After Gavin Newsom dropped out of the governor’s race, and California Democrats saw the need for a contested primary, many eyes turned to Jackie Speier as a possible candidate. A well-regarded legislator with a lot of progressive accomplishments, who very narrowly lost the 2006 Lt-Gov primary to John Garamendi, she would seem to be an excellent candidate to give Jerry Brown a real contest and strengthen the party ahead of a bruising general election battle against Meg Whitman.

Aided by reports Speier was unhappy being just one of 435 in a Congress that cannot act thanks to the total incompetence of the Senate, Speier has been getting a lot of pressure from folks to consider running for governor. But as Matier and Ross report, she may instead come back to California to join the crowded Attorney General field:

Speier’s interest in returning to Sacramento, where she spent nearly 20 years in the Legislature, was sparked by a statewide poll that showed her outpacing the other Democratic candidates for AG by better than 4 to 1.

The poll of 450 likely Democratic and independent voters, taken by J. Moore Methods this month, showed Speier running first with 23 percent, followed by San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris at 5 percent, state Assemblyman Ted Lieu of Torrance (Los Angeles County) at 4 percent and ex-Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo at 3 percent. A smattering of other candidates pulled lesser numbers.

The biggest bloc of voters, however, was “undecided,” at 62 percent.

Those numbers don’t really surprise me. Speier is a fairly well-known figure statewide from her 2006 run, whereas Kamala Harris still hasn’t established herself as a statewide figure.

And there’s some logic in Speier running for AG – if she wants to run for governor someday, it’s probably a better launching pad than LtGov, where Janice Hahn seems likely to be the Dem nominee anyway.

But it’s a shame that Speier isn’t considering the governor’s race. From what I understand, she is scared off by Brown’s success at raising money, and Whitman’s own bottomless warchest. I can also see why chasing after Brown, who already has a lead, seems less exciting than jumping into an AG race where you can start with good poll numbers.

Still, from the perspective of a progressive California Democrat, it’s hard to see this as a positive development. The AG field is crowded enough, so to see one of our potentially best statewide candidates jump into that race while leaving Jerry Brown unchallenged as he sleepwalks his way into the general election is not exactly a welcome outcome.

The real shame is that Congress is becoming a place that turns good people off. Speier would be an ideal primary challenger to Dianne Feinstein in 2012. And Speier is an excellent argument against state legislature term limits, along with people like John Laird.

So we will see what happens. If Speier does jump in, I have to believe some of the other folks running for that office will drop out. We’ll definitely keep you updated on how this turns out.

Pundits like to claim California voters are anti-tax. Of course, we’ve raised various kinds of taxes at the state level, including the Prop 10 cigarette taxes in 1998, and the Prop 63 millionaire’s tax for mental health programs passed in 2004. Still, even though our reputation remains, we’ve got nothing on Oregon, where no tax has been approved by statewide voters since 1930.

Until now.

Yesterday Oregon voters delivered a huge victory for progressives by approving Measures 66 and 67, raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 and large corporations to generate $733 million to close the state’s budget deficit. The Oregon legislature had approved the taxes last summer, but a corporate/teabagger alliance organized to put it to voters in a referendum.

One wonders if the national media will cover this victory at all – much less at the levels of the Massachusetts Senate race. Although they’ll almost certainly ignore it, the lessons for California are enormous and extremely important.

The opposition ran a well-funded campaign, led by Nike, Columbia Sportswear, and other big businesses. They were joined by Ari Fleischer’s FreedomWorks and the libertarian publisher of the Oregonian, who used to be at the Orange County Register before it went belly-up. Together they ran a campaign arguing that the tax increases would worsen unemployment. But 55% of voters have rejected that, and instead showed that when a truly progressive campaign is waged, the right-wingers can be beaten. Even on taxes.

What it also shows is that progressive policies, supported by smart progressive organizing led by folks such as former US Senate candidate Steve Novick and the Oregon Bus Project, which reached out to younger voters and had a strong ground game, can beat well-funded, well-organized corporate/teabagger alliances.

