In a truly shocking and stunning development, Garry South has made a self-serving statement cluelessly attacking California Democrats:

After we fought through the line of folks there to kiss Willie’s ring afterwards, we asked the Da Mayor about something one of the morning’s speakers, former Gov. Gray Davis campaign czar Garry South, said about the lack of a Democratic ground operation.

South, who also ran Brown’s erstwhile primary opponent Gavin Newsom’s gov campaign, also praised Republican Meg Whitman for setting up an “operation unlike anything we’ve ever seen in California.”

Willie agreed — about the Dems.

“I do not believe that Jerry Brown has a ground operation,” Willie said. He also wonders if it is a good idea for the Dems to rely so heavily on labor for their ground operation.

Now it IS true that Whitman has a strong ground game. I saw it here in SD-15 over the summer when it was used to help elect Sam Blakeslee in the special election. But South and Willie Brown are dead wrong when they say there’s nothing to counter it. Here’s John Burton’s response:

Dem Party chair John Burton told us in plain Burtonese: “Willie Brown is full of (poo-poo). And Garry South never liked any politician who wasn’t paying him. So you’ve got two full of (poo-poo) guys who aren’t relevant to anything in this campaign talking about it.”

In defending the Dems ground operation, Burton said “We’ve already made 1 million calls and have about 80 headquarters and thousands of volunteers. But Willie Brown wouldn’t know that because he’s too busy patting himself on the back.”

CDP Executive Director (and all-around awesome person) Shawnda Westly hit back hard as well:

“In eight years he’s done nothing of note and it’s no surprise that Garry’s on the sidelines in one of the most competitive races in history,” she said. “He simply doesn’t know what’s happening in the current Democratic Party.”

Beyond the quotes, there is plenty of evidence that South is full of it and Willie Brown clueless. Brown has a major financial disparity with Whitman, and so he had to concentrate his spending on messaging, including TV ads. At the same time, the Democratic National Committee in the form of OFA, the CDP itself, and the labor movement do indeed have a significant ground operation. It doesn’t have to be housed within the Brown campaign – the division of labor (Brown does message, the others do field) is a sensible way to share the burden with the resources we’ve got.

In addition to those efforts, other progressive groups in California, like Courage Campaign (where I work as Public Policy Director) and CREDO Action, Planned Parenthood, and the huge coalition of groups organized to fight Prop 23 are doing work to turn out the progressive base. These groups are not engaged in any coordination with a campaign for elected office, and haven’t made any endorsements in the governor’s race. But that’s another significant turnout operation that may well, if unintentionally, impact the governor’s race.

So why would Garry South trash Jerry Brown’s chances? Is it pure spite? Or might the fact that he worked with Whitman campaign flack Mike Murphy on the right-wing JOBSPAC effort in the 2004 generation election have something to do with it?

Garry South has a record unblemished by success. It’s no wonder he’s lashing out at the Brown campaign, which according to campaign manager Steve Glazer now has a 7 point lead in the latest SurveyUSA poll. This election isn’t over, and Whitman is still a serious threat to California’s future – but at least we know that Garry South is, once again, full of it.

Meg Whitman’s voodoo economics have been a target of ours here at Calitics all year long. Now others are beginning to take notice. Over at Think Progress, the Wonk Room shows how Whitman’s vague proposals cannot possibly hope to close the $19 billion budget gap:

I pointed out yesterday that California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s (R) job creation plan is based on a tax cut that economists don’t believe will create jobs or boost investment. Rather, it would amount to nothing more than a giveaway to California’s wealthy.

But Whitman’s plan to balance the state budget also leaves a lot to be desired. As UC Berkley economic Michael Reich noted, Whitman’s promise to cut $15 billion from the budget “necessarily implies significant reductions in spending on education, health, and social service programs on top of the deep cuts already made in the past two years.” But you won’t hear that from her, if her interview today with the New York Times’ John Harwood is any indication.

In that NY Times interview Whitman doubles down on her voodoo economics:

HARWOOD: Every single, at the national level, big deficit reduction package…has involved tax increases, revenue, as well as spending cuts. Is the better part of honesty and candor with the voters of California to say that’s what you’re going to have to do as well?

WHITMAN: I don’t believe we are going to have to do that. I am against increasing taxes on Californians.

HARWOOD: You can close a $19 billion budget deficit just by cutting spending?

WHITMAN: And growing the economy.

We’ve seen this movie before, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger who claimed he could close the deficit without tax increases. He was wrong, and acknowledged his failure in February 2009 by agreeing to temporary tax increases. The taxes have not included sufficient revenues from the wealthy and large corporations, so the structural revenue shortfall remains in place.

