Two Major Santa Barbara Politicos Trip over Their Own Egos

FULL CONFESSION:  When it comes to self-inflicted stupid, I consider myself a master, even a sensei. In my prime, I was what you’d call a prodigy. Not only did I take a stick to a swarming beehive (with predictable results) but I later picked a fight with a skunk, also with predictable results — though I still insist that ended as a draw. Most originally, I sawed off the tree branch I happened to be sitting on. Not once but twice. It’s a long story. In my defense, I was young. 

The same excuse, sadly, can’t be used any longer for County Supervisor Das Williams — ground zero personified for the local Democratic Party machine — or for Andy Caldwell, Santa Barbara’s right-wing gas bag and mouth-that-roars for COLAB, an outfit forever agitating on behalf of polluters, developers, and despoilers everywhere.

Williams, it should be acknowledged, is anything but stupid. But his raw political talent and tactical brilliance has been eclipsed by the creeping critical mass of his unconscious arrogance, a trait often afflicting people who see themselves as agents of historical change. Although Williams puts into practice many of the political values the Independent holds near and dear, the paper could not bring itself to endorse him this year. Our hang-up was the “A” word. 

Perhaps in Williams’s mind, he’s the righteous Young Jesus chasing the money-changers out of the temple; he’s the lone, brave soul forever speaking uncomfortable truths to power. It’s a nice myth. But if you’re going to be in politics, you have to listen. And listening — as all you marriage counselors out there know — is more than waiting for your partner to shut up so you can interject, “Yes, but….”

Trust me, I know.

Williams will all but certainly win reelection — “handily,” as they like to say — and is already setting his sights on a statehouse run in 2028. At age 49, Santa Barbara’s once and future young man in a hurry still has a long potential future. But when that race comes, Williams might find all these “intangible” issues a little too tangible for comfort. After all, it was an uprising by the politically well-connected — and blisteringly passionate — Anybody But Das Crowd who successfully deep-sixed his bid to be appointed to the Coastal Commission a few years ago. 

Das’s self-inflicted troubles, however, pale in comparison to the Mouth-that-Roared (and Roared and Roared), Andy Caldwell. The heart and soul of Santa Barbara’s forever aggrieved and outraged Republican catastrophists’ club, Caldwell has managed — in just the past few months — to cut off not one but three branches upon which he happened to be perched. I’m duly impressed. 

First, Caldwell had Mike Stoker, the grand old man of the Grand Old Party, on his syndicated radio show. Stoker accused Frank Troise — Republican candidate for 3rd District supervisor and suicidally self-identified investment banker — of being a sham and flim-flam artist the likes of which he’d never seen in his 40 years of political campaigning. Caldwell, a Troise backer, thought Stoker’s comments were irresponsible, perhaps even reprehensible — and yanked Stoker’s plug in the middle of the show.

Worse yet, Caldwell has gotten terminally sideways with Santa Barbara’s two North County (code for conservative or conservative adjacent) supervisors Bob Nelson and Steve Lavagnino. Nelson, who represents the 4th District including Orcutt, may be the only Republican elected official in Santa Barbara County. That makes him as endangered as the tiger salamander, which I am told only has sex by the light of a full moon immediately after a rainstorm. (Talk about a dubious strategy for reproductive success.) Nelson — smart, shrewd, open, canny, and capable of throwing an invisible jab or sucker punch for the team — constructively engages in the deliberative process like no occupant of his seat since, well, the last time a tiger salamander tried to get lucky listening to Barry White. 

This Tuesday, Supervisor Nelson felt the need to call Andy out — by reference rather than name — at the Board of Supervisors meeting this week for fomenting false and hysterical (in Caldwell’s case, subliminal allusions to floating uteri might be appropriate) information about the state of the county’s pension system, calling the county’s payroll bloated. 

For the record, Nelson pointedly noted, the county now has 600 job vacancies in budgeted positions, 107 of which were in the Sheriff’s Office. So much for bloat. In a social media exchange, Nelson — a card-carrying fiscal conservative — insisted that the county had all but solved the problem of pension liabilities a while ago and that Andy was singing from a hymnal long since outdated.

Supervisor Lavagnino — smart, genuinely funny, and painstakingly agreeable no matter how big a horse’s ass he thinks you are — ripped Andy the proverbial “new one” in more ways than can be enumerated here. (Lavagnino, who in any sane universe would have been a Republican superstar, has now become a Declined-to-State registered voter, having jumped Trump’s Good Ship Lollipop for reasons of human decency.) 

Caldwell had pissed Lavagnino off when he attacked firefighters for being overpaid. Lavagnino pointed out that the millions of dollars Caldwell had raised through COLAB could have been more effectively spent backing actual political candidates to run for public office rather than underwriting Caldwell’s enviable salary. Speaking of Caldwell, Lavagnino said, “He no longer attends board meetings, doesn’t have a relationship with any of the County Supervisors, and hasn’t moved the needle on one issue in the county in the last 10 years.” 

Ouch!

Life is short; I have lots of dumb stuff yet to do. But of all the dumb things I haven’t done, the dumbest one is not voting. So please, whatever you do, do not not vote. The election, by the way, is Tuesday.