Note: I’m proud to work for the Courage Campaign

The current budget crisis has been going on since at least mid-2007. It is a reinflammation of the 2002-04 crisis that brought down Gray Davis. Which was a recurrence of the budget crisis of the early 1990s. Which was a recurrence of the 1980s crisis, generated by Prop 13.

It has become painfully clear that the budget crisis is the result of a broken government. The 2/3rds rule has made the state nearly ungovernable. The initiative process isn’t much help. Susceptible to those with enough money to game the system, and hostile to those with good ideas, it’s worsened the governance crisis. How many times has Don Sebastiani put parental notification on the ballot?

We need not just a better budget, but a better government. Conservatives have succeeded in changing the rules to favor their ideologies. It’s time progressives pushed back. If we want to implement the progressive agenda, from universal health care to global warming solutions to affordable education and job creation, we need to fix the structural obstacles that have blocked those policy solutions.

That’s why the Courage Campaign – with help from many Caliticians – has unveiled its rescue plan for state government. We’re calling it CPR for California – the Citizens Plan to Reform California. It includes the following progressive reforms (the full document can be read here, with details on each of the proposals listed below):

• Clean money

• Term limits reform

• Universal voter registration

• Initiative financial disclosure

• Pursue campaign contribution limits

• Legislative review/consultation of initiatives

• Signature reform

• Eliminate 2/3rds rule

• Biennial budgeting

• Long-term budgets

• Restore marriage equality

• Protect the Constitution

All these reforms are good ones. But which ones should come first? We’re asking Californians to rank their top 3 priorities – and we’ve provided space for folks to propose their own government reforms.

CPR for California will be a progressive reform agenda for California, much like the 1911 progressive reforms that attempted to return power to the people. It will help pressure legislators to support the right reforms. It can serve as an agenda for a constitutional convention, should that happen.

Obviously some of these have already been proposed in the new Legislative session – public support for CPR for California can help create momentum for those progressive reforms.

At Netroots Nation in July, Van Jones explained the need for progressives to move from opposition to proposition. That’s what CPR for California is. Our chance to shift the terms of debate about democracy and government in California. Conservatives frequently frame government in hostile terms, and have set up rules that make that framing believable.

If we’re going to solve the budget crisis and build the kind of public services we deserve, Californians need a government that is democratic, accountable, and effective. CPR for California is a first step in making that happen.

Over the flip is the email we sent to over 100,000 Courage Campaign members today:

Dear Robert,

California is experiencing an unprecedented crisis, facing a $28 billion budget deficit over the next 19 months.

For thirty years, we have careened from budget crisis to budget crisis as the legislature becomes increasingly gridlocked and held hostage by a right-wing minority. Every election, millions of dollars are spent on meaningless or damaging ballot initiatives that often make matters worse. The voice of the voter is drowned by a sea of money, dispiriting the average Californian.

Before we can tackle the economic and environmental problems that bedevil our state, we must fix the broken politics that produced these problems.

Only we, the people, can revive California.

That’s why the Courage Campaign is launching the Citizens Plan to Reform California — “CPR for California” — a holistic package of reforms that can heal our sick government, including initiative reform, budget reform, clean money, and restoring equal rights.

We need your vote ASAP. In just a few minutes, you can rank the top three priorities we should place on our “CPR for California” agenda this year. Just click here to read the plan and tell us what YOU think are the most important reforms we should campaign for in 2009 to fix our broken state:

http://action.couragecampaign….

Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t rescue California. Five years after winning the recall election, his promises to “rise above politics as usual” have led to just the opposite: an impotent governor who talks big, but made our budget crisis far worse than what he inherited.

The state legislature can’t rescue California. The leadership’s hands are tied by the 2/3rds budget rule that allows a small minority of extremist Republicans to hold Californians hostage to the conservative ideology made famous by Grover Norquist’s vision of “drowning government in the bathtub.”

Only you can rescue California.

Working together, we can administer some progressive CPR to our state. Just click here to check out our “CPR for California” plan and tell us the top three priorities we should focus on in 2009. You can also suggest your own reforms to rescue our broken state:

http://action.couragecampaign….

When George W. Bush and his Republican friends broke the federal government, the American people organized to elect Barack Obama to fix the mess.

It is time for the people of California to do the same for California. Nobody else is going to step up and do it for us.

Thank you for helping us make California a more progressive, governable state.

