Weird walk to the governor’s office

Yes, (shudder), I even have watched the debates.

None of it has helped. I am not any closer to deciding who to vote for in the June 2 governor’s primary election.

Just as I start to lean toward someone, a new set of flaws is revealed. (Hello, Eric Swalwell.)

Xavier Becerra, the former California attorney general and former head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is surging. But he is being appropriately hammered for his inept mishandling of thousands of immigrant children as young as 13 who were released by his department and sent to fend for themselves all over the country. They ended up working in what The New York Times called “punishing jobs” at slaughterhouses, construction projects and near-sweatshop factories.

You may have seen the ads from billionaire candidate Tom Steyer on this issue that conclude with a clip of former Congresswoman Anna Eshoo sternly telling Becerra “the buck stops with you.” Eshoo has not endorsed in the governor’s race, she appears in the ad without her approval, and she would not comment on the ad or the race.

Nonetheless, her deep disdain for Becerra is clear and apparently entirely accurate, the result of multiple unsuccessful efforts to get him to respond to congressional inquiries about the crisis, according to congressional insiders.

Then there is Steyer who, despite spending $132 million of his own money on an unrelenting barrage of TV ads, has done nothing to make himself appealing as a person or as a leader.

There is no reason to believe a former CEO will do a good job of running government. CEOs give orders and people carry them out. At no time, does a CEO give an order and someone stands up, wags a finger, and says, “We are not doing that.”

Politics is about persuasion — getting people to do what you want them to do. Steyer has not persuaded me that he actually understands politics. For all the things Steyer says he is going to do, I do neither believe he will get any of them done, nor does he understand how to get them through the legislature.

Former Congresswoman Katie Porter positions herself as an outsider and a fighter, and there has been plenty written and said about how she is temperamental and testy. She asserts she will take no corporate money. But congressional insiders tell me she often pressured House colleagues to donate to her candidacies, which could be tantamount to laundering corporate money through other campaign treasuries. In any event, it is revealing that the vast majority of House members who served with her have not endorsed her.

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan seems to embody his home city’s midwestern blandness. He is a relative moderate and seems well-scrubbed, but his candidacy is the product of tech billionaires who want their own guy in charge.

A generation ago, tech execs once were community-minded and employee-oriented. The current crop is solely and soullessly about making money. They are rushing headlong toward AI as the next tidal wave of wealth. Regulating AI, social media and the tech industry could well be the most consequential policy issue of the next five years.

Mahan says he is “not afraid to regulate Big Tech or any other industry.” Tech is not “any other industry.” It is the industry spending millions of dollars on Mahan.

By the way, the debates have been useless. I blame the “journalists” who tossed out absurd and irrelevant questions, or agreed to ridiculous restrictions on the candidates. Imagine the Lincoln-Douglas debates in a modern format: “Mr. Lincoln. Slavery. You have one minute.”

Anyway, there you go. There is no such thing as a perfect candidate. But it would be nice if some — or one — of these candidates made it just a little easier to decide.

Still, we have to decide, and nothing I have whined about here should discourage anyone from voting.

Ballots are in the mail. The decision is looming. Vote. Indeed, make sure your ballot arrives by Election Day, given the legal challenges that are looming.

But it also makes some sense to wait.

As we have learned in this election, perhaps more than any other, anything can happen between now and June 2. That is only 26 days.

A political lifetime.