While trying to be California’s governor, Caitlyn Jenner blew her shot to be a real heroine

When I was growing up in the 1970s, I admired Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist. When I was an adult in the 2010s, I admired Jenner, the transgender heroine. I watched her show. I bought and read her book.

In 2021, I’m not sure what’s left to admire about Caitlyn Jenner, the California gubernatorial candidate.

Jenner has completely shredded the faint remnants of her leadership and her admirability in a matter of weeks.

When Jenner received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from ESPN in 2015, she basked in a moment of triumph that she deserved. Much of America was rooting for her. Before Jenner achieved this level of acceptance, trans people were viewed narrowly through the prism of transphobia, if they were seen at all.

Jenner demonstrated that the trans community just wanted to live their lives without being discriminated against or attacked.

“Trans people deserve something vital,” Jenner said that night during the nationally-televised ESPY Awards. “They deserve your respect.”

It seemed like a watershed moment with Jenner as a symbol of acceptance powerful enough to lift all trans people whether they were famous or not.

Sadly, it’s only been downhill from there. An early warning sign was when Jenner said she was a Republican because she “believed in the Constitution.”

The GOP itself? They don’t seem interested in the spirit of the Constitution if it conflicts with their partisan pathology. Just look at what happened on Jan. 6.

Considering she had been an amiable pseudo-Kardashian on reality television for years and a national athletic icon since 1976, Jenner was in a unique position to be the national leader for the rights of transgender people. Instead, she turned her platform into just another cynical brand extension.

She squandered that leadership in a way that I could hardly imagine, and her brief news conference in Sacramento last week didn’t help. Jenner said she was in town to assure that Gov. Gavin Newsom would be unsuccessful in his bid to be listed as a Democrat on the Sept. 14 recall ballot.

In her first news conference, which took place 77 days after she announced her candidacy, Jenner said she was the front-runner in the race, which is patently ridiculous. She might not even be the front-runner in the Kardashian family.

“I can guarantee you that I’m in the lead,” Jenner asserted.

Polling at 6% is not a lead. John Cox’s bear might poll higher than that, and he’s more knowledgeable about California public policy. Just lie about being in the lead. That worked for Trump, until it didn’t.

While Trump guy Brad Parscale acts as her lots-of-billable-hours campaign manager, Jenner can’t even decide if she’s aligned with Trump. She said she wasn’t looking for Trump’s endorsement in the race. I don’t know why she would, given that Trump had spent four years attempting to systematically dismantle any gains transgender people had made.

Let me help her with that: Trump would make sure she couldn’t serve in the military or use a public restroom.

When asked earlier about whether she even voted for Trump, Business Insider reported that she has “never voted for Trump and recently said that she skipped voting in the 2020 election to play golf. Public records, however, show that she did cast a ballot in the contest, according to CNN.”

After the silly news conference, she left Sacramento to attend the sillier summer meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. “To do media,” in her words.

At CPAC, Jenner was verbally abused with transphobic remarks by fellow Republicans. Someone called Jenner a “sick freak,” which tells you where her party is. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia/The Mystery Planet QAnon) reprehensibly called her a “man in a dress” on Twitter.

Instead of pushing back on the hatred within her own party, Jenner panders to the GOP by opposing trans kids from participating in sports because it’s “not fair,” she said.

She has said she wants to be a “disrupter” like Trump. Really?

Jenner hasn’t disrupted much back here in the state she wants to govern.

California media has asked all sorts of questions about her “qualifications,” which are zero, and her policy prescriptions, which sound like Charlie Brown pulling an all-nighter on a 4th-grade one-page term paper.

Homelessness? Jenner said to put them in a big field, and that her friends at the private air hangar are all so very horrified by it that they’re leaving the state.

Budget? Um, not really up on that.

District attorneys? Does Newsom appoint them, or...?

Newsom’s ballot designation did capture her interest, upon which she had no impact, anyway. Her interest in Newsom’s ballot designation is curious, given the fact that she had voted only nine times in 26 elections in California. I’m unsure if that counts the ones she lied about voting in or not.

Jenner should try voting here sometime. It shows belief in the U.S. Constitution.

This story was originally published July 16, 2021 at 6:00 AM.