California political junkies are buzzing about the new Rasmussen poll which shows former Governor and current Attorney General Jerry Brown handily leading all the major Republican gubernatorial contenders (Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner and Tom Campbell) while Brown's rival for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination trailing the same three possible Republicans. Here's the data:

Brown (D) 44%, Whitman (R) 35%
Brown (D) 45%, Poizner (R) 32%
Brown (D) 44%, Campbell (R) 34%
Whitman (R) 41%, Newsom (D) 36%
Poizner (R) 40%, Newsom (D) 36%
Campbell (R) 42%, Newsom (D) 36%

This is definitely NOT very good news for the Governor Gavin movement. That's too bad, because MadProfesah has been leaning towards Newsom, especially since Gerry Brown hasn't announced whether he wants the job (again) yet, and acting as attorney general, Brown was responsible for the devastatingly incompetent presentation by an Assistant Attorney General during the Proposition 8 California Supreme Court oral argument.

UPDATE by Dave: I would say that this poll is fairly meaningless. I’m guessing Rasmussen pushed leaners hard to get any kind of opinion. I don’t think anyone has really engaged on this race, and anyone thinking it will remain static isn’t being honest. This is more of a reflection of name ID, for good and ill, than anything else.

Tom Campbell, among all the Republicans in the gubernatorial field, has at least been willing to lay out detailed plans for how he would fix the state.  Typically this manifests itself as the same old Hooverism.  But his health care plan at least gets points for creativity.

GOP gubernatorial hopeful Tom Campbell released a unique health care proposal Thursday that would redistribute $42 billion in federal and state funds already spent on health care in California to buy private health coverage for everyone in the state who’s “involuntarily” uninsured.

Under the former congressman’s plan, the funds would cover an estimated 2 million such people in addition to the 7.6 million already receiving public health coverage under the state Medi-Cal and Healthy Families programs.

“The astounding conclusion,” Campbell writes in his proposal, “is that, using only the money already being spent by the federal and state governments for health care in California, we could buy free market health insurance currently available and cover all involuntarily uninsured in California, and still have more than $700 per person left over!”

Instead of dedicating funds to services for the poor or children, Campbell would split the state into regions, and allow insurers to bid against one another to cover everyone in that region who earned below a certain level, along with everyone denied coverage for a pre-existing condition.  Insurers wouldn’t bid on price, but quality of coverage – the money would be fixed, and insurers would bid against each other based on what they would cover and at what rate.

I’m wondering why any insurer would bid for this right.  They deny people with pre-existing conditions because they are more likely to use health care, increasing their medical loss ratio.  And the poor are more likely to need health care treatment based on lifestyle and environment.  And the kicker to Campbell’s plan is, if nobody bids, the status quo would remain in place for that geographical area.  So basically, Campbell is touting a big plan that would do… nothing.  And he wouldn’t embark on it if the federal government enacts their own plan.

Mavericky!

Really, that interesting, if impossible (try getting a federal waiver to set it up and face Congressmembers with interests in protecting SCHIP and Medicaid), proposal is a cover for Campbell’s apparent agenda – to permit the interstate sale of insurance and to bring up the canard of tort reform as a panacea.  Medical malpractice is an insignificant percentage of total health care costs and states which have embarked on major medmal reform, like Texas, have seen no change in health inflation.  As for the interstate sale of insurance, you can do it now – only you’re responsible to comply with the laws of the state in which you sell.  This proposal would allow insurers to only be responsible to the regulations of the state where they are based.  Tom Campbell wants to do for the health insurance industry what this kind of proposal did for the credit card industry – send all insurance companies to a small state with no regulation, and gut all state-based regulation in the process, leaving California’s insurance customers at the mercy of the laws of South Dakota or Mississippi.

To his credit, Campbell wants to remove the anti-trust exemption on the insurance industry.  But really, that’s a means to an end here.  However, there is a point of consensus between conservatives and liberals to do away with the McCarran-Ferguson Act, that offers that anti-trust exemption.  Bills to this effect were just introduced in Congress.  If Campbell wants to talk them up to the California GOP delegation, go ahead.

