Clinton for Governor
President Clinton is headed out to California next week to do some campaigning for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who trails badly in the polls.
I wish he would ditch Newsom and run for governor himself.
I started having Clinton rescue fantasies the morning this summer when he landed at Burbank airport with two California journalists he’d rescued from North Korea. Then, as now, five people were running for governor – two Democrats, three Republicans – and none of them had set the world on fire.
Polls suggest that as many as half of voters are undecided about whom to support for governor.
So why not Bill Clinton?
The Green Governor – Environment and Money
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger liked what he saw and heard from the tax commission when commissioners handed over their report to him. He gave the proposal a thumbs up and said he’d sign the plan into law immediately if he could. However, those thumbs were way up and his energy was much higher when he addressed the gathering at the Governors’ Climate Summit 2 in Los Angeles, yesterday,
To be sure, there were stark differences in the two events. At the climate summit the governor was playing to an admiring audience of world and environmental leaders while at the press conference he was talking to a bunch of grumpy reporters who he sees on a regular basis.
The environmental extravaganza plays into his grassroots stirring of a “Green Revolution”, as he called it, for which he has received international acclaim. With the tax proposal he faces an unruly legislature, which will demand changes and then most likely sink the whole proposal. He’s been down that rocky road too many times before to think its any fun.
Purple Politics: Is California Moving Toward the Center?
You don’t have to be a genius, or a conservative, to recognize that California’s experiment with ultra-progressive politics has gone terribly wrong. Although much of the country has suffered during the recession, California’s decline has been particularly precipitous–and may have important political consequences.
Outside Michigan, California now suffers the highest rate of unemployment of all the major states, with a post-World War II record of 12.2%. This statistic does not really touch the depth of the pain being felt, particularly among the middle and working classes, many of whom have become discouraged and are no longer counted in the job market.
Even worse, there seems little prospect of an immediate recovery. The most recent projections by California Lutheran University suggest that next year the state’s economy will lag well behind the nation’s. Unemployment may peak at close to 14% by late 2010. Retail sales, housing and commercial building permits are not expected to rise until the following year.
The growth question
Denial is the first obstacle an individual must overcome if he or she is to break the bondage of alcoholism. Step number one in the now-renown “12-step” process for beating the addiction reads:
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become
unmanageable.
Thinking about the sorry conditions the state is currently laboring under – economic decline, fiscal chaos, dysfunctional governance – I can’t help but see the similarities between a struggling addict and us. That is, we seem to know what the problem is but are trying mightily to ignore it. California is in denial.
Admittedly, it may be naïveté, not denial – state leaders have been acting for decades as if bad things “can’t happen here.” After all, they grew up believing that “California has it all” – the brains, the brawn, the beauty – and that those gifts of God, or accident, would keep California’s standard of living high and in great demand; would keep the economy humming; and, correspondingly, would grant those leaders the freedom to govern as they saw fit.