The primary election for California’s State Senate District 36, which encompasses much of coastal and northwest Orange County, is coming up on February 25th following Janet Nguyen’s resignation last year. On the ballot are Republicans Tony Strickland and John Briscoe and Democrats Julie Diep and Jimmy Pham.
Recently, I had an opportunity to hop on an interview with Diep and Pham along with members of the editorial board for this publication. I don’t know that the bar can be set any lower for politicians but Diep and Pham somehow managed to fall short of those paltry expectations. Since the interview was not recorded, any statements that I attribute to candidates are to the best of my recollection.
Julie Diep, a speech pathologist, labeled herself as a moderate but came off as totally obsessed with cultures and social justice to the detriment of all other considerations. When asked about her positions on particular policies or her approach to solving a given problem, her answers were nearly always related to how some culture is impacted, even when there were much more relevant general problems. There is plenty of room for taking into account social justice or how we can better serve communities with unique needs, but focusing so much on it often misses the bigger picture.
For example, she was asked how she would improve education given our state’s pitiful proficiency scores in subjects like English and math. An efficient, solution-minded individual might say things like: we need to address the shortage of high-quality teachers, provide school choice, reintroduce appropriate academic standards, and accountability for administrators. Diep instead claimed that we need to focus on things like understanding differences between ethnicities and cultures and focus on learning how to properly pronounce student names.
Those may or may not be appropriate targets, but there are clearly much more significant systemic issues that Diep failed to acknowledge and this was a consistent problem with her responses. Thinking that what Diep claimed deserves priority would undoubtedly fail to lead to improvements. Kids aren’t leaving high school as illiterates because their teachers missed a silent consonant. It wasn’t clear from speaking with Diep whether she had considered any of the issues she was asked about apart from how they specifically relate to ethnic communities.
Given her enthusiasm for social justice, there was an interesting gaffe when I asked Diep about her stance on the legal battle between Huntington Beach (which is in SD 36) and the state’s housing mandate. Huntington Beach has attempted to exempt itself from the state’s demands that they plan for more affordable housing.
I’m sure that if asked for clarification, she would either deny that she said it or claim that she misspoke, but she did say that we need to consider the needs and culture of Huntington Beach and that its residents deserve to feel safe raising their children around people from other socioeconomic backgrounds. Whether or not she meant it, I can only interpret it as meaning that rich people should not have to live around poor people.
As for Pham, an immigration lawyer, he seemingly has next to no knowledge of things that he’ll have a say in if he’s elected. Question after question, Pham required explanations on what a certain policy was and even what the battle between Huntington Beach and the state’s housing mandate was about (again, he would be representing Huntington Beach if elected).
That really was the primary issue with Pham. He seemed nice enough but it was also clear that he had not devoted any significant amount of time to learning about the most pressing problems in California or the district, perhaps apart from immigration.
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When Pham and Diep were asked why they were running for state senate, they gave the usual spiel about how they observed that those in charge were not getting the job done. Things aren’t getting done precisely because we keep electing people like Pham and Diep.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.
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