Strategy in Gov Race Could Assist Campbell in Senate Race
President Barack Obama’s visit to Los Angeles yesterday in support of Senator Barbara Boxer’s re-election bid is another sign that Boxer is in trouble – or that Obama has learned a lesson not to take an election for granted. His last minute attempt to rescue Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts senate race to replace Ted Kennedy was too little, too late.
Will California be a replay of the Massachusetts election?
California politics has come to resemble Massachusetts politics over the years. The two states are not exactly mirror images of one another, granted; yet the similarities are noticeable. Both states have overwhelming Democratic legislatures and solid Democratic voter majorities. Both find themselves with growing independent voting blocks that often determine elections. California Republicans, as a whole, tend to be more conservative that Massachusetts Republicans.
However, let’s also note that the Proposition 13 tax revolt, which spread across the country, was almost immediately adopted in Massachusetts. The Bay State version, Proposition 2 ½, also limited property taxes. Like Proposition 13, despite constant attacks, the public in the blue state of Massachusetts holds the property tax limitation favorably even after three decades.
10 New Rules for Public Affairs in the Internet & Social Media Age (part 1)
January of last year, I
blogged about the Obama 2008 campaign’s success online, calling it the
watershed event for the Internet in electoral campaigns. Since then, we saw at
least one major upset in the 2009 elections (Scott
Brown) owing in large measure to the Internet. And, more upsets are sure to
come.
While electoral politics is in the throws of evolution, the
broader world of public affairs has yet to see a similar type of watershed
event and, given the less transparent nature of the field, may never actually
experience one in such dramatic fashion. To a technophile like me, this is
unfortunate as these poignant movements are great catalysts for change and
innovation.
Be sure, the Internet is creating significant and lasting
changes and while the goals of public affairs remain the same (building
coalitions, influencing policymakers and impacting public perception/regulatory
environment) the tools and methodologies necessary for continued success are
evolving all around us. To help our public affairs clients take advantage of
the opportunity inherent in these changes, we developed 10 "New Rules" for the
Internet and social media age (outlined below).
Howard Would Be Proud!
In communities across the nation, taxpayers are standing tall, gaining strength by reaching out to each other, and becoming a major force for the protection of our constitutional liberties.
This is the type of movement Howard Jarvis hoped would carry on long after his 1978 Proposition 13 revolution. In his book, I’m Mad as Hell he stated “The message of Proposition 13 and its aftermath was clear: People can collectively effect change in the public interest, if only they get mad enough, and if their anger is rational and justified. People who want to do something don’t have to wait for somebody else to lead them: Americans can do things for themselves.”
Howard knew from experience what citizens can accomplish. In 1978, anger over high taxes, especially property taxes that were forcing people from their homes, erupted in an epic battle between average taxpayers and the entrenched forces of California government, including their special interest allies and government employee unions. When the smoke had cleared, Proposition 13, which limited annual increases in property taxes and required a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to increase state taxes, passed with over 65 percent of the vote.
What’s the Matter with Wall St. & Why We Still Won’t Fix It
I want to let you in on a little secret. Once upon a time, the Wizards of Wall St. took risks with their own money and, when those risks paid off, they earned handsome rewards. Somewhere in the not too distant past, that changed to the newer model, which nearly sank the world’s financial ship in the Fall of 2008 and likely will again, unless Congress addresses the heart of the problem.
Somewhere around the time that the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed (November 12, 1999, to be precise, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliely Act) the Wizards of Wall St. had a revelation. This light bulb suddenly illuminated, as in the old comics and cartoons, greatly assisted by a major shift of graduate-student-level physicists, weary of stuyding arcane String (Superstring, Membrane, ad nauseum) theories, and math geeks, tired of not making any real money using their mental gymnastics, were looking to escape the hallowed halls of academia.
It was also made possible by the power of modern computing, featuring exponentially increasing memory storage and computing power, enabling billions of calculations in microseconds, all emanating from a computer chip the size of a postage stamp. These academic émigrés were snapped up by the Wizards of Wall St., who called them “Quants,” and set to work, sweating over hot computers, cooking up exotic financial instruments, the understanding of which lay far beyond the ken of mere mortals, to whom an algorithm is a very hard-to-spell word for some kind of math that you did not pay much attention to decades ago when somebody tried to teach it to you. “[A]n algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem using a finite sequence of instructions,” say our pals over at Wikipedia, the People’s Encyclopedia.