Whitman pledges to eliminate the state’s capital gains tax, increasing the budget deficit by $5 billion without doing much to create jobs in California. So now we’re looking at a Whitman budget deficit of around $25 billion. The four areas where Whitman said she’d cut in the NYT interview – laying off public workers, slashing public pensions, cutting welfare benefits even further, and “run the government more efficiently” – are vaguely defined but as the Wonk Room explained, these don’t come close to closing the entire gap.

So where does the rest come from? Education and health care. Whitman is likely to begin privatizing our K-12 schools, cutting funding further and forcing schools to seek outside funding to survive. She probably won’t privatize in one fell swoop, but would starve the public system of money to the point where private funding is needed to survive, making it easier to achieve total privatization. One wonders what she thinks of David Harmer’s call to “abolish the public schools.”

As to health care, Whitman opposed the federal health care reform and would likely refuse to implement it while slashing even deeper into Medi-Cal and other state health services.

And she’ll do all of it in order to make the rich richer.

Meg Whitman has no jobs plan, she has no budget plan – she just has a plan to give more money to her wealthy allies and watch the rest of us suffer. No wonder she’s flailing in the polls – that’s not the kind of California voters want.

Mother Jones has a very important article up regarding David Harmer’s desire to, in his own words, “abolish public schools.” Harmer is the teabagger candidate and Republican nominee in the 11th Congressional district against Democratic incumbent Jerry McNerney, and a new SurveyUSA poll found Harmer has a 48%-42% lead, making this race and this issue even more important.

The Mother Jones article is based on Harmer’s own op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle published in 2000, titled “Abolish the public schools”. In it, Harmer advocates for vouchers, but says that’s the best we can do until we eliminate the state constitutional requirement for free public education – and then proceeds to argue for exactly that:

To attain quantum leaps in educational quality and opportunity, however, we need to separate school and state entirely. Government should exit the business of running and funding schools.

This is no utopian ideal; it’s the way things worked through the first century of American nationhood, when literacy levels among all classes, at least outside the South, matched or exceeded those prevailing now, and when public discourse and even tabloid content was pitched at what today would be considered a college-level audience….

More fundamentally, we should reconsider where ultimate responsibility for schooling anyone’s children resides. Having fathered my children, I am responsible for their welfare. Providing for their education is my duty, not anyone else’s.

This is extremely radical stuff. Free education is one of the bases of an equitable society. It’s also responsible for much of the prosperity we enjoyed in the 20th century, which teabaggers like Harmer are determined to destroy.

The notion that privatizing education would lead to better outcomes for people is simply absurd; it would merely recreate the inequalities we see in society while locking into place poverty making it impossible for people to ever escape its grip.

Mother Jones also explained how Harmer’s history is flawed and how universal single-payer public schools were key to improving educational outcomes. It’s worth quoting at length:

Yet historians say the early American education system was nothing like that. Back then, even high school was a luxury. “The high school at that point is a kind of elite form of education pretty much limited to the inner cities,” says John Rury, an education historian at the University of Kansas. The rest of the system was far from comprehensive. What early schools taught, Rury says, were “very basic literacy and computational skills.” Many schools only met four or five months a year, and their quality varied widely. “To get to a higher level of cognitive performance, you needed to have more teachers and longer school years, and that drove costs up,” he explains. That led to modern taxpayer-supported schools. “Look around the world,” says Rury. “Do we have an example of a modern, well-developed school system that operates on the model this person is advocating? We don’t.”

Early education was also far from inclusive. Minorities and the poor often had a lot of trouble getting schooling in early America, even in the North. “We’re talking about going back to times when very, very limited numbers of people in the society had access to education, access to power, or access to elevating themselves in society,” says Heather Andrea Williams, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who has written a book about African-American education in early America. Many young women were also excluded or saw their schooling limited, according to MaryEllen McGuire, a former Obama administration education adviser who’s now at the New America Foundation. “Education was not something that was available to most of our populace,” she says. And until about 50 years ago, children with disabilities often couldn’t get a proper education.

Still, Harmer deserves credit for being open about this. The “education reformers” such as Michelle Rhee, the makers of “Waiting for Superman,” and the billionaires and hedge funds that fund the reform movement also want this same outcome – privatized education where student achievement is left up to the market and one’s ability to pay – but they’re more clever at how they mask this ultimate goal.

It’s another example of how the teabaggers are much, much more than a 21st century form of white backlash – they are determined to destroy the middle class in the service of their corporate lords. They must be stopped.

