I am working for the No on 1A Campaign, however, I am not working for any other No campaign. My opinions should not be construed to be those of the campaign, especially when it comes to the remaining measures.

One of the reasons that I oppose Prop 1A, and to a lesser extent the other measures, is the sense that it is one more thing that we’ll have to fix. It is one more layer of dysfunction on our staked seven layer dip of dysfunction. But as a practical matter, it is critical that Californians understand the structural dysfunction that is at the heart of the mess:

A defeat of six of the seven measures on the May 19 special election ballot – a good possibility, according to recent polls – could mean a return to the Capitol’s pattern of futile negotiations between Democrats, who hold large legislative majorities but little sway, and minority Republicans, who hold the last word on budgets.

If nothing else, political observers say, such a scenario could present an opening for Democrats to unmask what they believe to be the heart of the Legislature’s dysfunction: the two-thirds vote in both houses to pass a budget, as required by the state constitution since 1937.

*  *  *

California is one of only three states – alongside Rhode Island and Arkansas – to require a two-thirds vote on budgets. Only five states, including California, have a two-thirds requirement for taxes. (CoCo Times/MediaNews 5/3/09)

You know that, I know that, but at least according to the variety of polls we have seen since the marathon budget session, people forget quite quickly just exactly why we have this level of dysfunction.  They forget that the majority of California is getting mugged by an increasingly small minority that is doing its darndest just to maintain control of a third of the legislature.  Back in February we had majorities for overturning the budget 2/3 rule, and a close call for the tax rule. Now we’re looking at uphill slogs in both.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work to get both out of our Constitution. It was quite the subject at the CDP convention

Lowering that threshold to a simple majority is “the next big fight we need to win,” Treasurer Bill Lockyer said at the recent state Democratic Party convention, where delegates identified the two-thirds requirement as the most pressing issue among 117 they considered.

*   *   *

Strategists and party officials say that they expect to put the issue before voters on the November 2010 ballot, perhaps lending it extra profile during the gubernatorial campaign. (CoCo Times/MediaNews 5/3/09)

I think the 117 number comes from the number of resolutions, which was actually 119. (Trust me, I was there for the marathon meeting.) As for the most pressing, I’m guessing that came from the prioritization from the resolutions committee, but  that should be taken as the consensus of the convention. It is merely that all 20 voting members of the resolutions committee recognized that it should be prioritized. But the point is still well taken, it truly is the most pressing issue.

We’ve heard rumors of propositions to change the 2/3 majorities, but the only props on the Secretary of State’s website don’t appear to be from any institutional player and don’t go back to the simpler to explain majority vote, opting rather for the arbitrary 55% figure.  I don’t know who exactly will lead the charge against 2/3, but it needs to be a cohesive effort from the grassroots all the way to the top.

We simply cannot let this dysfunction continue.  And right along with that, we can’t add on to the dysfunction with Prop 1A. I understand the need to grab the $16 Billion that will come in two years from tax increases, however, make no mistake that the spending cap formulas contained in Prop 1A will haunt us for years, and will be with us far beyond the two years of the extended regressive taxes.

We need to repeal 2/3, and on May 19, we need to be careful that we don’t add one more item to our list of things we have to change.

I’ve been pretty up front in questioning whether or not the next Governor matters compared to the structural reforms needed to get California back on a sustainable course.  Nevertheless, the off-year CDP convention in Sacramento does traditionally kick off the following year’s gubernatorial race, and this year was no different.  Given what we know right now, I think it’s highly probable, actually, that the Democratic primary will feature only two candidates.  Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom were the only two with any visibility whatsoever in Sacramento, and while Antonio Villaraigosa may still feel he can jump in late and capture a healthy share of the Latino vote in any primary, his awkward exit from the festivities does not lead me to believe that he will bother with the race.

If that is the case, we have a virtual mirror-image of the 2008 national Democratic primary, with a candidate positioning himself as looking to the future against a candidate firmly implanted in the past.  That’s the general belief, anyway, and there’s quite a bit of truth to that.  Clearly, Mayor Newsom’s convention speech continually framed the choice for voters as “whether we’re going to move forward in a new direction or whether we’re going to look back.”  Clearly, each candidate has a profile that fits that general mold.  And the general mood of each candidate’s signature event, with Brown lolling at the old Governor’s Mansion with his 1974 blue Plymouth in the driveway, literally an historical set piece, while Newsom closed off a street and held a block party featuring Wyclef Jean (and got what amounts to an endorsement from Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson when he introduced Newsom as “the next Governor of California”), could not have been more different.

And yet Jerry Brown has always been something of a political futurist, someone who was mocked in his time for being unrealistic and silly, on issues which are now firmly in the mainstream of the American political debate.  And as CalBuzz points out, Brown’s presentation to the convention may be closer to the zeitgeist than Newsom’s right now:

While Newsom (a Hillary supporter, BTW) spent the weekend trying to position himself as Obama to Brown’s Clinton, General Jerry delivered a Jim Hightower-like jeremiad to the convention, filled with rips and roars at financial insiders and white collar criminals. In tone and substance it seemed closer to tapping the populist zeitgeist of these financially troubled times than did Newsom’s effort to fight the last war.

