On a chillySaturday late last month, I met Eric Swalwell at a Little League diamond near Capitol Hill, where the Bay Area congressman and his wife, Brittany, would be watching their 8-year-old son. Swalwell, who was running to succeed Gavin Newsom as the next governor of California, had been gradually rising above a Lilliputian cast of candidates and had acquired a strong scent of momentum in the race.
“Impeccable timing for you,” he’d texted me on my drive over. He attached a just-publishedWashington Postarticlereporting that FBI Director Kash Patel was seeking to release files relating to a decade-old investigation into Swalwell that had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. If true, thePoststory presented a publicity godsend to Swalwell’s campaign, further elevating his status as a nemesis of the vindictive president.
The family-guy tableau of the Little League game felt consistent with the wholesome image that the campaign had been straining to project of late, for reasons that would become clear soon enough. Our interview occurred on the same weekend that Swalwell released a video of him and Brittany holding hands on a boardwalk stroll, while she called him a “really great dad” and a “really good husband.”
As we sat together in the bleachers, Swalwell introduced me to Brittany, dropped the names of his better-known endorsers, and referred to Nancy Pelosi as his “work mom.” He also mentioned Adam Schiff, his former House colleague, whose trajectory into statewide office Swalwell had watched closely. Like Schiff, Swalwell had become a ubiquitous antagonist of Donald Trump—about as good of a credential as any for leading the de facto capital of Blue America.
“I am the only candidate whose name the president knows,” Swalwell told me.
Read: Donald Trump’s gift to Adam Schiff
A few weeks later, a lot more people know Eric Swalwell’s name, which has now been stained immeasurably. He is leaving Congress; his campaign is over, probably his political career too; and the California governor’s race is even messier than the colossal fiasco it had been before.
Swalwell’s collapse hasbeen sudden and swift, if not surprising. Recurrent talk of bad behavior toward women had trailed him around Washington for years, and proliferated as he approached front-runner status. Late last week, the rumors detonated:Multiple women, one of them aformer staffer,accused himof sexual misconduct, including sexual assault, unwanted advances, and explicit Snapchat messages. Swalwell admitted to “mistakes in judgment” but deniedthe allegationsand vowed to “fight” them. In short order, he has been met withmultipleinvestigations, and instant pariah status. (I reached out to him after the accusations came out but did not hear back.)
The fact that Swalwell was, until recently, the Democrats’ leading candidate for governor is itself illustrative of the race writ large. Or, as far as the people still running, writ small. The glaring lack of candidate talent, political skill, and personal appeal—let alone star power—has been the defining quality of the race. Bigger names, such as Kamala Harris and Senator Alex Padilla, opted not to run. Newsom is term-limited. Jerry Brown is 88. George Clooney lives in France.
Beyond the perverse pull of watching such ineptitude on display, the main allure of this campaign is that it could produce the ultimate man-bites-dog political result: the election of a Trump-aligned Republican governor in this bluest of states, concurrent with a national election that could produce the bluest of waves. Such a monumental upset would not occur because the two GOP candidates—Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and the British-bred commentator and strategist Steve Hilton—remind anyone of Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or any of the other larger-than-life Republicans in the party’s rich (if not recent) California tradition. Rather, a Republican win would represent an act of Democratic self-immolation, spectacular even by Team Donkey standards.
Source: Drudge Report