The final gubernatorial debate is tonight in San Rafael, and will be hosted by Tom Brokaw on an NBC station near you at 6:30. The previous two debates saw Jerry Brown win clear victories over Meg Whitman, who either came off as a robot reading lines or as Cruella DeWhitman when she was telling successful young students they didn’t belong in school.

With Whitman consistently behind in the polls, nothing short of a knockout blow will revive her chances. She’s already spent over $120 million on this campaign and has saturated the airwaves, so Californians know her about as well as they ever will. Only a decisive win matters to Whitman, anything else is a loss.

Unfortunately for Whitman, it’s not clear how she’s going to get that win. She has shown herself to be deeply out of touch with the voters, at times sounding like she was running for governor of Texas or alienating a blue state electorate by namedropping reviled right-wing politicians. And Jerry Brown has connected with voters by offering honest, unscripted, and blunt answers to the questions about the state’s problems.

Apparently the Whitman campaign hopes that the debate will be dominated by questions related to their manufactured controversy – the one about someone tangentially linked to the Brown campaign calling Whitman a “whore” for buying off a police union by exempting them from her wacko pension reforms.

It would be a shame if even a minute was wasted on that totally irrelevant issue. So far, the moderation and questions at the first two debates have been very good, with hard-hitting questions on the actual problems facing California – economic recovery, the budget, immigration, water, etc – dominating the conversation, as well they should. Tom Brokaw ought to focus on those kinds of issues, rather than turning this into an episode of Access Hollywood.

Brown, for his part, needs only to keep up the pace of his first two debates, where he offered direct and genuine answers to the questions he was asked. It would also be good if the progressive streak he showed in answers to questions about labor unions (where he honored public workers) and immigration (where he emphasized the immorality of scapegoating immigrants) were continued and extended. Brown’s secret weapon is his skillful use of progressive framing, which emphasizes his populism and contrasts well against Whitman’s vicious right-wing greed.

We’ll see what happens tonight at 6:30!

We’ve been charting pretty extensively here at Calitics the ways in which Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are deeply hostile to Latinos and their values. Fiorina supports SB 1070 and Whitman, as you know, thinks successful Latino students don’t belong in school. No surprise then that both candidates are tanking with the state’s Latino electorate, without which one cannot win a statewide race.

So how are Whitman and Fiorina going to deal with the fallout from their alienation of Latino voters? By downing shots!

NBC News put it this way: “Republicans Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina having a little fun and downing shots a tequila Friday night, going along with tradition during a Hispanic 100 award gala in California. Fiorina was very animated at the beginning of her speech, calling for shots of tequila before every speech and then even let out a high-pitched trill of the tongue.”…

“This evening has spoiled me forever,” Fiorina tells the crowd. “From now on..I want to follow an incredible mariachi band. And I don’t know, I think every speech should begin with a shot of tequila.”

This is a classic manifestation of what some have called “mariachi politics,” where politicians think the way you win Latino votes is to have a mariachi band play, or in this case to down a shot of Cuervo (which might get you respect in a USC frat house but probably won’t faze a Latino voter in Santa Ana worried about their job and their home). Meaningless gestures do not actually count as addressing Latinos’ concerns, yet politicians like Whitman and Fiorina seem to think they do.

Perhaps it’s because they have no real connection to the Latino community. Barbara Boxer has been fighting for Latinos for at least 20 years, which is about half the time that Jerry Brown has been doing the same. Whitman’s Latino outreach consists of exploiting a housekeeper, whereas Brown walked with Cesar Chavez and mounted a very strong and passionate defense of the DREAM Act at the Fresno debate.

Fiorina’s record is even worse, having embraced every immigrant and Latino-bashing proposal and frame in the primaries to win the hearts of her right-wing base. Now that Fiorina has to try and win Latino votes in the general election, she finds that all she can do is drink shots and give a bad grito in the hopes that it will be enough for Latinos to forget her terrible record on their issues and needs.

Unfortunately for Fiorina, there isn’t enough Cuervo in the world for that to happen.

It’s a recurring theme almost every election year here in California: some voters, many of them progressive, proclaim a “no on everything” stance on the ballot propositions. Intended as a protest at the flawed initiative process, this approach is little more than unilateral disarmament in the face of a concerted right-wing, corporate-funded effort to destroy California’s prosperity and democracy. Instead of making a futile gesture that won’t help fix California’s woes, progressives need to make intelligent choices on the November ballot – some of which involve a Yes vote.

