by those of LA mayor Karen Bass, who left for Ghana just before the outbreak of the fire. A 117 million gallon reservoir in Pacific Palisades, meanwhile, was also allowed to remain empty for nearly a year (and counting).

None of the particulars of Newsom and Bass’s choices in the days leading up to this tragedy speak well of them. But it’s the ideology they represent that may well compel voters to reject them and the brand of politics they are associated with.

The likes of Newsom, Harris, and Bass found success in politics because they were willing to repeat the progressive shibboleths necessary to climb the Democratic Party’s ladder.

Men can become women, while women can become men. Climate change is an existential threat that justifies any number of draconian policies at ruinous expense. No migrant can be illegal. Our economic woes would be solved if only the wealthy were made to pay their “fair share”. Abortion is “health care”. The slogans go on, and on, and on.

Following any of them to their logical conclusion only ever causes pain. But an obsession with the mantras of progressive ideology also distracts from the basic business of effective governance. It doesn’t win headlines, but ensuring that the streets are safe, schools are impressive, and officials in areas prone to natural disasters are prepared, wins votes.

California fails on all three counts; it’s no coincidence that it’s run by a bunch of incompetents whose only discernible talent is repeating their little slogans with a smile.

Harris, though not culpable for the tragedy unfolding in her home state, perfectly embodies this vapidity. Think back to the campaign trail. Was there a single accomplishment that the Democratic nominee for president or her supporters could point to? The answer most Americans would land on is a simple “No”. History is unlikely to look kindly on a vice-president who reportedly ordered a review of whether the intelligence community used “gender-biased language” at a time of enormous new threats to the West.

In November, the United States resolved to stop paying the price of Harris and Newsom’s toxic form of virtue-signalling. The Vice-President should not hold out much hope of a political comeback.