State of the State 2009
Today is the day that Governor Schwarzenegger was scheduled to deliver his annual State of the State Address to a joint session of the Legislature, and by extension the people of California. Since he has postponed his speech until January 15th, allow me to fill the void for all you who have been waiting to hear what he has to say,
I don’t know about you, but when he does speak to the people, I do not want to hear any high falutin’ rhetoric about California being the seventh largest economy in the world or what wonderful global warming laws (I’m sorry, climate change laws) we have passed that nobody yet knows the cost of.
No, what I want to hear is some honest, brutal talk about how bad things really are without false hope, phony budget numbers or unattainable political promises. No talk of anything other than the fiscal mess we are in and how we can get out of it, and how we are going to pay for the many problems we have neglected for so long.
So for all you political junkies who can’t wait until January 15th, here is my suggestion to Governor Schwarzenegger for his upcoming State of the State speech.
Save the Columbus Day holiday!!
While we should expect that public sector labor would defend every privilege they have gained for their members, it is still astonishing that state unions and their patrons would consider their positions immune from the ravages of the state’s budget debacle.
With every other politician claiming we are in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, state unemployment rising to 8.3%, and consumer confidence falling to an all-time low, since when are reductions in state government personnel costs off limits? Indeed, Gov. Schwarzenegger has proposed what are probably the least harmful approaches to the current state workforce to minimize layoffs by a combination of furloughs, salary reductions, and reducing some state holidays, like Columbus Day.
A History Note: Some Founders Worried About Actors in Power
In a recent column, the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters bitterly accused Gov. Schwarzenegger of being an “amateur governor.” That shot at our movie star governor was fresh on my mind as I read Ira Stoll’s new biography, Samuel Adams: A Life.
Full disclosure: Stoll, a journalist and newspaper editor, is a friend. So I won’t go on and on about how great the book is. But I did want to relay one historical gem that Stoll unearthed in the journals of the Second Continental Congress. It’s a detail I had never encountered before, even through many years as a newspaper reporter who had to write often about the intersection of entertainment and politics.
Sam Adams — the Boston patriot, legislator and Founding Father — saw religion and morals as the foundations of liberty and happiness. Adams was delighted that the Congress, in 1778, had passed a resolution making that plain. But some in that Congress, Stoll reports, wanted to go further and ban people involved with the theater from federal office.
Political Watershed 2008: The Internet Takes its Rightful Place?
I hear a lot of political professionals buzzing these days about the Obama online campaign. That’s a good thing. It seems that Obama’s victory (enabled, in part, by an aggressive online campaign) was the watershed event that the political world needed to finally recognize the internet as powerful political medium.
The last major watershed event of this kind was nearly 50 years ago for television with the televised Kennedy/Nixon debates. Television quickly became the dominant medium for political communications and has continued its reign through the present day. So, it’s natural that many campaign professionals have come to see the world through the one-way, broadcast framework that television requires.
From data we compiled from the 2004 elections, it was clear that there was a disproportionate difference between dollars spent by campaigns on the internet as a percent of total media spending (1%) and the amount of time that Americans were spending on the internet vs. those other mediums (17%). This 17:1 imbalance represented a real opportunity for a campaign to embrace the internet vis-à-vis a competitor running a more “traditional media” campaign. Over the last four years, this analysis proved to be a powerful marketing tool for my business (a political internet agency), but it took the Obama watershed to bring about industry-wide recognition. Again, a very good thing.