After witnessing enough of these budget negotiations, I’ve finally found the formula, under this broken system, to get the best of any deal.
Whoever cares the least about the outcome wins.
If you don’t care whether children get health care, whether the elderly, blind and disabled die in their homes, whether prisoners rot in modified Public Storage units, whether students get educated… you have a very good chance of getting a budget that reflects that.
If on the other hand you claim to care, you will concede and concede and concede so you can at least play the responsible part and say at the end that you didn’t completely eliminate the social safety net, though what you did get in return will be totally unclear.
And you will do it every single time.
How anyone in public service who claims to care lives with themselves under this current system, then, when your proportion of caring is inversely related to the proportion of care your constituents will receive, is baffling to me. You’d think at some point over the last 31 years, someone would cry “Stop!”
UPDATE by Brian: I just wanted to add a simple link to meetnori.com, the site that produced that video. To say it is powerful is an understatement, but when you get the full background of Nori’s story, you’ll feel depressed all over again. Sorry…
I reject all the thinking behind this. Do Democrats care more by hating so much as to vote for the GOP crap?
No.
The rule is Democrats cave. GOP wins.
Voting for big 5 budgets is not a sign of caring, it is a sign of incompetence.
To be depressingly honest, I suspect that Arnold will outlast Ahmadinejad. He’ll go back to directing traffic before Arnold goes back to directing movies.
A recall sounds nice, but with the dearth of leadership in this state, where do we find the change agent who has the cojones to stand up and say that the California Constitution is fatally flawed? Has that become the third rail of California politics? “Yes, we all know that the constitutional budgetary provisions are going going to turn the state into a governmental version of Enron, but if we try to fix it, we’ll get voted out of office by the Jarvistrolls, so let’s just go merrily along. As you were.”
Without a political party around which to rally (and without the institutional support of a labor movement that presently rallies around the CDP), it’s hard to identify how you get a movement behind amending the constitution and fixing this once and for all.
I get the now-daily Courage Campaign e-mails, I get that people are angry, and that anger is righteous, but righteous anger only gets you somewhere if you can get a couple hundred thousand people to march down Wilshire or Geary. I don’t see that in our future, and I don’t see any kind of person in Sacramento who’s willing to lead.
So, I guess what I want, since I feel like I no longer know what to say here, is to see, instead of all the posts on how terrible this deal is, to start seeing some posts about how to fix this. “Recall Arnold” sounds nice, but so did Davis and “total recall.” The problem isn’t the person, the problem is the paper, and I don’t see people outside of the blogosphere talking about how to fix that.
Any word on how the Cal Grant fared in this budget slashing?
They are the ones who are running the place these days. They did not get to where they are by initially going after the mushy middle. They started with the most conservative districts and got no tax pledges and established a foothold. They then went after the mushy middle. Now they have solidarity in the Republican Caucus. They also provide cover because the conventional wisdom says that if Republicans vote for tax increases, they will get primaried. That apparently makes it ok for them to destroy the State.
Progressives need to stop whining and start whacking the people that betrayed us. It means no money for any so-called progressive that voted for this budget. We need to find candidates that will take a pledge of no more cuts. The place to start is the most liberal districts. It means primaries or third party candidates to challenge the people who have demonstrated that they cannot be depended upon to uphold progressive values by voting for this budget. If we could turn two or three seats it would drastically change the equation in Sacramento. Even if the seat turns Republican, at least we will have an unabashed opponent rather than a hypocrite.
“Whoever cares the least about the outcome wins”? No, whoever cares only about the outcome wins. That is, the winner is the side that cares only about winning and not about the consequences of stalemate. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s the side that, when the Judge says that the solution to the custody dispute is to cut the baby in half, pulls out a book entitled “101 Recipes for Split Baby” and makes sure everyone sees them salivating.
The concept you’ve hit on is, in the mediation literature, called BATNA — Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement. Arnold’s BATNA was always pretty good; the Dem leadership’s was, in their view, pretty bad. So, their brinksmanship was lousy. The failure is in not inducing the public to see how much Arnold, that narcissistic sociopath, was willing to see others suffer just so he’d win.
And it’s hard, because there are so many things going pear shaped here it isn’t even funny.
But I’d argue to have an effect here, we’d need to really focus on a few things that would give us the most bang for the (rapidly disappearing) buck…
The first one that pops to my mind I think would be the easiest and could be done in a way to help educate more Californians about the dysfunction in the government (I am continually surprised and appalled by how many people are just going “Oh the legislature is f’d up!” without understanding a) the 2/3’s thing, b) the existence of prior budgets being vetoed, not by leg. but by Arnold and so on, and on…). Put together a boatload of ads targeting the whole oil companies giveaway over the last year or so. Have them point out they are NOT taxed, the giveway they got earlier this year, the new drilling that’s been approved, and I guarantee you that the entire population, left or right, can be properly whipped up given the right framing. The Courage Campaign might be a good place to start this.
Second would be a series of ads, again, about the property tax rolls and splitting them between commercial and residential. Alternatively, we could focus on what the 2/3’s rule does to our system of government — but pick one and focus on it.
Thirdly, supporting progressive (not Democratic per se) candidates everywhere.
None of these are new or original ideas or anything at all like that. But what I think is necessary is to pick one and try to use it as a tipping point to push back. Otherwise we’re flailing around in a sea of possibilities.
What the f@#% was Bass smiling about?
David Dayen is absolutely right. This has been brinkmanship. The Governor and Republicans were willing to go to the brink to get what they wanted.
Our Democratic leaders were afraid and avoided the brink and so we lose.
I voted against the Propositions because they were gimmicks that merely kicked the can down the road.
I should have known that my Democratic representatives were cowards and fools. They have never seen the fight for what it is, an ideological struggle. They have been afraid to go to the mat for our values.
They have been trying to make numbers balance and get a “deal” instead of forcing a choice on how we address the structural deficit.
I am so disappointed in my party leaders for their lack of will, conviction, and vision.