Jerry Brown is really a riddle wrapped in an enigma.  First, he tries to play coy as to whether he is planning a run:

“The whole system is bogged down all over Sacramento,” Brown said. “We need a very strong leader who can pull everyone together. I’m not a candidate. Yes I am leading in the polls, but I’m not yet convinced….The people of California are not anxious to hear from their candidates yet, and the deadline for filing papers isn’t until March – so tune in.” (SF Chronicle 9/16/09)

Wow, isn’t that cute. I’m ahead and going to crush all of you, but I may not run. So keep guessing, suckas.  But from a tactical standpoint, you can’t blame the guy. He has nothing to gain by officially announcing. He’s already way ahead of any non-self-funding candidate, and likely already has a slew of (wink-wink) commitments for more money once he switches the Jerry Brown2010 campaign account to the Gov race.  He’s in no need of additional name ID, so why not keep them “guessing?”

But, once again, we’re back in 1978. As Steve Poizner sought to grab the right flank by talking crazy on taxes, it seems that Jerry Brown is still repeating the mantras that he began reciting on June 7, 1978:

Brown followed by calling the logjam in Sacramento “a management problem” and saying legislators needed to carefully choose priorities in deciding how to stimulate the economy.

Brown said he would not raise taxes if he became governor, noting that the public is opposed. “We’re not in the revenue raising business,” he said.

A management problem? That’s like saying the Titanic took on a little water. Sacramento has more than a mere management problem. Is management going to make the Republicans cease their petty power plays? Going to make the legislative system more functional? Going to get the few Republican votes that we need every year?  

That’s all just a management problem?

Look, I think Jerry Brown is as qualified, if not more qualified than the field for this gig.  Perhaps he can find Republican votes where our current (Republican) governor could not. He does know the building better than pretty much anybody. Given his experience, he’d be in a better position than any other candidate to bring about a consensus.

But how is it that we get out of this mess without even considering revenue. At some point, the lines between Tom Campbell, who supported a gas tax increase last year, and Jerry Brown begin to blur. And, unfortunately for us, they aren’t meeting in the middle. I know I’m picking on Jerry Brown, but it really isn’t just him. We are losing the battle on talking about this budget, over and over and over again.

While perhaps not a sign of the better side of our politics, the money race in California politics is crucial. This is especially true for the Governor’s race, where the campaign has been mostly fought via air war in the last few elections.  Thus, it is time for a Calitics look at the money situation in some of the statewide races.  We’ll start with the Governor’s race, and within the next few days, I’ll post information on some of the other races of note.

So, let’s get right to it. First, the Republicans:

Meg Whitman

Ending Balance – $4,962,065.61

Debts – $295,175.64

What isn’t included in this report, however, is that Whitman donated a bit of money to her campaign.  You know nothing, major, just $15,000,000. Yes, you read that right. Whitman has now donated over $19 million to her campaign. Money will be no issue for the Whitman campaign. There is a litany of problems for Whitman, both with the Republican primary electorate as well as with the general election voters.  However, if she has an overwhelmingly large a lot of money, she might simply be able to drown out any message that isn’t exactly to her liking. It is a bit worrying, despite all the fun that you can have with Meg Whitman.

Steve Poizner

Ending Balance – $3,701,993.79

Debts – $176,186.66

Steve Poizner hasn’t dumped the kind of money that Whitman has into her campaign. He’s getting some decent level of grassroots support from the right-wing, as there has been no real hard-right McClintock-esque type of candidate. Poizner doesn’t have quite the wealth of Whitman, but he can afford to drop a few million into his campaign if he begins to get overrun by the Whitman machine.

Tom Campbell

Ending Balance – $317,381.69

Debts – $0

Poor Tom Campbell.  Not that Campbell is a poor man, but compared to the other two, he simply cannot donate to his campaign. He cannot get the right-wing grassroots support as he has consistently ticked off the right-wing with his positions on Prop 8 and taxes.  At some point unless his fundraising picks up steam rapidly, you begin to question whether this is a serious campaign and not some platform for him to talk about the budget. If that’s the case, well, it’s a fairly good tack, and would give him some power over the discussions in the campaign.  He’ll need to raise a lot more to actually be competitive in the Republican primary though.  

