California dodged a bullet Tuesday, June 3 when moderate Republican Neel Kashkari was nominated to run against Governor Jerry Brown this November.

A last minute advertising blitz resulted in Kashkari soundly defeating Tea Party candidate Tim Donnelly.

Even though neither of them could have beat Brown in the November general election, Kashkari’s nomination will result in productive, intelligent conversation.

Nominating Donnelly would have led to extremist partisan bickering and content free sound bites played on a loop.

Donnelly’s primary campaign proved there would be no rational conversation if he was nominated.

During the campaign, Donnelly said that Kashkari had fallen under the sway of Sharia law because Kashkari had attended a conference about finance in the Middle East.

Donnelly also said anyone who disagreed with him was fighting against the freedom that this country was built on.

When he was a member of the California State Assembly, he attempted to bring Arizona’s controversial immigration law to California.

The law makes it a crime to not carry immigration documents and allows police to detain anyone who cannot prove they are in the country legally.

Fortunately, Kashkari, the sane candidate, won and California will have a productive conversation throughout the election season.

The debate will focus around two prominent issues in California right now: employment and education and the economics that affect them.

Both Brown and Kashkari are qualified to talk about these subjects. Brown has been a California state politician for the last 44 years and Kashkari was a federal treasury officer when he led the 2008 Wall Street bailouts.

The rest of the country has not been as lucky as California. Tea Party candidates have displaced establishment republicans including Texas Congressman Ralph Hall who has served for 34 consecutive years.

While the rest of the country becomes more polarized and debates issues like is Obamacare merely socialist or an insidious communist plot, California will be bettered by rational debate.