You’ve probably seen the gubernatorial campaign ad of Steve Poizner pulling a car back from going over a cliff like George Reeves as Superman in the 1950s TV show.
Poizner’s campaign calls the ad “Liberal Failure” and in the first eight seconds of the 30-second spot a quote from Washington Post columnist and TV pundit, George Will, appears on the screen: “…Liberalism has Tarnished California Gold.”
The quote is actually the title of a Will piece published January 10.
I found the article among my papers in cleaning up my desk the other day. I had saved it and marked some of Will’s observations.
Will was writing about the student and union-member protests at UC Berkeley over the 32-percent student fee increase. Certainly, an increase of that magnitude was a shock to the budget of the students, although as Will pointed out, the new tuition was “still 70 percent below student costs at Stanford and other private institutions in California that Berkeley considers no better than it is.”
Will did not so much lack sympathy for the students as he held scorn for the students’ fellow protestors—the members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Will charged that the state is “run by and for unionized public employees” which has led to “liberalism’s mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California’s once-creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians’ many threads.”
His conclusion was that the students’ fellow protestors have caused the extra tuition burden to fall to the students. With public employee growth in members, compensation and benefits, and entangling regulations driving manufacturing jobs from the state, little revenue is left over for the students.
Which in a round about way brings me to Senator Leland Yee’s complaint about Sarah Palin’s speech at Cal State Stanislaus scheduled for June 25. The former vice-presidential candidate is being paid to speak at the CSU Stanislaus Foundation’s $500-a-ticket fundraiser. Yee wants to know how much Palin is being paid. In a statement he said, "The CSU should immediately disclose how much money is being diverted from students to pay Sarah Palin’s exorbitant speaking fees.”
However, no money is being diverted from students. The money is from the foundation. And, in the end, the foundation officials report that, with the brisk sales of tickets for the Palin event, the foundation will have up to a couple of hundred thousand dollars in new funds for scholarships and academic chair endowments to benefit students.
Yee is clearly attempting to make political points at the expense of the former Alaska governor.
The senator’s time would be better spent considering George Will’s charge that the exorbitant cost of the public union benefits is what is diverting money from students.