Katie Porter lost it.
The Democratic front-runner for governor of California was giving a routine TV interview to the CBS station in Sacramento when reporter Julie Watts asked if she supported Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting proposal, Proposition 50 on the Nov. 4 special election ballot. Porter said she did. The next question caused all the trouble.
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“What do you say to the 40% of California voters — who you’ll need in order to win — who voted for Trump?” Watts asked.
You’d have to go back to 1939, when Judy Garland threw a bucket of water on Margaret Hamilton, to find a comparable reaction captured on camera.
“How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” Porter asked, leaning forward into the shadows with an expression that Margaret Hamilton could only achieve after hours in make-up. Then, as Watts referred to the math of a crowded Democratic field in the primary, Porter turned to look at someone off-camera and rocked with laughter.
“Unless you think you’re going to get 60% of the vote,” Watts continued. “You think you’ll get 60% of the — all of the — everybody who did not vote for Trump will vote for you. That’s what you’re a…”
“In a general election, yes,” Porter said. “If it is me versus a Republican, I think that I will win the people who did not vote for Trump.”
“What if it is you versus another Democrat?” Watts asked.
“I don’t intend that to be the case,” Porter snapped back.
As Watts persisted to find out what Porter meant by that statement, Porter looked off-camera and said, “I don’t want to keep doing this. I’m going to call it.” The former congresswoman and former candidate for U.S. Senate declared that she would not continue the interview if the reporter was going to “make up a follow-up question” on every question.
The sense of entitlement was so familiar.
Last year we saw Vice President Kamala Harris grab the Democratic nomination without a primary and then go 39 straight days without giving an interview or holding a press conference. Harris didn’t bother to reach out to Americans who had voted for Donald Trump. She campaigned with Liz Cheney, the defeated former congresswoman from Wyoming who called Trump, among other things, “a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.” President Joe Biden chimed in, calling Trump’s supporters “garbage.”
But the champion of entitlement has to be the former first lady, secretary of State and U.S. senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. She famously called Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” as she marched toward her inevitable, historical, glass-ceiling-shattering, fireworks-off-a-barge presidential election victory that did not happen.
It’s easy to say the election failures of Porter, Harris and Clinton are the product of reactionary patriarchal antipathy to decolonial feminist intersectionality — OK, it’s not easy to say, but it will get you straight A’s in 99 classrooms out of a hundred.
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