Their message was deeply progressive:

These reforms protect nearly $1 billion in vital services like education, health care and public safety. These funds preserve class sizes, save jobs for teachers, provide seniors with in-home care, and provide health care for thousands of Oregonians through the Oregon Health Plan. In this time of economic crisis, we must protect those who have been hit the hardest – seniors, children and the unemployed – without putting more of a burden on the middle class.

It’s a message that works nationally. And it’s a message that’ll work here in California. Voters don’t like seeing their neighborhood schools close, or mass layoffs of teachers, or ending care for the disabled, or kicking kids off of health care. They don’t want it, and are willing to raise taxes to prevent it.

All eyes now turn to Sacramento. Oregon proved, beyond any doubt, that anti-tax sentiment can be beaten by progressive taxes on the wealthy and corporations in order to save programs people like. The message could not possibly be any clearer. Voters want their programs saved, and are willing to tax the elite to do it.

Oregon netroots activist Carla Axtman may have had the best take on the victory:

Dear OR Legislators: When you take bold, progressive action–we have your back. Remember this night.

There is no reason now for California Democrats to not propose doing the same. We know that the 2/3rds rule is a huge obstacle that Oregon did not have. But if Democrats are to avoid making horrific choices like ending Healthy Families, it’s time they took the fight to the Republicans, and made them defend these policies to the public by making them oppose progressive taxes.

We know a progressive message, selling progressive policy, backed by progressive organizing, can win. All California waits to see whether Sacramento Democrats know it too.

One of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s centerpiece proposals back in his State of the State address earlier this month was a constitutional amendment to ensure the state spends more on higher ed than prisons. It sounds like a pretty good idea in the abstract. Since the early 1980s, California has built dozens of prisons, but only 3 new UC and CSU campuses – even though the construction cost is about the same, and even though students bring money into the system and create value when they leave it, whereas prisoners suck up resources and generate no value.

So something that would take money from prisons and give it to higher ed sounds like a great idea, right? Not according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which slammed the proposal as “an unnecessary, ill-conceived measure that would do serious harm to the budget process” and concludes “we recommend rejection of this proposal.”

KQED’s John Myers offers a good overview of the issues:

The budget odd couple left almost everyone scratching their heads, though on its face it’s pretty simple: in four years time, there would be a cap on prison spending at 7% of the state’s general fund and a corresponding floor for the UC and CSU systems, combined, of at least 10% of general fund revenues.

But that wouldn’t be so simple because, as the LAO points out, about 9.5% of current GF revenues are going to prisons and only about 5.7% to UC/CSU.

To get to the magic numbers, the governor’s proposal would require any cuts in prison spending – beginning next year – to be transferred dollar for dollar to higher ed. If that swap of cash doesn’t get the UC/CSU piece of the pie up to 10% by July 2014, lawmakers would have to use “other available resources” to make up the difference.

It’s worth noting that this setup procedure – cutting prison costs even beyond current levels and possibly forcing cuts in other programs to pay for the proposal – hasn’t been widely talked about, and has been completely absent from any public mention of the plan by Governor Schwarzenegger.

In other words, the proposal would take money from prisons regardless of their actual spending needs, give it to higher ed but won’t guarantee higher ed gets as much money as the mandate requires so other programs are dragged into this, and as Myers further explains, would exclude community colleges from getting the funds AND exempts operating costs of prisons built under the huge AB 900 bond from the cap on prison spending.

What this all reveals is that Arnold Schwarzenegger once again is trying to use a gimmick to avoid actually solving the underlying problems. Prison spending is high because our sentencing laws are ridiculous. Instead of ending the war on drugs and reconsidering Three Strikes, Arnold thinks the answer is to just cut prison spending by constitutional fiat and dump the money into higher ed.

And instead of finding a long-term revenue source to fund higher education and ensure lasting prosperity for California’s future, he’s basically proposing a poorly thought-out raid on another big segment of the state budget.