Robert Cruickshank

Public Policy Director

I will be on KRXA at 8 this morning to discuss this and other topics in California politics

The Public Policy Institute of California released a poll today about voter decision-making on Prop 8 (and some other props, including 1A and 4). Their conclusion is that Prop 8 passed because its Republican and evangelical supporters were highly motivated to pass it, whereas Prop 8 opponents lacked a similar sense of urgency. From the PPIC press release:

   * Evangelical or born-again Christians (85%) were far more likely than others (42%) to vote yes.

   * Three in four Republicans (77%) voted yes, two in three Democrats (65%) voted no, and independents were more closely divided (52% yes, 48% no).

   * Supporters of Republican presidential candidate John McCain were far more likely than those who backed President-elect Barack Obama to vote yes (85% vs. 30%).

   * Latinos (61%) were more likely than whites (50%) to vote yes; and 57 percent of Latinos, Asians, and blacks combined voted yes. (Samples sizes for Asians and blacks are too small to report separately.)

   * Voters without a college degree (62%) were far more likely than college graduates (43%) to vote yes.

   * While most voters (65%) consider the outcome of Proposition 8 to be very important, the measure’s supporters (74%) are far more likely than those who voted no (59%) to view the outcome as very important.

The poll also indicated that support for same-sex marriage was split, 47% in favor, 48% against, and 5% opposed. That suggests to me that the Yes on 8 campaign’s lying ads about the effects of Prop 8 had some effect on voter behavior.

Still, if the poll’s conclusions about voter motivation are accurate, then it adds more fuel to the criticisms of the No on 8 campaign for not having done an effective job in mobilizing its own base to vote, and not doing a good enough job of creating a sense of urgency around the proposition – and in reaching out to other communities, including communities of color. If and when this goes back to the ballot we can expect the anti-marriage forces to be highly motivated to vote. Our side, the supporters of marriage equality, need to be motivated as well.

The PPIC poll has a wealth of other information on state politics, from approval ratings of the governor and the legislature (Arnold fares better than the Legislature – 42% approve of Arnold, 49% disapprove, 9% no opinion; and a whopping 66% disapprove of the Legislature) and public opinion on the initiative process.

The best way to fight a bad idea is to propose a better alternative, and the SEIU California State Council has delivered. Today they proposed their own budget solution which would raise $14 billion in new revenue and seek $15 billion in federal assistance. Some details:

SEIU’s budget proposal includes a limited expansion of the state’s Vehicle License Fee (VLF), which would protect middle-class families by exempting the first $20,000 in vehicle value; restoration of the upper income tax brackets enacted by Governors Reagan and Wilson, adoption of Governor Schwarzenegger’s oil severance and alcohol tax proposals and the Governor’s proposal to broaden the sales tax to include discretionary services such as entertainment.

SEIU’s proposed federal stimulus package would get our people back to work now and invest in long-term economic success for California families by:

• Increasing the federal match for California healthcare dollars

• Kick-starting hospital retrofits and local government infrastructure projects

• Funding federal special education obligations

• Investing in workforce development and a competitive resurgence by restoring worker training and opening more seats in our public colleges and universities.

This is exactly the kind of budget solution that a state facing a severe recession needs. Republicans are hell-bent on implementing Herbert Hoover’s reckless policies of austerity and deflation, wanting to destroy government services and throw tens of thousands of people out of work.

SEIU’s more progressive plan recognizes that California can’t do it alone – that as in the 1930s, federal assistance is necessary to help the states stabilize and grow the economy. Health care and education in particular are vital to preserve during these hard times.

I call this a “realistic” budget partly because it makes perfect sense – but also because some in the media are too quick to dismiss this plan. Witness Kevin Yamamura at the Capitol Alert:

The unions’ dream budget

With lawmakers at an impasse over the state budget, the SEIU State Council, which represents state workers, took it upon itself to propose its own dream plan Tuesday.

And we mean dream in the politest of terms, as in it might happen in a parallel universe where Democrats don’t need any Republican votes and federal dollars pour from the sky.

Here we see how the media acts to reinforce center-right ideologies – a perfectly sensible plan is derided as a “dream” but the Republicans’ insane plan to close the deficit by cuts alone and throw the state into a Depression gets treated as if it’s somehow serious policy.

Democrats and progressives would do well to support this plan, or something close to it, as the only hope of fixing the budget deficit without destroying our public services and making our economic crisis far worse.

Before Barack Obama, there was Harvey Milk.

A politician who brought a message of hope and empowerment to a place that had suffered under years of conservative rule. Who broke down a major barrier for a group of long-persecuted Americans. Who knew how to reach out to sometimes hostile and different groups to build a coalition for change.

30 years ago today Harvey Milk, the first openly homosexual person elected to office in America, was assassinated in San Francisco City Hall by a fellow Supervisor, Dan White. White went on to kill Milk’s close ally and another great San Francisco liberal, Mayor George Moscone.