On the Democratic side, it’s starting to look like an un-fair fight.  Attorney General Jerry Brown (and supposed candidate for that race again) has a lot of money heading into the Democratic primary,  SF Mayor Gavin Newsom had a fairly disappointing first half of the year for fundraising, considering he was the only announced candidate. Running for Governor also allows a substantially higher maximum, so Brown can go back to a lot of his maxed out donors when (if?) he declares for the Governor’s race.

Brown

Ending Balance – $7,386,669.12

Debts – $0

Brown has been extremely thrifty, with his staff very limited. His wife, Anne Gust, is doing much of the day-to-day work, and Joe Trippi is doing a bit of consulting. But, there just hasn’t been much money flowing out of his campaign. If he goes back and double-dips to his other contributions, he’ll have even more money.  This is a train with a lot of steam now.

Newsom:

Ending Cash – $1,244,919.85

Debts – $334,482.67

In years past, these numbers wouldn’t have been terrible. But costs have gone up, and you simply need a lot of money. With the exodus of Eric Jaye and the now unquestioned authority of Garry South, it is a fairly safe assumption that there will be a big push on traditional fundraising methods over new media and grassroots fundraising. Whether Newsom will succeed with such methods is still an open question.

Thanks to the power of twitter, we have some real-time reporting from this afternoon’s “debate” between Tom Campbell and Steve Poizner.  They each came kitted out with props. Campbell apparently is a fan of whiteboards, and Poizner brought massive copies of the current California budget.  Ooh, fun!

But neither actually addressed the real problem: the economic crisis in California. Instead, they choose to address the symptoms by cutting spending from the California budget.  Robert described Campbell’s “plan”, but Poizner is even more ludicrous. Apparently a “process” makes massive cuts palatable

Poizner says it’s “distasteful” to talk about cuts without a “process.” LAT’s George Skelton says “process doesn’t solve budget problem.” (John Myers twitter)

And despite any stories about tea bags in the ballot, the plural of anecdote is not data. (My apologies to Raymond Wolfringer.) Is the symbolism more robust with a teabag in the ballot? Sure, but symbolism alone does not and should not drive the narrative.

The narrative is this: Californians are sick and tired of a dysfunctional government. They want quality schools and services that work for California. And while some taxes aren’t all that popular, there are a lot of taxes that could pass provided that the Governor provided some real leadership. Rather than just sitting behind a podium trying to scare people, we need a leader that is willing to go to bat for Californians.

Tea bags are a distraction from what is the sad fact facing California: we are about to Hoover our economy, and the Republicans are cheering it on.

California’s media likes to play up Tom Campbell as some sort of “moderate” or “sensible” Republican. As compared to Attila the Hun this might be plausible. But even a cursory glance at his alternative budget solutions shows that he is a typically conservative politician. Sure, his conservatism seems to be of the Ronald Reagan sort as opposed to the Grover Norquist sort. But there never was much difference between the two, except in tone, which is apparently all that matters to the media.

Campbell’s proposed budget claims to want to solve a “systemic” crisis in a way that doesn’t hurt our ability to recover from the economic crisis. Yet his budget merely offers a different method to achieve the same downward spiral that has afflicted the state – particularly Campbell’s total ignorance of the revenue drop and the negative impact of spending cuts on consumer spending.

Tom Campbell believes the budget can be balanced by hammering social services, even though there is unprecedented need for these services. An example of his proposals:

•15% salary reduction for state workers OR 15% layoffs of state workforce

• $156.7 million savings in Cal Works by implementing Federal work participation requirements.

• $248.5 million savings by reverting to federal minimums on Supplemental Security Income and the State Supplementary Payment.

• $114.1 million savings by reducing compensation to in-home supportive service workers to the state minimum wage.

• $882 million savings in Medi-Cal, provided California receives a federal waiver from terms of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

In other words, he’s offering a mixture of attacks on the poor and attacks on Obama’s stimulus. His rationale:

1. California must, in large part, return to national standards on welfare and health care; we cannot afford to provide more than the national average in areas where we have long exceeded those levels;

2. California must ask those capable of taking care of themselves to do so;

3. California must not undercut its ability to bounce back when the national recession ends. This means being careful about cutting education, especially Community Colleges where much workforce retraining takes place.

