In the weeks now that Californians have been lashed by high winds during epic rainstorms and multiple mudslides as a series of atmospheric rivers moves through the state, I’ve heard from friends across the country, asking if we’re OK. So it’s weird that Rep. Katie Porter seemed not to have heard any of this.
The Orange County Democrat definitely didn’t know that it was less than ideal timing, launching a U.S. Senate campaign with the death toll in her home state still climbing, to 19 as of Wednesday night. Floodwaters ripped a 5-year-old out of his mother’s arms, and cars were being swallowed whole by sinkholes. There was kayaking on the streets of Santa Barbara, evacuations from Montecito, and whole roads turned into rivers. Yet this ongoing disaster didn’t rate even a passing mention in Porter’s announcement video, which focused on the need for “a warrior in Washington.”
Last I checked, Washington was lousy with warriors. Porter, however, I would until this week have described as refreshingly unlike other lawmakers — a brainy and unvarnished single mom and singular communicator. Every fact fancier has to love her way with a whiteboard.
But the timing of her announcement undercut her message that, as she said in her video, “I don’t do Congress the way others often do.” Yes, this announcement raised Porter lots of money for a race that will be crowded soon enough.
She’ll lose few if any votes in 2024 because she couldn’t wait for the storms to subside and wouldn’t wait for incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein to decide. But Porter’s Washington-centric focus — with the House Speaker’s race finally over, why wait another minute? — does make her seem a little less shimmery, and a little more like every other campaigner.
Feinstein, who is 89, is not expected to run again, but she was not wrong to call Porter on her casual disrespect of both her and their state. The senator said that she (unlike oh, say, Katie Porter) would announce her intentions at the appropriate moment, which wasn’t this moment: “Right now, I’m focused on ensuring California has all the resources it needs to cope with the devastating storms slamming the state and leaving more than a dozen dead.”
When MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell asked Porter to answer criticism from fellow California Democrats that she should have waited until after the crisis to launch her bid, she said, “Those storms, which are going to keep coming in the next few days, the next few months and the next years, are a result of ignoring problems for far too long in Washington.”
Yes, but the “another day, another storm” tone of that comment is oblivious to the quite specific suffering right here, right now.
“My kids are in California, and I hope they’re staying safe and dry,” she told O’Donnell, as if she might not have received a postcard or other communication from them recently. I’m sure that’s not true, but again, the remove that remark suggested was so odd that it made me wonder whether the shadow side of her irresistible wonkiness is a little bit of a Vulcan streak.
“While my heart goes out to everyone in California … right now, we need to send people to Washington who are going to solve problems. … That’s the best thing we can do to ensure California and the country are safe going forward.”
Every politician says that. And again, I had thought that Porter was everywoman without being every pol.
Porter says she read a book a day last week while watching now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy give extremists everything not bolted to the House floor. As someone who enjoyed reading so much when I was a kid that my mother occasionally had to make me go outside and play, I was definitely in the demo that loved that photo of her with her nose in “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F—.”
Only now that photo, and that book title, ought to remind her, not subtly at all, that she can’t forget to give a bunch of — hoots, let’s say — about what’s happening back home.