As the new Gus Van Sant/Sean Penn biopic hits theaters this week, it seemed worthwhile to take a look back at Harvey Milk, and remind ourselves why he matters to ALL of us, 30 years later. Especially when we’ve had our own November tragedy surrounding gay rights.

The genius and the lasting importance of Harvey Milk is that he matched his advocacy of equal rights with a progressive approach to government and movement building. He is rightly seen as one of THE leading gay rights activists of the 20th century. But to stop there is to miss the full picture of what he did. Milk was a populist at heart, someone who deeply believed that government should be responsive to the people, that a nation in which power was held by the few and not by the many was an unfair and unjust place.

Milk sought to help gays attain the equal rights they deserved – but he also wanted to help ALL people obtain the freedoms they were owed. Milk was a transformative politician for San Francisco, a figure who helped take a town governed by centrist Republicans and turned it into the progressive stronghold we know it as today. Barack Obama would understand exactly what Harvey was doing.

In 1978 – his only year in office – Milk continued to work for change. He helped secure passage of one of the first gay rights laws anywhere in America in a close 6-5 vote on the Board of Supervisors. He also fought real estate developers and demanded greater civilian oversight of the police.

It was in the summer of 1978, at the Gay Freedom Day rally, that he gave perhaps his most famous speech – the “hope speech.” Shortly before the 2008 election the speech was set to animation and uploaded to YouTube.

Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio there is a young gay person who all the sudden realizes that he or she is gay; knows that if their parents find out they will be tossed out of the house, their classmates will taunt the child, and the Anita Bryant’s and John Briggs’ are doing their part on TV.

And that child has several options: staying in the closet, and suicide. And then one day that child might open the paper that says “Homosexual elected in San Francisco” and there are two new options: the option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight.

Two days after I was elected I got a phone call and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said “Thanks”. And you’ve got to elect gay people, so that thousand upon thousands like that child know that there is hope for a better world; there is hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those who are blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s: without hope the us’s give up. I know that you can’t live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.

Milk also recognized that his high profile made him a target. He routinely received death threats. They rattled and unnerved him, especially as by 1978 the backlash against the gay rights movement was in full swing. Milk didn’t let them stop him. But he also understood what would happen if he were shot. Milk made a recording to be played in the event of his assassination that included the phrase: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet open every closet door in America.”

Unfortunately, a bullet did enter his brain. And it came from a fellow Supervisor, Dan White, a conservative who had resigned his seat a week earlier due to money problems but wanted it back. White had resented Milk, resented the gays and the hippies and all the social changes that had taken place in San Francisco that to White, Milk represented. White then shot and killed Mayor Moscone. All this happened on November 27, 1978 – 30 years ago today.

Milk wanted his assassination, should it occur, to be a mobilizing moment. An opportunity to rally a city and a nation for progressive change. “Don’t mourn, organize” might have been something he’d have agreed with. San Francisco’s first reaction was indeed to mourn. That night, 30 years ago today, thousands of San Franciscans marched in a silent candlelit vigil from Castro Street, down Market Street to City Hall. They were there to mourn, but also to remind themselves that Harvey’s spirit and his legacy would live on.

Last February I had the opportunity to participate in a reenactment of that march. The “Milk” filmmakers had been in SF for a few weeks shooting on location and they wanted to recreate that moment, and put out a casting call for extras. My wife and I dressed up in the best 1970s clothes we had and drove up to SF for the all-night shoot. It was a cold evening, but an inspiring one.

I wasn’t even alive when Milk was killed, nor were many in that crowd. But some were. Several had been in that march 30 years earlier. I talked with many of them and they were feeling a mixture of emotions – elation, sorrow, amazement. We got our candles and marched down Market Street as directed, but as soon as we were on the move, the mood changed. It wasn’t a film shoot any longer. We all felt like we were there to honor Harvey Milk, and that the cameras were incidental. The march was totally silent – but empowered. As we left Market Street that night there was a sense of determination to ensure that progressive change and gay rights would animate our movement in 2008 just as they animated Harvey Milk’s movement in 1978.

We have faced our own tragedy this November. The passage of Proposition 8 is a devastating blow to all of us. It reminds us that bigots and homophobes still have power and influence in our country.

But we’re going to beat them. Because we’re going to remember Harvey Milk this week and remember what he taught us.

He taught us you’ve gotta give ’em hope. By insisting that we do not accept the passage of Prop 8, by organizing protests and a movement to repeal it, we are giving a new generation of LGBT Americans hope. We’re showing that even though a political bullet has been fired through the California Constitution, we’re going to make damn sure that it opens every closet door in America.

