Below are what will approximate my opening remarks at today’s Netroots Nation panel on the California budget and political crisis. If you’re in the room (or not), you can participate in the session by submitting questions on Twitter using the #cabudget or the #cabudgetNN09 hashtags, or posting in the comments here. Consider this an Open Thread for the panel, featuring myself, Robert Cruickshank, Kai Stinchcombe and Jean Ross of the California Budget Project.
*****
Over the last several months, we have started to see a lot of attention at the national level devoted to this topic of the California budget crisis. And this would be pleasing to me, if it wasn’t for the minor point that all of it has been wrong. One hundred percent, no exceptions, wrong. You can start by the insistence on referring to it as a budget crisis. I’ll give you a related example. Right now we’re seeing this debate over health care, and the intensity of the town hall meetings and misinformation provided by Republicans and their allies in the health care industry. But really, none of that has to happen. With a Democratic President, and large majorities in the House and Senate, there should be no problem finding a majority that supports some form of decent legislation which includes insurance reforms and a public option to provide competition. But you have the hurdle of the filibuster in the Senate. In fact, the very undemocratic nature of the Senate itself, where the state of California and the state of Wyoming have the same representation despite one having over 70 times as many residents as the other, distorts the debate and creates abstractions from the expressed will of the people and the political will in Washington. Now, that ought to be understood as a political crisis, not a crisis over what to do about health care but a crisis about how to leap the institutional hurdles. Well, take that situation, multiply it by 10 orders of magnitude, and you start to understand the nature of the problem in California.
We have a center-left electorate and a center-right political system in which they must operate. And sure, Democrats in the state could do a much better job at negotiation and advocacy. But my contention is that this is not a problem of personality but process, and that process has created the crisis which we now face. We could elect Noam Chomsky Governor next year and still be saddled with the structural hurdles that must be jettisoned before we can even return to a baseline of sane and responsible governance in California.
And while the worst economic hole since the Great Depression certainly accelerated the problem, this is not the result of a perfect storm of factors contributing to the demise. It was a 70-year bout of rain, and at every step of the way, nobody properly challenged this slip into an ungovernable system. So it’s going to take a lot of time to restore democracy to California, just as it took so much time to take it away. But I believe that we can solve this problem in a way that can truly be a harbinger for the country at large, which is the state’s reputation. If we can really work to figure out the proper model for government that allows for the will of the people to be reflected in policy and provides the accountability for the public so they know whether or not they like the policy results, we will not only have saved California, but the whole nation. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today.
That this is an organizing opportunity, because the impact is going to really touch people personally.
But the key is to capitalize on the opportunity with a different political approach that challenges the politics of fear.
David:
With all due respect, in the aggregate, California’s electorate is neither center-left nor center-right..
Rather it is an ever-changing, eclectic mix of fiscally-conservative, socially-liberal, and operationally libertarian folks, with fractured divisions based on the demographics of age, class, color, geography and partisanship..
Additionally, California’s voters have shown a strong disposition to respond reflexively and viscerally to the pie-in-the-sky political promises made by the Political Idol d’jour, especially in elections for Executive positions.
Witness the winning majorities racked-up amongst California’s voters by Governor Schwarzenegger, a Business Friendly Republican with Socially Liberal Democratic Kennedy familial connections in the Recall Election of 2003, and President Obama, a shrewd and media-savy, audacious Democrat from the South-Side of Chicago advocating the mindless mantra of “Change”,during the November 2008 General Election. Of course since then, California’s voters have seen the limits of the President’s commitment to “Change” specially when it threatens the enduring economic mega-power exerted by his Wall-Street buddies.
The dynamically fickle nature of the California electorate is the essence of the problem of shifting “True-North” election needle on Californian’s partisan political compass.. Poll after poll, and more importantly election after election prove this.
And this will become even more evident during the 2010 election season when the State’s voters will be asked to change the 2/3’s requirement currently in the State’s Constitution required for passage of both the State’s budget and for raising State taxes..
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance said it best more than three-hundred years ago, “…The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing…”
The California political leader who best understands and best applies Minister Colbert’s timeless public finance dictum above will carry the day with the State’s voters in 2010 regardless of ideology, partisanship or point-of-view on the non-economic political issues of the day..
At this point in time, my own political sense is that by a very slight margin, a majority of California voters will vote to remove the 2/3’s requirement for State budget passage, but by a much larger margin, they will vote “NO” when asked to remove the 2/3’s requirement to raise State taxes.
Call it cognitive dissonance, voter schizophrenia, or whatever you will. I call it the grand political calculus of millions of hard-working Californian families who, are overworked, overtaxed, and overwhelmed by the economic uncertainties they face each and every day, with no real help from Sacramento..
Both individually and collectively, California’s voters understand the practical wisdom of Minister Colbert’s public finance dictum mentioned above much better than the so-called political elites of both parties in Sacramento who masquerade as leaders of the Golden State, which is, after all, the eighth largest economy in the world, at least for now..
NostraDemus
I agree with ND’s predictions on the fate of the 2/3 vote requirements – but it will have much more to do with the avalanche of propaganda on the airwaves than the “kitchen table” deliberations of Harry & Louise.
Much remains uncertain, but the electorate isn’t quite as chaotic as described. There are many measurable consituencies in the state: urban and rural, coastal and inland, young and old, native and immigrant, retired and child-rearing, the few who sign paychecks and the many who cash them.
Demographics favor the Democrats. The growing segment of the population has a relationship with government that goes beyond their tax returns.
The old guard Republican voters spent their working lives nursing at the teat of cold-war aerospace defense spending, but “never took a cent from the government”. They’re now retired, going on cruises, and dying off.
They’re being replaced by younger voters who work in SEIU industries, who need childcare or have children in public schools, who attend state universities, whose jobs depend on state water and state infrastructure spending.
The right succeeds in activating their shrinking base with flank attacks on gay marriage, abortion and scary black men, but only with corporate advertising dollars and petition signatures paid for by millionaires. That’s a reality we’ll have to contend with until reforms can be enacted.
But the main assault against taxes has succeeded mainly because of the latent racism in older voters. My grandparents never complained about taxes… all the schools were segregated back then.
My teenager already complains about the taxes witheld from her part-time paychecks. But she keeps rap music and country western hits on her playlist. I don’t believe she’s ever going to feel resentment because “her” taxes are going to support “those” people. Her generation will be able to listen to reason about the costs and benefits of good government.
Recent events have demonstrated once and for all that politicians who promise less government never deliver anything but bad government. I believe that the “Schock Doctrine” now being inflicted on California is going to result in some serious “blowback” for conservatives.