The good news: Garvey is well known, well spoken, he can probably raise a good deal of money, and he’s still craggily handsome at 74. As a ballplayer, he was a model of durability, consistency, and clutch hitting in October, and he helped lead the Dodgers to four pennants (one a World Championship) and the Padres to their first pennant. California Republicans are perennially so desperately hard up for statewide candidates that even getting somebody who can make the final November ballot is a win. Under California’s jungle-primary system, which pits the top two vote-getters against each other, 2022 was the first time in a decade that Republicans even had a Senate candidate on the ballot on Election Day. Combined with having an opponent for Newsom, that probably helped the party down the ticket, even though the Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates lost their races by 18 and 22 points respectively. If the GOP hadn’t gained three California House seats in 2020 and another in 2022, it wouldn’t have a majority today. The Democratic primary, headed by Adam Schiff and Katie Porter and featuring elderly radical Barbara Lee, promises to be crowded enough that if Republicans unite behind a single contender, they could get on the final ballot …

The bad news: Garvey is ideologically vague and a rookie politician — both characteristics that he has in common with some of the most underachieving recent Republican celebrity candidates such as Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz. There’s also the sex scandals that collapsed his once-squeaky-clean image: “Among the controversies in Garvey’s past are fathering two children with different women shortly before he married a third.”

[Dan also recalls, as I do, that Garvey’s extracurricular (and extramarital) activities doomed what had seemed like a likely career in politics. His first wife Cindy was herself a local celebrity. All of those issues are far in the past, and these days wouldn’t matter much if they weren’t. What concerns me is the desperate attempts to get celebrities like Walker and Oz into races rather than good and well-prepared candidates. And I’d like to know what a candidate stands for first. — Ed]