Harris Win Reflects a New Generation of Voters
Kamala Harris’s upset victory in the attorney general’s race not only completed a sweep of statewide offices for the Democrats, it also put an exclamation point to the political change in California over the last generation.
In the California of a quarter century ago, no candidate for attorney general opposed to the death penalty, criticized by police in her hometown, with hardly any endorsements from the police or district attorneys around the state, would have a prayer of winning.
Yet, Harris won and will be California’s next attorney general. Part of her victory can be attributed to the solid wave of Democratic support that engulfed all the California political races. And, that Democratic wave can, in part, be attributed to a different California electorate that created “Reagan Country” of three decades ago.
One of the ubiquitous political posters during Ronald Reagan’s run for the presidency had a portrait of the former California governor superimposed over an outline of the Golden State with the phrase, “Reagan Country” printed on the poster.
Will Republicans matter in the Legislature?
Has the Republican minority in the Legislature been
driven into irrelevance by the passage of Proposition 25? It has – if you
believe the pundits and politicians, who have marked the advent of a
new age of majoritarianism.
After all, starting now, the Legislature may pass a budget bill and any
spending bill identified in the budget with a simple majority vote. It may pass
with a majority vote any substantive bill that implements the state budget and
that takes effect immediately (which incidentally immunizes that bill from a
citizen referendum). And any regular statute may be passed, as before, by a
simple majority vote.
So where can legislative Republicans find their
influence, now that these levers of governance are operated exclusively by
Democrats? I can think of four opportunities.
The Madman (and His Son) that Roared
Like the proverbial spoiled child, North Korea has taken to having regular tantrums when it seems that the rest of the world is not paying enough attention. Following the ‘bad boy’ syndrome that negative attention is better than being entirely ignored, quite recently, we have seen a few strange and bold moves by North Korea in yet another attempt to provoke.
First, American scientists observed, or were shown (it is not clear) a previously unknown North Korean facility which had ‘thousands’ of centrifuges spinning away – capability to produce a whole nuclear arsenal. More recently even, North Korea attacked a small island occupied by South Korea, which the Madman Dictator claims, when not watching John Wayne in his favorite western movies. Several people, both military and civilian, died.
Earlier, North Korea repeatedly tested missiles and nukes, including a missile fly-over of Japan, and actually sank a South Korean vessel. Clearly, the days of occasional skirmishes across the DMZ are over and troubling days in that part of the world have begun anew. For anybody unfamiliar with the Korean War, which never officially ended, David Halberstam’s last book, The Coldest Winter, possibly his best of all, tells the whole brutal story in great, and moving, detail.