I’ve been having this discussion on Facebook with several friends this past week, but one of the most prominent exponents of the “no on everything” approach is Markos Moulitsas. He’s mentioned this many times on Daily Kos, with one of the clearest articulations coming in January 2008:

My default position is to vote “no” on all of them (except for the ballot initiative to eliminate the ballot initiative, I’d vote “yes” for that one). Is there a really good reason I should consider casting a “yes” vote for any of them? For those of you following Golden State politics closely, please chime in.

Update: Thanks for the advice guys. I’m sticking with “no” on everything. I hate ballot box budgeting and changes to the state constitution make me leery. So while I was as conflicted as the community on 92, since it’s a worthy cause, any conflict is resolved toward the negative.

This is one form of an argument that usually goes something like this: “it’s the legislature’s job to make laws, not the voters’. I’m going to vote no on everything because I don’t want the system to get screwed up even worse.”

There’s no doubt that the ballot initiative process in California is flawed and needs reform. But to vote “no” on all initiatives, regardless of their content, is to declare unilateral disarmament in the middle of a political war. A no vote on all initiatives, even progressive initiatives, hands victory to the right-wing and the corporations when it comes to progressive initiatives that are usually difficult to pass.

The fact is that the initiative process, like the United States Senate, is massively flawed but is also part of our politics. We cannot simply refuse to fight because we don’t like the process. Just as no sensible progressive would suggest we boycott US Senate elections this fall in a protest against the failure of the Senate to address this country’s problems, no sensible California progressive should suggest we surrender the ballot initiative fight in a protest against the flaws of that process.

Like a vote for Ralph Nader, or a decision to not vote at all, a “default no” on ballot propositions is a particularly pointless act of political protest. It does not do anything to help improve the state legislature, because as Joe Mathews and Mark Paul have very ably explained in their new book California Crackup, the legislature is broken not just because of the initiative process but because of things like the 2/3rds rule and other systematic problems that cannot be addressed solely by initiative reform.

Further, the “default no” approach is flawed because it so often hands victory to corporations when progressives refuse to support progressive policies that can only be enacted at the ballot box. In 2006 and again in June 2010 some form of public financing went onto the ballot, and in June it suffered a particularly close defeat. Any progressive who voted No on Prop 15 because they take a “default no” on the initiatives helped hand a major victory to corporations while undermining one of the most important progressive goals we have today: public financing of elections.

The November 2010 ballot provides a textbook – and very important – example of how a “no on everything” vote undermines not only progressives, but actually blocks an effort to fix the legislature so “they can do their jobs” and hopefully lead to fewer flawed ballot measures.

Proposition 25 would restore majority rule to the budget process. It would end the 2/3rds requirement to pass a budget, which has led to crippling gridlock in Sacramento as budgets are routinely delayed not by weeks but by months as right-wingers use their veto power conferred on them by the 2/3rds rule to undermine progressive proposals and further worsen an already broken budget and government.

Someone taking a “default no” approach to the November 2010 initiatives would therefore be prolonging the gridlock in the legislature and would be joining such progressive leaders as Chevron, the California Chamber of Commerce, Meg Whitman, the Howard Jarvis Association, and Tom McClintock in defeating a proposal that would restore some progressive power and help enable further reforms to fix the legislature. In this case in particular, a “default no” from any progressive becomes worse than futile – it becomes a de facto vote for right-wing policy.

We can see other examples of this on the November 2010 ballot. Prop 24 would hike taxes on large corporations by closing a tax loophole created in the 2008 and 2009 budget deals. Are progressives seriously going to oppose that? Prop 21 would guarantee the long-term future of state parks as well as freeing up hundreds of millions of dollars each year to the general fund. Why would progressives oppose this, and put state parks at jeopardy of being sold off to private developers?

Good progressive political activism is that which engages in the fights that are before us, while also making long-term plans to improve the battlefield itself. We absolutely must reform the initiative process, as part of a broader fix to California’s broken government. But we won’t get there with the unilateral disarmament of a “no on everything” approach to ballot propositions. Progressives need to get informed and make the right decisions.

Thankfully, there are resources out there to help you. The Courage Campaign – where I work as Public Policy Director – has produced a Progressive Voter Guide that you can get by clicking that link or by texting VOTECA to 30644. It includes recommendations on the ballot propositions from Courage Campaign, CREDO Action, and a range of other major statewide organizations.

There’s no excuse for handing a victory to the right-wing and the corporations by voting no on important progressive propositions like Prop 21, Prop 24, and especially Prop 25. Let’s make sure that progressives make the right choice this election, instead of giving up the fight and letting the enemy win by default.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we? Today we are going to the Zeroes, that fun-filled decade that brought you such treasures as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Arrested Development, the unitary executive, and the governator.