This is complete bullshit. First, the national standards on welfare and health care are woefully insufficient. Campbell acts as if there is no national health care problem, as if there is no issue with the working-class finding and holding jobs. Campbell is a typical Republican – wealthy and totally ignorant of how everyone else experiences life in California.

Second, how the fuck are people supposed to “take care of themselves” in a recession like this?! Campbell is the sort of guy who drives through a poor community in his Jaguar and shakes his head saying “why don’t they just get a job?” That statement alone is proof that Campbell is intellectually unfit for office by virtue of his unwillingness to understand the challenges facing most Californians.

Campbell also proves he has no clue about modern economics – otherwise he wouldn’t so blithely ignore the work of Nobel Laureates who point out that if you cut social service spending, folks have to replace that lost money by curtailing consumer spending, hammering jobs and tax revenues.

Third, Campbell’s whole budget blueprint is designed specifically to prevent California from enjoying economic recovery. How are people who have no health care benefits supposed to find work? How are people supposed to find work period if you’re scaling back Cal-WORKS? How are small businesses supposed to open when the state is laying off workers or cutting their salaries?

Campbell’s also internally inconsistent. He states he wants to be “careful about cutting education” and then proposes:

$150 million unallocated cut to UC and CSU (I realize this would require further increases in student fees, or improved fund-raising).

Tom Campbell isn’t some kind of new Republican. He’s no moderate. Instead, he is the same exact kind of Republican that the party has offered dating back to Herbert Hoover. He is a man of the upper class, determined to protect the wealth and privileges of the upper class at the expense of everyone else.

Campbell’s economic policies are no different than Reagan’s, or Bush’s (either one, 41 or 43). Campbell offers the vast majority of this state only reduced services and less money in their wallets. His Hooverite policies would merely make the recession worse, and ensure that when economic recovery does come, only Campbell’s rich friends see any of its benefits, while everyone else is left behind. Which will apparently be just fine with Campbell, since everyone else should just take care of themselves anyway.

We’ve all seen this movie before. We know how it ends – we’re living through it right now. Californians will reject Campbell’s Hooverism. But will the media report on exactly what Campbell offers? Or will they continue to lie to their readers and claim he’s some kind of “moderate”? I’m not exactly holding my breath.  

UPDATED at the top, as the Governor lays off 5,000 state workers, the perfect thing to get California working again.  He’s basically borrowing from the Whitman playbook here.  See below for why that’s crazy.

It’s a long way until the 2010 Governor’s race, but I think Calitics needs to do our part in pointing out that Meg Whitman is frequently full of crap.  She’s seized on this idea that California’s problems can merely be solved by firing all the state employees.  Now, first of all, California has the second-lowest rate of state employees per capita in the entire nation, a conveniently forgotten fact by eMeg and the rest of the swinging corporate raiders in the Yacht Party.  Next, as Josh Richman explains:

“We haven’t looked hard enough at where we can cut. We can lay off 20,000 to 30,000 state employees while prioritizing public safety and teachers,” Whitman told the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce. “We shouldn’t have to lay off teachers, we need to lay off bureaucrats.”

Fact is, “cut the bloated bureaucracy” has been a GOP rallying cry for decades, and yet whenever the study, the audit or the blue-ribbon commission report comes back, we’re suddently talking about far less “waste, fraud and abuse” than they’d implied. Is there some fat to cut? Sure. Should we? Probably. Will it fix this deficit? Not even close.

The budget deficit now looks to be about $21.3 billion; it would be about $15 billion if voters approved Propositions 1C, 1D and 1E next week, but that almost certainly ain’t gonna happen. And $21 billion isn’t 30,000 jobs, as George Skelton so eloquently put it back in February:

According to the state budget document, there is the equivalent of 205,000 full-time jobs controlled by the governor. There actually are more workers than that because some are part-time. Do the math based on 16 months, since that’s now the time frame of the projected deficit, assuming a balanced-budget package could be implemented by March 1.

You could lay off all those state workers – rid yourself of their pay and benefits – and save only $24.4 billion.