When it comes time to render a verdict on his terms in office, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be remembered as someone who talked a big game, but persistently refused to offer genuine solutions that matched the talk. Looks like it’ll take our next governor to finally address the problems that Arnold let fester out of his own unwillingness to admit what needs to be done and to propose we actually do it.

Last week we made a solid case that Barbara Boxer is no Martha Coakley and that Republican hopes of taking her seat this November are likely to be dashed. However, the dynamics of the Massachusetts special election ARE much more applicable to the other big statewide race this fall – the race for governor.

Jerry Brown seems to be doing all he can do to become the next Martha Coakley. Like the Massachusetts Attorney General, California’s Attorney General seems to believe he doesn’t yet have to run an actual campaign. Meanwhile, Meg Whitman is not only spending a lot of money, but spending it wisely. She is building a strong campaign staff, a good field operation, and airing some rather effective radio ads across the state that make her sound like a soft moderate, rather than the slash-and-burn radical she actually is.

And what is Brown doing in response? Still stubbornly refusing to launch his campaign or even officially declare his candidacy. Instead his online outreach is little more than going through the family photo album.

While Brown doesn’t have to declare his candidacy just yet, his stubborn refusal to do any actual campaigning is a big problem. Whitman is able to define herself to the electorate on her terms, and generating favorable coverage and buzz as a result. Brown is instead losing valuable time to counter this by building his own support and base. Although Brown currently leads Whitman in the polls, that won’t last; by April or May he will likely be behind.

Perhaps that’s how he wants it. Brown seems to believe that he can take down Whitman by painting her as a member of the Wall Street corporate elite – which she is. Doing so would help Brown’s chances. But it won’t be sufficient. Unless Brown can organize and motivate the progressive base, the right-wing base will instead propel Whitman into office.

Calbuzz, which first made the Brown/Coakley comparison last week, today examines the latest Field Poll to see what it means for the governor’s race. Along with pointing out eMeg’s problems with women and Brown’s with youth, they conclude:

The bad news for Brown is that no matter who emerges as his Republican opponent — and at this point it sure looks like eMeg with her unlimited self-funded campaign budget – Brown can expect to get hammered on TV starting in about March with ads aimed at younger voters portraying him as old news, over-the-hill status quo.

“Jerry Brown and his entrenched allies will be spending millions to defend failure and the status quo in Sacramento, and Meg is committed to defeating them,” Whitman mouthpiece Sarah Pompei told Contra Costa Timesman Steve Harmon last week, limbering up for some serious trash talk.

These ads will be potent since they’ll have the added benefit of being true. Jerry Brown played a major role in the creation of the 30-year crisis the state has been facing. First through his hoarding of a surplus during his first term as governor, then his failure to produce property tax reform, then his decision to become a “born-again tax cutter” after Prop 13 passed, then his role in creating the flawed “system” of funding government in California where localities depend on the state to backfill lost revenue, leaving both local and state governments less and less able to meet the needs of a modern society.

Of course, Whitman’s attack will probably focus instead on things like spending and labor unions. But Brown so far has shown absolutely no willingness to counter this by offering the kind of vision for the next 30 years that he needs to show in order to win the support of the younger voters whose turnout and support will be key to winning this election.

In particular, Brown so far hasn’t explained how he’ll restore education funding, either at the K-12 level or for higher ed. With the federal health care reform looking perilous, he hasn’t yet offered any sense of how he’ll provide affordable health care here in California, without which lasting economic recovery is impossible. He is still stuck in the mud on prisons and drug policy, and his budget solutions amount to “I’ll sit down with everyone and work something out but won’t raise taxes” – which earned him the title of Apostle for Fantasyland from David Dayen last year, deservedly so.