Milk also taught us to build coalitions. The No on 8 campaign forgot that lesson. They failed to do the outreach to all Californians – African American, Latino, Asian American groups had been pleading with the No on 8 campaign for months to be involved but were routinely ignored, only contacted in the final weeks if at all.

Milk would never have made that mistake. Milk fully understood that gay rights is something that all people must embrace. Coalitions must be made not just because it’s the winning strategy, but also because it’s the right strategy. The empowering strategy. The strategy that takes a movement for equality and turns it into a movement that, as in San Francisco, can reshape an entire politics.

We are going to repeal Prop 8 the right way – by listening to the lessons Harvey Milk taught us.

Already over 300,000 people have signed a petition to repeal Prop 8 that the Courage Campaign (where I work) launched shortly after Election Day. We were animated by the same feelings of loss and determination that San Franciscans felt the night Milk was killed.

Sign the petition to repeal Prop 8 if you haven’t already done so. Make sure your friends and family do as well.

And if they need convincing, remind them of Harvey Milk. A man who understood the value of hope. Of building coalitions. Of empowering the people to make their OWN change.

The legislature voted yesterday on the Democratic budget plan and, predictably, Republicans refused to vote for it, unwilling to support a tax increase. Closing a $17 billion hole in the budget with cuts alone would pretty much destroy government, which is of course their goal. In turn that would send California from a recession into an outright Depression, as the safety net would crumble and job losses would skyrocket.

The media’s coverage of the budget debate is equally predictable. The Sacramento Bee framed yesterday’s vote as a “last ditch effort” and the article opened with phrases like “debated, complained and pointed fingers of blame Tuesday.” Arnold compared the legislature to a kindergarten, which I am hoping is not a set-up for some 1990 movie flashback.

The result of such coverage is to further depress public interest in and engagement with the budget process. Reporters make it sound like the Legislature is dysfunctional or doesn’t care, conveniently sliding past the fact that the budget delays are solely the product of Republican obstructionism.

That means we need to look beyond what the media says to the actual plan the Democrats put forth:

• $8.1 billion in new revenues, from a tripling of the VLF and from freezing the current income tax tables
• $8.1 billion in cuts, including $4 billion to schools and $100 million to community colleges
• $800 million in fund transfers and other gimmicks

It’s not a great plan, and the Democrats’ united opposition to education cuts from the spring seems to have melted away. That’s not a good sign, as the budget fight that began in 2007 seems to move inexorably toward the Republicans.

At the same time, this plan needs to be seen as a first step toward a budget solution. Legislative support for a restored VLF is a big step in the right direction, reversing 10 years of supporting that flawed tax giveaway. Action on the income tax is also a good move, although I would like to see Democrats return to their summer budget plan that called for a restoration of the 1990s tax brackets for higher income Californians.

That dovetails with the winning tax platform Obama used in his campaign. Note the word campaign. Sacramento Democrats need to start campaigning on the budget. Too often they have been focused on deal-making inside the Capitol and failed to aggressively sell their plans and their framing to Californians.

Next week dozens of new members will be sworn into the legislature. Their new energy can help take this plan, improve it, and build the public support necessary to implement it by breaking Republican resistance.

Let’s hope that the new members bring a fresh attitude to the budget – one that recognizes this thing will NOT be solved inside the Capitol with a vote or a backroom deal.

KPIX Channel 5 in San Francisco commissioned a poll from Survey USA about the proposal being floated in Sacramento to triple the Vehicle License Fee as part of a deal to close the budget gap. The results were not surprising given decades of anti-tax rhetoric:

Support: 17%

Oppose: 74%

Not Sure: 9%

The crosstabs show the oppose numbers to be remarkably consistent – 68% of Dems oppose and 75% of liberals oppose.

It’s not easy to sell a tax increase without having done consistent work to show Californians why this is necessary. And in the absence of that long-term effort you get polling results like this that will likely put the kibosh on the current efforts in Sacramento to restore the pre-1998 VLF.

My own thinking has always been, and continues to be, that the Democrats need to stick to their summer budget proposal that emphasized higher taxes on the wealthy, a restoration of the 1990s-era tax brackets. That dovetails with what the Obama campaign successfully sold to the public, although obviously California is in no position whatsoever to offer tax cuts to anyone else.

This poll also shows us the need to work with Californians on the basics of tax policy – that in a recession, social services need to be funded instead of cut, that more government spending grows the economy.

