You can see why California Governor Gavin Newsom had to go beyond California to find a fitting replacement for the late Dianne Feinstein in the United States Senate. He put a lot of thought into it. He conducted an extensive search. Before Feinstein’s body was cold, Newsom was ready with his announcement. He had found the compleat Democrat: Laphonza Butler of Silver Spring, Maryland.
It’s almost funny. But consider, to borrow a Shakespearean formulation, she is the perfectest herald of joy, Democrat style. She combines identity politics and ideological rectitude with institutional networking. Let us pause to admire her perfection.
She’s black.
She’s homosexual.
She will be the “first openly L.G.B.T.Q.” (plus or minus one) “senator from the state,” as the New York Times stretches to put it.
She’s married.
She is an ardent evangelist of the Democrats’ abortion creed. Indeed, as president of EMILY’s List, she is a high priestess of the faith.
A former Regent of the University of California, she has one foot in the left’s higher education bastion.
She has served stints in corporate America.
She has wisdom sufficient to have served as an advisor to Kamala Harris’s 2020 crash-and burn-presidential campaign.
Striking a nostalgic note with deep roots, she wears the union label.
She has served as a board member for the National Children’s Defense Fund, BLACK PAC, and the Bay Area Economic Council Institute.
She was a fellow for the MIT Community Innovators Lab, and was the former director for the Board of Governors of the Los Angeles branch of the Federal Reserve System.
Her residence in Maryland requires the erasure and pretense of those expert in the art of public relations.
Forty-four years old, she is a harbinger of our future.
There is just about nothing she hasn’t “done.”
She is leaving 2024 “an open question,” as the Times puts it. I think the open question is what office she will run for in 2024.
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