Would a contested Democratic primary have helped Brown become a better candidate, instead of stubbornly refusing to campaign? It didn’t work for Coakley. But it would likely have worked for Brown and the Democrats. Whereas Massachusetts Dems seem to have assumed the seat would be an easy hold, California Dems know that winning the governor’s seat is very difficult. Since 1900 only four Dems have done it, and since 1982, only one has done it – and we all know how Gray Davis’s administration ended.

Of course, two of those four Dems were named Edmund G. Brown. The second, younger of them is convinced he knows what it takes to win the governor’s office. I’m unconvinced. Edmund G. Brown, Jr. is going to have to show California progressives he knows what it takes to win – and that starts by rolling out a campaign that understands the need to mobilize the base.

UPDATE: As ajsunited noted in the comments, Brown has finally hired a campaign manager. As Carla Marinucci reports:

Democratic State Attorney General Jerry Brown looks to be making a big move in his 2010 gubernatorial campaign: he has asked Steven Glazer, his campaign spokesman, to come on as his full-time campaign manager, we’ve been told.

The appointment hasn’t been officially announced yet, but Glazer — who is also a former Orinda mayor and current Orinda City Councilman — has been doing the heavy lifting on the campaign regarding media work for some time now, and is expected to accept the spot. He’s been a pro bono campaign spokesman for Brown for months, but is now going to be a paid staffer in the run….

And he’s quoted in a slew of past news stories as both a former senior adviser for communications and policy on the 1994 campaign of Jerry Brown’s sister, Kathleen Brown who challenged Pete Wilson for governor.

That’s not exactly a good record. For those of you who may not have been here in 1994, the Kathleen Brown campaign was so bad that it makes the Phil Angelides campaign of 2006 look like the ’08 Obama campaign. Brown was totally unable to get any media traction during that campaign, allowed Pete Wilson to dominate the messaging through his embrace of “three strikes” and Prop 187, and lost by 15 points. It was just a terrible, awful campaign.

Maybe Glazer has learned a thing or two in the 16 years since.

For us Californians, the most important election of the month wasn’t the Massachusetts Senate election. Instead it’s tomorrow’s special election in Oregon, where two tax proposals, Measures 66 and 67, will be decided by voters. Earlier this month I explained the background behind these proposals, which would raise nearly $800 million in revenue by taxing high income earners and large corporations. If the measures are approved, it will not only help save some of Oregon’s critical services such as schools and health care – it will show that West Coast voters really will support taxing the wealthy, rejecting the misleading right-wing claims that taxing the wealthy is somehow bad for everyone else.

Yesterday’s New York Times took a look at the election and what it might mean for the state. Unfortunately, they chose to do so from the perspective of Jackson County in southern Oregon, home to the cities of Medford and Ashland. Voters there are extremely rabid about their anti-tax politics, voting against proposals to keep libraries open, schools funded, and cops on the beat. Much of this is hypocrisy, since they expected ongoing federal timber payments to local governments would take care of funding these programs. “Welfare for me, none for thee” is the guiding fiscal principle in the region.

And yet it’s no longer working. Southern Oregon’s growth in the last decade was largely driven by its own housing boom, fueled to some degree by Californians taking their equity, settling down along the Rogue River, and joining locals in trying to keep taxes low. With the housing bust and the timber bust, southern Oregon’s economic fortunes don’t seem particularly strong.

Yet Jackson County only makes up a small part of Oregon’s population, most of which is concentrated in the Willamette Valley from Eugene to Portland. Measures 66 and 67 will be decided there, particularly in the Portland suburbs. Recent polls showed the measures with a healthy lead, but like any special election this will be decided by who returns ballots in the state’s all-mail election – and so far turnout isn’t great. Multnomah County, home to Portland, had an 86% turnout rate in November 2008, but has had only 36% of its ballots returned as of late last week.

This is worrying, especially as the editorial pages of the state’s leading paper, the Oregonian, has been taken over by the former publisher of the Orange County Register. As we Californians know well, the OC Register is a breeding ground for wackjobs, and they’ve brought their game to Portland, editorializing against taxes and for cuts to school spending. Local progressives have taken to calling the paper the Orangeonian as a result. Meanwhile, the opposition has been caught making illegal robocalls.