Sacramento legislators need to get out of the closed meeting rooms and start taking their message to the public. The time to do so was decades ago, but if we are to solve this budget mess with anything that resembles progressive solutions, that work must be done now.

Today’s San Diego Union-Tribune has a long article on the failure of Proposition A, a $52 parcel tax for all of San Diego County that would have funded a regional fire authority and help provide badly needed additional resources at local fire departments. Interestingly, it was the most fire-prone areas of San Diego County – towns like Ramona, which nearly burned down in the 2003 fire – that turned in the strongest No votes. Why would they vote against protecting their own property?

“I think the people don’t believe the government,” said Peter Jorgenson, a Ramona resident who voted for the tax. “They don’t believe that they’re actually going to do anything with the money.”…

It did not win the support of Mary Eaker, 59, a clerk at a Circle K in Ramona.

“With the economy so bad, everybody’s voting against anything with taxes,” Eaker said. “Nobody wants more taxes. Forget it.”

The article describes many other possible reasons for Prop A’s failure, including poor leadership from San Diego County Supervisors, but the distrust of government does seem to be at the core of the problem.

Of course, this isn’t just some random development. Conservatives have had as a primary focus creating and capitalizing on distrust of government. Conservative politicians, activists, and editorial pages like those at the U-T (which did endorse Prop A) have frequently accused government of being wasteful and reckless with tax money as a way to ensure voters never do support a tax increase. They cried wolf so often that when the wolf finally appeared in the form of a catastrophic firestorm, the good people of San Diego County did what they had been trained to do – be skeptical of government and vote against a tax for services they desperately need.

It dates back to 1978:

Proposition 13 reduced property tax revenue to governments throughout California, leaving fire districts with revenue shortfalls as high as 80 percent.

It’s not likely we’ll ever see a conservative question Prop 13. But as we saw last year conservative criticism has extended to fire departments themselves. Firefighters in Orange County were frequent targets of right-wing criticism, with the OC Register accusing them of being wasteful and taxpayers as being “weak” for giving fire departments more money.

One of the primary reasons for California’s ongoing budget crisis is because conservatives have successfully created and exploited this distrust of government. If we’re going to solve the fire crisis or the budget crisis, we need to restore public trust in government.

Showing Californians the consequences of conservative policies is a good way to do that. Just as conservative anti-government policies left New Orleans vulnerable to a hurricane and left the city’s residents stranded when that hurricane finally arrived, so too has conservative policy and framing left Californians vulnerable to a similar disaster.

In the days after Proposition 8’s passage, much was made of a CNN Exit Poll showing 70% of African Americans voted for Prop 8. That poll had a number of problems including a small sample size. But the damage had been done, and it soon became conventional wisdom that black voters made the difference, that Obama brought out a huge wave of black anti-gay voters, etc.

But a further review of the evidence, more accurate exit polling, and academic analysis suggests that the 70% figure is way off, as David Mixner reports:

Dr. Fernando Guerra of Loyola’s Levy Center for the Study of Los Angeles did a far more extensive poll than CNN and found that the 70% figure was way too high. The figure is closer to 57% (still not acceptable) but a long way from the 70%. Other models that I have been running in an attempt to get the facts and not the emotions show the latter a more likely figure.

The other data that appears to be emerging (BUT yet to be totally verified) is that African-Americans who early voted (which was a huge number) voted YES while those on election day voted NO. Remember we did not do extensive campaigning in many of the African-American precincts until the final week or so which was long after tens of thousands had already voted. Our campaign was slow to use Obama’s opposition to Proposition Eight which he gave the day after the initiative qualified five months before the election.

That explanation makes much more sense than anything else I’ve seen. Early voters tend to be older and it would make sense if some of them in the African American community were strongly associated with Yes on 8 churches. Once the No on 8 campaign finally got its act somewhat together and did outreach to African Americans, we saw the rewards on Election Day.

Ultimately this reminds us how cheap, stupid, and misguided the scapegoating of African Americans over Prop 8 has been. Prop 8’s passage revealed that the marriage equality movement has a lot of outreach to do in this state – to older voters, voters living in “red California,” to some Latinos and African Americans but also to numerous white voters (if whites had voted strongly No, this discussion would be moot), to Asian and Pacific Islanders, to some religious groups, including LDS Californians.

When the next campaign happens we will be sure to not make these same mistakes. Outreach is going to happen early and often. Just as Barack Obama took his campaign to red America – organizing in places Democrats never before thought they could win, reaching out to voters Dems often ignored – so too must the Prop 8 campaign adopt an inclusive and assertive organizing strategy, mobilizing our base and doing outreach in every community that did not vote strongly enough for marriage equality.