(This video can’t be good. It’s overly sensationalist, and more than a bit trashy. But still, the underlying question remains at a time when such questions could be disastrous for the term limits initiative. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)
Steve Lopez takes his whacks today.
“There’s not too big a difference,” Nuñez told Vogel, “between how I live and how most middle-class people live.”
Hands down, it’s the quote of the year.
I’m not sure what middle-class people Nuñez is talking about, but I’m worried that he’s spending entirely too much time with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Could the speaker be talking about Brentwood’s middle-class?
That’s the kind of quote that haunts people throughout their political career. And Lopez connects it to fears of buying access that should worry all of us, especially in light of the special session.
It’s the democracy we’ve all been waiting for in Sacramento. Gulfstreams, Louis Vuitton office supplies and nose-thumbing responses to inquiring constituents.
Given Nuñez’s refusal to explain the specific purpose of his travels, Carmen Balber of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is biting her nails, hoping Nuñez wasn’t sampling fine wine with players who have pumped $5.3 million into the “Friends of Fabian Nuñez” campaign kitty.
“The first question that comes to mind is whether the health insurance industry was sponsoring the speaker’s lavish trips, as he’s now debating the future of the health market in California,” Balber said.
She notes that Nuñez’s travel fund has received $136,000 from health insurers and their lobbyists. And Nuñez is working with Schwarzenegger ($719,000 and counting from health insurers and their lobbies) on a health insurance reform bill that would require every Californian to buy coverage, but wouldn’t require insurers to cap the cost.
Certainly the insurers would love to raise a fine bottle of red to the passage of such a bill, and Nuñez has been known to pop the cork on crushed grapes that run as high as $224 a bottle.
I think we have to look at the root causes of something like this. I believe it directly comes out of a static Democratic Party, with its extreme gerrymandering and zealous antipathy to primaries. Matt Stoller has an incredible post today about the broken market for Democratic primaries, and I think it’s directly relatable to what we’re seeing in California. On the flip…
Let’s go through why primaries are essential vehicles.
One, primaries create tremendous efficiencies for activists, concerned citizens, and outside groups. Spending inordinate amounts of time calling and writing Democratic members of Congress or advertising to get their attention, all to get them to do what they should be doing anyway is incredibly costly, and is a direct result of a lack of real political costs to bad faith actions that would be imposed by a healthy series of primary challenges. The lack of primaries is in effect a tremendous negative feedback loop for activism, dampening all of our focused energy as a piece of insulation does summer heat.
Two, democracy is a core Democratic value. The right to vote, and have that vote counted, is meaningful because it allows citizens to generate buy-in to their civic structures. This is as true within a party as it is within a country (and as true within a union, club, corporation, or church). It’s no accident that the Democratic Party gained tens of thousands of new registrants in 2006 in Connecticut. Democratic structures make our party and our country stronger, whether that’s by generating Democratic volunteer or donor lists in a hot primary that can be moved over to a general election or letting a festering intraparty fight get resolved by putting it to the voters.
Three, a lack of primaries disenfranchises Democratic voters. John Tanner, who has not faced a real race in years, or Lynn Woolsey, simply do not have to represent their constituents. They may choose to do so, but they do not have to. And their constituents have no recourse. Their constituents are cut out. In that case, why be a Democrat? Why volunteer for Democrats, or donate if the party itself isn’t democratic?
Four, primaries are a check on calcification and corruption within the party. The only way to keep Congressional representatives responsive to party activists and voters and not corrupted by their control of the party is to have regular mechanisms for feedback by activists and voters. Joe Biden obviously should be challenged for his Senate seat in 2008, but it’s not likely to happen, and this was true for Tom Carper and Dianne Feinstein in 2006.
All of these are key elements of the situation we’re seeing in California. It’s hard to keep activism high when the legislature in Sacramento seems like such a closed system, even to rank-and-file legislators. We have a Big Five and a Little One Hundred And Sixteen, and this is a discouraging development. There is also no excitement generated by Democrats throughout the state, no opportunities for registering new voters and bringing new ideas to the process. The legislators have little belief that they can be beaten once they first get elected, so they don’t feel any need to respect the wishes of their constituents. And the end result is a calcified Democratic Party with a shrinking base, which has ceded much of the inland areas in the state and is concerned primarily with holding on to their fiefdoms. Plus, the opportunities for corruption and ethical lapses, as we see in this case, are amplified.
This is obviously a drastic reading of what goes on in the state. We have decent majorities and have passed some praiseworthy policies in recent years. But the ability to go further and do more is always suppressed, and political power is centralized among a select few. Just as there is a narrow establishment class in Washington that discourages inter-party debate and primary efforts, the same class exists in California, as the establishment appears to abhor the idea of even growing the majority by competing in “red” areas, let alone taking a hard look at the seats under Democratic control to judge whether there is an effective legislator working to advance our interests and values. This is not about purging the party and shrinking the tent, this is about saving the party from itself, as they are shrinking their own tent and dampening activism. The demographics are working for the party in many ways, but also against the party, as job growth moves inland into fast-growing areas like Riverside and Ontario in the south, and districts like CA-11 up north.
We are squandering an opportunity to build a strong legislative majority that can move forward real change by investing power in the hands of an unaccountable few and watching idly as they are tempted by powerful interests to use that power to do little more than protect the status quo. One of the few ways to change this paradigm is to support any efforts to make strong challenges in the primaries to hold these power brokers accountable. Another is to take a long look at the effort to entrench power further by changing the term limit law in a way to keep the leadership in charge for another 6-8 years. Regardless of whether or not you agree with term limits as an abstract concept, you have to ask yourself if it’s advisable to create a situation that would again centralize power, calcify the party leadership and reduce efforts for real change.
(Obviously, meaningful campaign finance reform, which would remove the money barrier to contested primaries, is a great vehicle to kick-start this process.)