We’ll find out tomorrow whether the all-out GOTV effort has succeeded, or whether the lawbreaking and misleading anti-taxers prevail in a low-turnout election. In either case, there will be much for California to learn from this election, as we hopefully begin preparing to craft our own similar package.

Rasmussen is out with their latest poll on the California budget crisis which is being reported as showing Californians don’t want taxes – but in fact suggests the reality is more nuanced. While I’d prefer to take my cues on public attitudes on the budget from more intensive research, and would certainly choose the Field Poll over Rasmussen any day, it’s still worth drilling down a bit to see what this tells us.

The pollsters want us to come away from their results believing that Californians prefer spending cuts to taxes. And when it’s framed in that general language, that’s exactly what we see:

3) Suppose the state of California must decide between filing for bankruptcy, cutting back on services, or raising taxes. Which option would you prefer?

15% Filing for bankruptcy

43% Cutting back on services

28% Raising taxes

14% Not sure

Except, as KQED’s John Myers points out, California cannot declare bankruptcy. Trust us, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s explored that option, and it’s just not possible. So already Rasmussen is presenting some pretty flawed results.

Further, if voters think they can avoid a tax increase by cramming someone else down, they’ll do it – but only to a point. Vague “spending cuts” are one thing, but what happens when you get specific? Things change somewhat. While 63% of voters would support cutting state worker pay by 14% instead of a tax increase (and Rasmussen doesn’t explain that such a wage cut would not only fail to close the deficit, but would have massively negative economic consequences for everyone else), their attitudes differ when other victims of cuts are named:

5) The Governor has also said that California may have to eliminate the state’s main welfare program and cut back on health care services for the disabled and the elderly. If you had a choice between cutting these programs or raising taxes, which would you prefer?

31% Cutting these programs

52% Raising taxes

17% Not sure

Of course, those cuts to the disabled and elderly have already happened, and Cal-WORKS has been hit hard by cuts in 2008 and 2009. But this shows that public services remain popular, and that Californians aren’t quite as Hooverist as the other poll questions indicate.

There’s still plenty of room for Sacramento Democrats to propose a tax increase to help fund core services like family assistance, health care, education, and public transit. While the debate over federal aid to help the state’s budget crisis is still unfolding, it’s time that legislators began building the case for progressive revenue policies to avert an economic and human disaster in the upcoming budget cycle.

UPDATE: A new Field Poll is out, this one on approval ratings of the governor and the legislature, which are predictably very low (27% approval for Arnold, 16% for the legislature). 59% of voters say that Arnold will have left state government in worse condition than he found it. I want to know who the 7% are who said he’s made it better (30% said “about the same”).

Earlier in the week I argued that Boxer isn’t Coakley, and that if she took a strong populist stand against the banks, she would help strengthen her position even more as we enter the campaign cycle.

Sure enough, Boxer is already moving down that very path, announcing her opposition to Ben Bernanke’s reconfirmation as Federal Reserve chair:

I have a lot of respect for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. When the financial crisis hit in late 2008, he took some important steps to prevent what many economists believe could have been an even greater economic catastrophe.

However, it is time for a change – it is time for Main Street to have a champion at the Fed. Dr. Bernanke played a lead role in crafting the Bush administration’s economic policies, which led to the current economic crisis. Our next Federal Reserve Chairman must represent a clean break from the failed policies of the past.

This is exactly the right messaging to use at exactly the right moment. Already Boxer’s move is being hailed as being a possible backbreaker for the Bernanke nomination, showing that Boxer has the right political instincts and timing, as well as the right policy. She was joined later in the day by Russ Feingold.

Calitics alum David Dayen argues this is a crucial turning point in policy toward the banks:

We’re seeing a tectonic shift here in the balance of power in the White House and in Congress. Obama’s release of the Volcker proposal to limit bank size clearly moved power away from Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. That Geithner is leaking out his opposition, and making the arguments of the bank lobby in doing so, shows this pretty explicitly.

