One opinion that unites my family – a family of newspaper people – is that you can’t trust anything you read in the New York Times. My dad writes for the Washington Post. My mom’s an editor at USA Today. My wife is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I was a staffer at the LA Times before joining the think tank. The NYT is a competitor for all of us.
But even as a Times skeptic, I was taken aback by the front page headline this morning, declaring that the passage of Prop 14 represents a "revolution" that’s likely to spread across the country, Prop 13-style. Even supporters of Prop 14 (congratulations to them, by the way) know that’s not true.
Prop 14 is actually quite modest. (I thought it far too modest-and thus a problematic distraction from the fight for real reform of California’s broken system.) Prop 14 may or may not produce more moderates in the legislature (there’s little evidence of this, given the limited data we have with Washington state’s experience with same).
And it’s highly unlikely to do much of anything to make it easier to pass responsible budgets in this state (getting rid of the two-thirds requirements for budget bills and tax increases is the way to do that). The theory behind Prop 14 doesn’t hold up-producing more moderates (particularly Democratic moderates, as a study by the Center for Governmental Studies predicts)-doesn’t change a budget system that is all but designed to produce persistent deficits and heavy borrowing.
It’s also a complete misreading of the country to think that this will spread. Unfortunately, American politics and the American public are becoming more ideological and partisan, not less so. The factors driving that polarization, particularly changes in the media, are not going to be altered by a change in California’s primary rules.
Prop 14 isn’t going to be exported. It represents the end of an era of political reform – an era devoted to trying to recapture the youthful days of baby boomers, when everyone got along and the parties cooperated more. It would be wonderful to go back to those days, but we can’t.
The future of political reform, in fact, will consist ideas and models that do the opposite of Prop 14. Instead of trying to create a larger center (as Prop 14 seeks to do), the next generation of reform will focus on remaking elections and government in ways that harness the energies and realities of today’s hyper-partisan reality in service of good government.
What sorts of things does this mean? Rules for budgeting and governance that make parties and partisans accountable when they fail. And new kinds of election models that force the parties to compete on ideas and make it easier to kick out incumbents and switch party control.