Voters fed up with Governor Arnold’s shattered promises to “blow up boxes” and sweep clean the mess in Sacramento may well be in the mood for less “change” and more common sense, which happens to be Brown’s political meme du jour.

Ultimately, I don’t cotton much to these popularity-based views of major elections, preferring to judge on substance.  The primary electorate is older, but that means there’s more potential for increasing turnout among youth, so we’ll see where that leads.  But ultimately, I’m going to judge on the basis of substance, particularly with respect to structural reform.  And while Brown gave a fairly nice speech, highlighting his high-profile work as Attorney General suing the likes of Wells Fargo, in essence he left unanswered the charges that he is an apostle for fantasyland in thinking he can just bring Democrats and Republicans in a room together and get them to work everything out.  On the other hand, Newsom, in a meet and greet with bloggers, came out once again in favor of a Constitutional convention to put all of these contradictory and hobbling budget and governing ideas on the chopping block and work from scratch to figure out a way to organize the state that makes sense.  You can ague with his somewhat rosy picture of his record – as I have – but you cannot argue that he has a forward-looking view of how to finally blow up this insanely dysfunctional structure.

On the near-term issue of the special election, Brown has appeared on stage with Arnold Schwarzenegger to tout the Yes side on all measures, while Newsom has not.  In fact, he expressed his opposition to Props. 1C, 1D and 1E, saying “I can’t get my arms around balancing the budget with lottery money” and that 1D and 1E would raid successful and cost-effective programs.  Now, what I can’t get MY arms around is Newsom’s support for 1A, particularly because he explained that his first instinct was to oppose, but that he “had to be responsible” and look at the impact on city budgets.  However, 1A would provide no budgetary relief for two years, while 1C, 1D and 1E, which he opposes, would.  In clarifying this, Newsom spokesman Eric Jaye explained that the impact on city budgets could be made worse by the bond markets seeing the failure of 1A and raising their interest rates, but there’s definitely a tension there.  Perhaps Newsom thinks that he can fix whatever damage is done by a constitutional convention, but a voter-approved spending cap would be hard to cancel out within a the space of a year or two.

(More on the Newsom blogger meetup in a later post.)

I think there’s room to be critical of both candidates, as well as room to be praiseworthy.  But rather than framing this election along cultural or generational lines, I think it’s necessary to frame it along the policies they would both bring to Sacramento and whether they make sense for progressives to get behind.  So it’s not past vs. future for me so much as success vs. FAIL.

Those who followed the proposition thread know the outcome, but in case you need a recap, Big Media’s got your back as well.

Efforts by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders to win voter approval of six budget measures on the May 19 ballot grew more difficult Sunday when a sharply split state Democratic Party declined to back three of them.

The mixed verdict by more than 1,200 delegates to a state party convention came after a nasty floor fight over the grim menu of proposed solutions to California’s severe budget crisis.

“We’ve got all kinds of divisions,” Art Pulaski, leader of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, said of the fractures among unions that drove the party’s internal rift. “It’s not unusual for us.”

Republicans, too, are split on Propositions 1A through 1F. The state Republican Party has broken with Schwarzenegger, its standard-bearer, and begun fighting the measures.

Taken together, the muddled messages from California’s two major parties threaten to fuel the sort of voter confusion that often spells doom for complicated ballot measures.

This is pretty on the money.  There’s a split within both parties, one that Democratic leaders aren’t coming to terms with.  Neither side has taken heed of its grassroots, at least in part.  With the propositions in trouble, we must take an eye to the message that will come out in the aftermath.  The truth is that Democrats have a principled policy difference here, and those legitimate concerns should not be discounted by the leadership in favor of a narrative that voters opposed the ballot because of 2 years’ worth of certain tax increases.  In fact, the word “taxes” was not used once on the floor of the convention by those opposed to 1A or any other measure.  We oppose these measures because we find them deeply harmful to the future functioning of the state.  We believe there’s a better way in the short term, with the majority-vote fee increase, and the long-term, with the end of the conservative veto and a more sustainable course, based on broader-based taxation to pay for the services all Californians desire.  We reject in whole the dumbed-down, simplistic framing that 1A would “reform the budget” and failure would court disaster.

As for the spin that delegates “supported” the measures on the “May 11 ballot” (Steve, you should probably get the date right if you’re working for the Yes side), and a “supermajority quirk in party rules” was used by opponents, I really don’t know what to even say to that.  First of all, the quirk has been on the books for a long time, and it was actually progressives like Dante Atkins who have been working to reform the endorsement process, so welcome to the party.  Next, with fully 1/3 of the delegates electeds and appointeds, most of whom negotiated and supported the deal, and another 1/3 elected by county committees, and another 1/3 grassroots delegates elected at caucuses, a 60% threshold, which again was never argued by these people when it worked for them, represents a fairly broad consensus of all three sectors.  Finally, if you went state by state, I would imagine you would find such a threshold in many if not most state Democratic parties, whereas the 2/3 rule for the budget, to which some are making a false equivalence, only finds parallel in Arkansas and Rhode Island.  I would be all too happy to completely reform the endorsement process and even question its use by the party outright, that would be a fine debate.  But whining about known rules sounds like Hillary Clinton’s staff bemoaning the fact of caucuses in the 2008 primary when they knew the facts for years.  The grapes, they are sour.