It’s very good to see Boxer taking leadership on these issues, especially as the White House “fails to rise to the occasion”, in Paul Krugman’s damning words.

Although California Republicans want us to believe that Martha Coakley’s loss in Massachusetts this week is somehow a sign that Barbara Boxer is going to suffer the same fate, the facts prove otherwise. The latest Field Poll shows Boxer still leads her opponents by decent if still uncomfortably close margins:

General:

Boxer 48%

Campbell 38%

Boxer 50%

Fiorina 35%

Boxer 51%

DeVore 34%

Boxer is hovering around 50%, so she’s not a shoo-in for reelection by any means. But she knows she has to run the campaign of her life to win, and that’s exactly what she is going to do.

On the Republican side, it looks increasingly clear that Tom Campbell’s decision to jump to the Senate race was the right one, as he has a clear lead over his rivals:

GOP Primary:

Campbell 30%

Fiorina 25%

DeVore 6%

Undecided 39%

What’s so interesting here, aside from the fact that 40% of the wingnuts are undecided, is how poorly Chuck DeVore is faring. He was the great teabagger hope here in California, with endorsements from the rest of the Sacramento Republicans and strong support from the activist base. But he still only manages 6%! It’s a sign that California Republicanism, for all its truly insane far-right activists, remains a creature of corporate power.

No matter who wins their primary, they’ll face a formidable candidate in the form of Barbara Boxer. This election will be decided on the basis of turnout, something I certainly hope the Boxer campaign understands. Large segments of the progressive base are demoralized, even in California. Boxer has earned their support and activism in the past, and she can certainly do so again. Assuming she does, the Republican candidates are going to have a very tough time beating her in November.

California’s favorite moderate Democrat badly misinterprets the results of yesterday’s Senate election, as well as shows how little she understands the suffering going on here in California:

“You see anger. People are worried. And when they’re worried they don’t want to take on a broad new responsibility,” like health care reform, she said….

“I think we do go slower on health care. People do not understand it. it is so big it is beyond their comprehension. And if you don’t understand it when somebody tells you it does this or it does that and It’s not true, you tend to believe it, even though it isn’t true. It’s hard to debunk all of the myths that are out there.”

Shorter DiFi: since voters are stupid, we have to “go slower” on something they desperately want.

I don’t know what universe Dianne Feinstein is living in, but the health care crisis is very much a part of our economic crisis. It’s not some frivolous thing that we can wait until we’re flush with money. It is a major part of the reason why we are broke as a state, a huge element of the inequality that built up over the last 10-15 years, a major cause of household indebtedness and financial distress.

It’s just stunning to me, although not exactly surprising, that DiFi thinks health care is some minor side issue that isn’t important and doesn’t matter to people. The current health care crisis is a major drag on our economy. The US spends far more on health care than any other industrialized country and gets much less in return. It’s difficult to start new businesses because people can’t get affordable coverage on their own, and consumer spending is held down by concerns over ability to pay the medical bills.

In short, it is very difficult to see how California or the nation will experience any rapid or lasting economic recovery until we fix health care. It is a central part of economic recovery efforts.

And as national polls show, the public very much wants health care to be done. Anyone who thinks that doing less on health care, or kicking it even further down the road would be a good idea is fundamentally misreading public opinion.

Feinstein tops it off with a gratuitous slap at the public, which she essentially argues isn’t intellectually capable of understanding the issues. It doesn’t help that Democrats have done a very poor job of messaging and selling health care in 2009, but DiFi prefers to blame others for her own failures.

I suppose I should be thankful for this, though. With statements and political analysis like this, she is doing everything in her power to run a Martha Coakley campaign in the 2012 Democratic primary. Let’s hope there’s a good progressive out there willing to mobilize public opinion and finally put DiFi into retirement.