The California Exception

By James Preston Allen, Publisher

The other day I was invited to a rather swank hilltop fundraiser to support the re-election campaign of Debra Bowen for California Secretary of State––a candidate for whom I have the utmost respect and confidence in performing the duties of this office. On the tail end of this was added the Democratic Party event featuring party chairman and former Senate President Pro Tempore, John Burton, and a performance by singer/songwriter Jackson Brown. With Jackson belting out the refrain to his hit song, “The Pretender,” I looked out over the great expanse of the Los Angeles basin from the Santa Monica Bay to the epicenter of power in downtown Los Angeles, thinking how much this sprawl of civilization has grown in the last 50 years.

There are some who look back with a sense of political nostalgia, longing for the much simpler Ozzie and Harriet days expressed in the complaint that government is “too big” and dysfunctional. Yet, the size of our state’s $129 billion budget is probably proportional to the per capita increase in our population from what it was in 1955. No visionary ever expected this state’s population to explode the way it has or for our economy to increase in such a way as to compete for being the eighth largest in the world. The truth is California has, from its inception as a state, always played catch-up to the reality of its growth. From the initial boom of the Gold Rush to the post-World War II baby boom, California has never adequately planned for its future growth or done well in dealing with the interceding recessions. And our government over the past century and a half kind of reflects this. Our state constitution is a patchwork of ideas–some lifted from the Iowa State Constitution in 1879 and then amended some 500 times since.

According to Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, the authors of California Crack Up–How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It, California’s government has been flawed since its inception and nearly every attempt to fix it has only made the situation more complex and less functional– particularly since the passage of Prop. 13, which was originally proposed as a two-tier tax plan, not a one percent solution for everyone. The continued use of voter-approved propositions that were passed without funding sources combined with term limits in the legislature have hobbled the state into a perpetual deficit spending cycle and political stalemate, they claim.

Some of us remember the days when public education, particularly our colleges and universities, were in ascendancy and were the envy of the nation. Not so today as we compete with states like Mississippi for the rank of 46th in education spending as a percentage of personal income (and that was in 2008-2009, before our last round of cuts). What we are witnessing today is the battle over accountability in our public schools where government mandated tests are used like darts thrown at the backside of the teacher’s unions while local control of spending is ignored and actual learning relegated to statistical debates over graduation versus drop-out rates. Does anyone really care about educating students so that they can critically deconstruct the political mess we’ve left behind and make an intelligent vote?

Everyone complains about how messy and nasty political campaigns have become. But you know what— I think Americans actually like a good fistfight. If you look back, our history is accented with political pushing and shoving matches that have, at times, devolved into out-in-out violence. The Civil War is but the most example.

One might hope that we as a people have evolved past the point “ritual warfare” when it comes to politics. But we haven’t. Just look at the attention the Tea Party is getting for their misguided intent and misplaced blame focused on President Obama and the Democrats. The truth of the matter is, we have had 30 years of collaboration between Republicans and Democrats that has led us down the acid-Kool Aid path of “free market” economics as being the fix-all solution to everything that ails this country and it has only made matters worse. Unregulated capital’s only goal is to amass greater profits without regard to the consequences for the rest of the nation. But this understanding is lost on the Tea Baggers, the born-again Christian rightwingers and Karl Rove, whose secret hand orchestrates astro-turf uprisings funded by corporate conservatives like the Koch brothers and fronted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

While the rest of our nation is challenged by the façade of the Tea Party uprising, unable to recognize it for what it is, as a phony political movement, California has slowly awakened to fact that our votes, if not our entire state, have been put up for sale by Meg Whitman, Carly Forina, Tesoro and Valero oil companies. This November elections will decide whether or not California is still the Great Exception that historian Carrie McWilliams once explained in his book of the same name, or if we have become so lulled into a stupor of idiocy by Fox News, Karl Rove and the U.S. and California Chambers of Commerce propaganda machines that we will actually vote against our own self-interests.

For my generation, this is a test of greater significance than the “value added” exams we forced on our children and whether we pass it or not will determine the legacy that we leave them and ourselves. I’m betting that California will vote for its future and not repeat the mistakes of its past by electing novices to run its government like a Wall Street business venture.