North Bay residents look to Biden inauguration with hope and pessimism

For all its pomp and solemnity, the inauguration of an American president is a surprisingly elastic affair. The dates and locations of the ceremony have shifted, down through the centuries, as have the size of the crowds and the time of day.

And that’s a good thing, because Wednesday’s inauguration of Joe Biden will go down as one the most unusual in American history. The 78-year-old president-elect from Delaware will take his oath on the west front of the U.S. Capitol building ringed with razor ribbon and patrolled by 25,000 National Guard troops, at the height of a pandemic, with the nation’s economy on the brink.

Outgoing President Donald Trump, freshly impeached for inciting insurrection at the Capitol two weeks ago, will be only the fourth president not sticking around to see his successor sworn in, a breach of protocol that last occurred in 1869.

Yet the simple swearing in of our 46th president, this national turning of the page, gives many Americans hope — it fuels their optimism things soon will be better.

“So far, it feels like we’re in the 13th month of 2020,” said Joy Sterling, CEO of Iron Horse Vineyards in Sebastopol.

Inauguration Day “will be our real New Year’s,” she said.

Sterling, who also leads the California Democratic Party Rural Caucus, was one of a cross-section of North Bay residents who talked about what Wednesday’s peaceful transfer of power will mean to them. Outlooks ranged from pessimism and bitterness from some Trump supporters, to high hopes from people thrilled to see him in the rear-view mirror.

“We suffered a serious assault,” said Sterling, referring to the rioters storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. “That we’ve come through it is a spectacular sign of our resilience, as a country and a democracy.

“I applaud the return of truth telling, and the reliance on science, and competence, experience, and intellectual prowess,” she said. “I think we are headed into a very, very exciting time.”

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, expressed “profound relief” to arrive, finally, at end of the Trump presidency, opening the door for “new governance, new opportunities to do a whole bunch of essential things.”

“On the other hand, I’m afraid we’re going to be dealing with the residual of Trumpism, both politically and culturally, for many years to come,” Huffman said.

For previous inaugurations, members of Congress have been able to procure dozens of passes for constituents. On Wednesday, they were permitted a single guest. Rep. Mike Thompson, Sonoma County’s senior congressman, is taking his wife, Jan. Huffman chose not to bring a guest, because of the coronavirus pandemic and security concerns.

Huffman on Tuesday described the jarring scene in Washington, D.C.: “Makeshift encampments in the Capitol building, fortifications, soldiers and weapons everywhere.”

Seeing the Capitol so transformed left Thompson “heartbroken,” he said. “This is the people’s house. It’s really sad how this insurrection changed everything.”

Praise for empathy, kindness

Was that rock bottom? After rioters ransacked the Capitol, is it all uphill from here?

When that question was posed to Joe Rodota, the Montgomery High School graduate and veteran political strategist, he quoted the late Sen. John McCain: “It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black.”

In truth, Rodota said, “McCain was an eternal optimist. I’m hoping Jan. 6 was the moment things went totally black, and now we’re turning the page.”

Throughout Trump’s term, he’d seen many of his Republican friends leave the party. But Rodota didn’t follow.

“I still felt very connected to Ronald Reagan, still very proud of my service to two California governors,” Rodota said. “I didn’t want to throw that away, over just one guy.”

But his party’s reaction to the storming of the Capitol proved a bridge too far. Instead of coming together to condemn the attempted coup, too many Republicans lent tacit support. On Jan. 7, he went onto the California Secretary of State’s website and changed his registration to “Independent.”

He is comforted by Biden’s obvious reverence for the office, encouraged by the president-elect’s track record of collegiality, the trust he’s earned on both sides of the aisle, and his abiding decency.

“One of the things that became clear during the campaign,” Rodota said, “is that he’s a man of enormous empathy, and personal kindness. And I think we could use a lot of that right now.”

Seconding that motion is Patty Ginochio, owner Ginochio’s Kitchen in Bodega Bay and firm believer that “kindness always matters.”

“I am cautiously optimistic about moving our nation forward,” under Biden, Ginochio said, “but recognize the challenges we face.”

As vice president of Bodega Bay-based Waves of Compassion Foundation, she sees firsthand the struggles of many coastal working residents, some of whom must choose between paying rent and putting food on the table.