Meanwhile, you would have dumped 160,000 convicted felons onto the streets because all the prisons were closed after the guards and wardens were fired. There’d be no Highway Patrol because all the officers were canned. State parks would be closed because there were no fee-collectors or rangers.

Truth is the savings wouldn’t even add up to $24.4 billion because some of those employees are paid out of small special funds that are self-sustaining.

If these people were in an empty trash bin, they’d still clamor to “cut the waste.”

Let me again commend Chris Kelly’s Meg Whitman week on the Huffington Post, he’s doing an oppo research job that should practically ensure him a spot on any number of campaign staffs.  I particularly like the part detailing the $1.78 million she stole from Goldman Sachs, which for all I know might make her a folk hero.

Next year oughta be fun.

…by the way, I’m not letting other Yacht Party gubernatorial hopefuls off the hook either, like Tom Campbell.  He predictably dissembles about California’s low per-pupil spending on K-12 education, making the same debunked “hey, the schools have plenty of money” claim that Dan Walters likes to peddle.  Allow me to introduce them both to Julia Rosen circa April 2008, which by the way is before the even deeper cuts to schools made in the February budget agreement.

…And if you want to laugh, read this “we’re winning, and the fact that everyone makes fun of us PROVES it!” op-ed from Whitman senior adviser Jeff Randle.

I’ve been reading a bunch of stories about Tom Campbell, and I’m pretty sure that he is the greatest person in the history of all politics EVER! He’s brilliant and really far more serious than any of us silly “partisans” could ever dream of being. He’s sincere and never takes any of those hippy or fascist positions.  Really, this is the greatest man since, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger circa 2003.

That was actually pretty hard to write, but it’s not all that far off from the tone of the coverage that Campbell is getting.  Take this  Skelton column from today’s LA Times today:

Tom Campbell is a rarity. He’s a politician who carefully thinks through contentious issues and takes positions based on his notion of good government.

Good politics seem to be a low priority, if one at all.

Not that all politicians are finger-to-the-wind opportunists. Each varies by degree between being a policy wonk and political survivalist. But Democrats tend to genuflect to labor, particularly public employee unions. Republicans tend to cower before the anti-tax crowd, to name one.

Campbell is practically all wonk.

And he must have missed the memo to rookie politicians about going along to get along.(LA Times 4/9/09)

I will say this, Campbell is fairly wonky. And compared to the Governator, he is far more introspective and far less showman. But, you know, Arnold is an actor and a professional showman, so that’s hardly saying much.

There’s this emphasis in Sacramento, but in politics generally, to always look for the next great moderate hope.  And apparently this time, the focus has settled squarely upon Tom Campbell.  He opposed Prop 8, which gives him solid cred on the socially progressive vote in the Republican party.  All seventeen of them statewide.  

And boy is he serious.  I mean he’s so serious that he supports Prop 1A, but not Prop 1B.  That’ll really show those crybaby school kids.  We’ll cut and cap spending and then make sure schools get less than they are legally entitled to under Prop 98.  That’s very serious indeed.  From Debra Saunders:

With his service in Congress, the state Senate and then as Schwarzenegger’s state finance director, however, Campbell told me, “I am banking on the electorate to favor experience in government.”

That’s some bet. … Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles, noted that as with Davis, Campbell’s only hope would be “if Poizner and Whitman knock each other off – and that’s a possibility.”

“Maybe competence wins out,” Stern added.

Well, that would be something.  Competence winning out over money and right-wing nuttery? Well, long shot indeed. Saunders goes on to note that Campbell is the guy trying to win by supporting Prop 1A (but not 1B, but I digress).  Perhaps it would be nice if the Republican party had more people like Tom Campbell and even a few to his left.  But the unhappy lesson from the Republican electorate at the Sacramento state convention right after the budget deal was not that they should be more moderate, but that they must make every effort to be completely inflexible.  Completely ignore the situation that’s actually happening and how to address the problems, and just be Grover-zombies.

The fact is that Campbell is really no moderate in the classical sense. He’s moderate only because the Republicans have gone insane. Read his take on the issues of the day. They are moderate if and only if you take the ever-rightward-shifting pole of the Republican party.

But, Tom Campbell is serious and silly bloggers are not.  So, I’ll do my best not to interfere with any of his very serious work.