First stop: 2005. As part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s special election initiatives, a spending cap was placed on the ballot, Prop 76. It went down in flames, 62-38.

Next stop, 2009. As part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second special election, a very similar spending cap was placed on the May 2009 ballot, Prop 1A. It went down in flames even worse than Prop 76, losing 65-35.

After a while you would assume Sacramento got the message – Californians do not want a spending cap.

So what do we find in the 2010 budget deal? Yeah, another spending cap. The Assembly just approved putting it on the March 2012 ballot as part of the overall deal.

The logic here must be that the March 2012 electorate will be overwhelmingly Republican, since Obama won’t have a primary challenger (though we might want to drum one up just so we can drive Dems to the March 2012 polls), therefore a spending cap is more likely to pass. And Democrats, looking at the poor record of spending cap ballot measures, probably figured this was something they could beat again.

Still, it’s a sign that Sacramento hasn’t really heard the public’s resounding rejection of a spending cap, which would ensure that the $60 billion or so cut from the state’s budget since 2007 will never, ever be restored, even when economic recovery finally comes.

It’s also a good argument for preventing ballot initiatives from appearing on presidential primary ballots. In fact, until the 1970s statewide ballot initiatives only appeared on November general election ballots. Might be worth reconsidering.

One of the most clever videos I’ve seen this cycle is this new one from CCPOA titled “Bobblehead Meg.” It’s got a very catchy tune that tells the viewer all they need to know about Meg Whitman, her shady stock deals, her move to California, the job losses at eBay, even her use of eminent domain in Telluride. Watch it:

Lyrics are below the fold.

Let me introduce you to Bobblehead Meg,

A poor billionaire who’s really a powder keg,

A former CEO who didn’t vote till oh-two,

Listen California she wants to be in charge of you!

Well good ole Meg was born into old money,

Got tired of Boston so she moved somewhere sunny,

Now says California’s always been her home state,

But she’s only lived here since nineteen ninety-eight.

Meg for Meg!

I’m not voting for Meg, Meg, Meg.

It’s not all about Meg, Meg,

Shakey, flakey, flippy-flopper, bobbling her bobble head.

Since she moved in she’s been the head of eBay,

And in that short time a lot of job’s she’s sent away,

Two out of five eBay jobs are overseas,

Wonder if she’ll outsource all the state employees?

So we all know Meg is a very rich lady,

But how she got her dough sometimes seems a bit shady,

Ten years ago when the rules were pretty lax,

She did a sketchy deal with the boys at Goldman Sachs!

Meg for Meg!

I’m not voting for Meg, Meg, Meg.

It’s not all about Meg, Meg,

Shady lady, job deporter, bobbling her bobble head.

Well Meg’s got a house in pretty Telluride,

And she wants to keep her view form each and every side,

She couldn’t buy out her neighbors so she figured out a plan.

Use eminent domain to gobble up the land!

Now Meg’s ego needs a boost so she’ll do anything to win,

So she came up with a scheme to simply buy her way in,

Spent a hundred million dollars just to be on your TV,

But I’m sorry dear old Meg you just don’t work for me!

Meg for Meg!

I’m not voting for Meg, Meg, Meg.

It’s not all about Meg, Meg,

Ego-driven, over spender, bobbling her bobble head.

Yes, she’s bobbling her bobble head…

Ballots for the November election are already hitting voters’ mailboxes – meaning it’s time for progressives to make their decisions on the nine ballot propositions. And the Courage Campaign, joined by our friends at CREDO, are here to help!

As with the November 2008 election and the June 2010 primary election, the Courage Campaign – where I work as Public Policy Director – has produced a Progressive Voter Guide. This year we’ve partnered with CREDO to bring the guide to you. It includes Courage Campaign and CREDO recommendations on the nine propositions, as well as the recommendations of other statewide progressive groups such as the California Democratic Party, the California Nurses Association, the California Federation of Teachers, the California League of Conservation Voters – and of course, Calitics. (We’ll have more on the Calitics proposition endorsements in a separate post later this week.)

You can click here to get the guide as a PDF and send it to your family and friends. You can also get a mobile version of the guide sent to your phone by texting VOTECA to 30644.

One of the primary reasons Californians – and progressives in particular – don’t vote in these primary elections is a lack of information about the choices on the ballot. By providing this voter guide, we’re providing information – and that translates to voter turnout.

So please download the voter guide, or get it sent to your phone, and share it with your family and friends.