Biden’s inclination toward kindness, she hopes, will lead to a laser focus on those problems.

‘Sense of something shady’

Many of Sonoma County’s 54,000 registered Republican voters are displeased to see him go.

“We’re sad,” said a man emerging from Oliver’s Market in Windsor on Monday evening who identified himself as Pastor Ross. “We would agree that President Trump has a bizarre personality, but his policies, promoting the economy, less taxes, were helpful. And he stood up for churches,” said the pastor, who declined to give his full name, for fear of reprisal.

Pastor Ross found it implausible, moreover, that Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, whom he described as “the most radical left” member of the Senate, would get more than 81 million votes — 7 million more than Trump.

“There seem to be some evidence of shenanigans,” he said. “There’s just this sense of something shady happening.”

While claims of voter fraud continue to circulate widely on right-wing media sites, they have been consistently, comprehensively debunked by countless federal judges who handled several Trump-coordinated legal challenges to Biden’s victory and state elections officials.

And Trump’s own cybersecurity chief, Chris Krebs, who was in charge of election security nationwide, broke with the president and declared it a free and fair election.

Flurry of executive orders

Ryan Nurse didn’t seem much happier than Pastor Ross, who resides at the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Nurse, the owner of Sonoma Coast Surf & Skate in Petaluma, has long been irked by the obstruction of congressional Republicans.

“They’re not required by their constituents to govern,” said Nurse, through a mask that said “The Stakes Are High.”

“The only reason they’re there, the only reason they get reelected, is to ‘own the libs,’” Nurse said. “It’s the politics of obstruction, not governing.”

Of course he was pleased when Democrats took narrow control of the Senate, by winning both runoffs in Georgia. With narrow margins in both houses of Congress, however, the margin of error to pass legislation will be slender.

“The only way I can see real change coming,” Nurse said, “is if he (Biden) just carpet bombs us with executive orders.”

Biden has vowed to do exactly that — part of the reason his calls for unity are not resonating with many on the right.

Predicting disaster

“I am not even cautiously optimistic about the next four years,” said Sandy Metzger, president of the Santa Rosa Republican Women Federated, in an email.

Biden, she predicted, “will use his executive powers to undo so many of the positive things President Trump accomplished.

“Biden will stop building the wall on the southern border and allow hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to flow into our country — for free health care, jobs and housing. … They’ll work for lower wages than American workers and take jobs from them. Unity? No.”

Metzger is outraged over the “censorship” of Republicans, with “Big Tech” banning Trump from various social media platforms, and shuttering Parler, a right-wing version of Twitter. She decried the “double-standard” of muzzling Trump supporters while allowing “violence-prone Dem and Left voices.”

“The more Biden and the Dems try to shut us down, the stronger we become. I’m looking forward to 2022,” she said. “The Dems ought to be concerned about what they wished for: I see only disaster for our country, its citizens, and our economy under Biden.”

‘We can only go up from here’

Yahaira Lopez is the daughter of two of the undocumented immigrants Metzger finds so threatening. Lopez was brought to this country from Mexico as an infant. After graduating from Elsie Allen High School, she won scholarships to attend Santa Rosa Junior College, where she earned a degree in dental hygiene. Between her shifts as a dental hygienist, she’s taking classes to become a registered nurse.

As one of California’s 183,000 “Dreamers” — the name for beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA — she was vastly relieved by Biden’s victory. The program is the Obama-era policy offering protection from deportation to those brought to America illegally when they were children. Trump had long sought to end the program, which would have opened Lopez and her fellow “Dreamers” to deportation, even though they have no other home.

Calling Trump’s efforts to end DACA “cruel and counterproductive,” Biden has vowed to work from Day 1 to create a path to citizenship for “Dreamers.”

“I don’t dwell on it too much,” said Lopez, during her lunch break on Monday. She finds it more productive to “focus on these goals I’ve set for myself, and not get too down about the progress that was supposed to be made, but hasn’t been made, because it’s so hard for people to agree.”

Pleased as she was by Biden’s election, Lopez saw a practical upside in the rise of Trump, whose open racism brought many like-minded Americans into the light. Trump, she said, “made it safer for those people to express themselves.”

“It’s obviously kind of ugly to look at,” she said, “but it might be a good thing for people to see this, to have it out in the open.

“I’d like to think we can only go up from here,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.