Now that the endorsement battle is over and the election just weeks from being done, let’s have a dialogue instead of a lecture, and let’s take the concerns seriously of those who reject the false messiah of a spending cap and raiding important voter-approved initiatives and balancing the budget on the backs of gamblers.  Let’s actually advocate for something rather than being forced to accept something.  Let’s not worry about “what the Republicans will say” and let’s not sniff that “pie in the sky solutions won’t work.”  Let’s reform the state and come out with a government that works.

I’m quite proud to be working for the No on Prop 1A campaign. More details about that here.

The Yes on Prop 1A campaign has a daunting task in trying to get the voters of California to support the Frankensteinian creation that is Prop 1A.  After all, support is hovering around 29% now. So, like I did with Squirrel in her Darth Vader costume, the Prop 1A campaign is trying to do with their dog.

Let’s start at the top: Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a meeting with the Bay Area Council, yesterday said this:

“We are one of the only state’s that don’t have a rainy day fund… so Prop 1A [will be a historic reform if it passes.]”

Except, wait, where have I heard that? Right, that was in the ballot argument for Prop 58 (PDF):

WILL require general funds to be put in a “Rainy Day” fund to build a RESERVE to protect California from future economic downturns. The Budget Stabilization Account will also be used to pay off the California Economic Recovery Bond early;

Wow, how quickly Arnold forgets his own propositions.  It’s easy, I suppose, when they have been spectacularly unsuccessful.

And then there’s the ads.  The Budget Reform Now Committee, that would be the Yes on 1A-F campaign in campaign-speak, released an ad for the teevee. I enjoy that on their web page (and in any YouTube embed), the ad is up there with a one star rating. As for the content of the ad, it is, shall we say, only honest in a way that a political consultant could love. You can peep the whole ad, in all its widescreen glory, over the flip.

The ad is just about as confusing as the measure itself, which is saying quite a bit. For example, the actor in the ad says that “Prop 1A will give us budget stability.” Beyond the fact that we’ve heard that one before, oh, about four years ago with Props 57 & 58, there is the troubling matter of the huge structural budget deficit that Prop 1A leaves in its wake.  

According to the California Budget Project’s report on Prop 1A (PDF), the projected revenue cap will be $16 billion lower than the Governor’s “baseline” spending in 2010-2011, followed by $17 and $21 billion in the next two years. Thus, we’ll have to either raise taxes or decrease spending. That’s hardly the stability we need.

Or how about the somewhat audacious claim that Prop 1A will “help hold the line on higher taxes.”  While I’m not one to concern myself with that particular issue, the claim is deceptive at best.  Ignoring the extended sales tax for the out years, if Prop 1A does anything, it encourages taxes.  The most efficient way of resetting the cap is to, drumroll please, raise taxes.

This ad does its best to dress up a dog, but Californians are saying that this dog just won’t hunt.

This is simply an incredible performance by Der Governator, captured by Josh Richman:

The governor went on a bit of a tirade against dissent, first talking smack about U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger’s 2007 order reducing the operation of pumps in the Delta to protect the endangered Delta Smelt, then about a three-federal-judge panel’s moves toward ordering the release of certain inmates to reduce California’s chronic and unconstitutional prison overcrowding, and then about Clark Kelso, the receiver empowered by a federal judge to demand $8 billion from the state to correct unconstitutional, decades-long underfunding prison health care.

“It’s not productive for the state to have so many chefs in the kitchen,” the governor grumped. “Those are the kinds of things that make it very difficult.”

But his ire wasn’t just directed at the federal courts. Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, he said, opposes him on fiscal policy at every turn, he said: “He’s running for Congress now, so that’s good.”

And he cited state Controller John Chiang’s and state Treasurer Bill Lockyer’s opposition to his plans to cut state salaries last year. “How does a coach win a basketball game when all of the players are running off in different directions?” Schwarzenegger asked.

Maybe that’s why he’s so hot for Proposition 1A, which would give the governor new authority to unilaterally reduce some spending for state operations and capital outlay and eliminate some cost-of-living increases, all without legislative approval – shoo, you pesky compromises; begone, consensus! Also, maybe he’s forgetting that these federal judges’ job is to hold California to its obligations under federal law and the U.S. Constitution, and that the Democratic statewide elected officials he’s knocking are with this state’s majority party while he’s in the minority.

Now you tell me that this Governor is a good-faith operator when he seeks to grab additional executive power without legislative oversight.  He’s an actor used to getting his way because he has the biggest trailer on the set.  And he has little use for those measly checks and balances.  It’s all so very American.  So why not just get rid of them?

Only problem for Mr. Whiny Ass Titty Baby, nobody in the state likes him and they consider him to be a terrible steward of government.  That’s why they’re rejecting his efforts to hamstring the state even further.