Governors

An introduction to presidential grave-hunting

Where better to talk about dead presidents than over beer and wings at Jim's Saloon in East Pembroke, New York, three days before Millard Fillmore’s birthday? Across the table from me is Pat Weissend, a convivial bank manager and former museum director who has visited the gravesites of all thirty-nine dead presidents and all but two of the forty-three dead vice presidents of the United States. (The hard-to-get veeps are Walter Mondale, whose ashes have yet to be interred under the cold hard Minnesota ground, and Nelson Rockefeller, whose private and inaccessible burial spot is the Holy Grail of the grave-hunting community.

presidents

Gavin Newsom has no right to talk about other states’ crime rates

Gavin Newsom is running for president. Sure, he hasn’t announced it and has claimed he’s “all in” for Biden, but he’s increasingly taking time off from personally disrupting the nation’s Dapper Dan supply chain in order to weigh in on national issues, measure the drapes, and attempt to troll Republican governors. His latest salvo, directed toward Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was sworn in as Arkansas’ governor about 15 minutes ago, claims that “While [Sanders] touts public safety, here is what she skips over: Arkansas has the one of the highest murder rates in the nation.” This is, of course, true. In 2020, the last year for which CDC stats are available, Arkansans have a much greater chance of being murdered than Californians.

newsom

A tale of two media standards for governors

Almost no topic shows our media's complete disconnect from reality than the national coverage of governors over the past year with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. While flooding their viewers with stories of coronavirus failures about Ron #DeathSantis in Florida and Kristi Noem in South Dakota and Greg Abbott in Texas, the press consistently praised the work of Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom in California. The reality on the ground could not be more different. The two most prominent faces of the Democratic response to COVID (with Gretchen Whitmer being the third) have found themselves humiliated and disgraced. Both may end up out of power thanks to their personal and professional behavior of the past year.

media governors