Draft Gross for Governor
It’s been a theme of this column that the current contest for California governor is a Seinfeld campaign. The three leading candidates – two Republicans and one Democrat – aren’t addressing the profound questions posed by the state’s fundamental and crippling governmental dysfunction. They’re offering personal attacks when they should be talking about how to rescue California from its current crisis.
So, is there a better choice out there?
Probably not. The system itself is so broken that a governor has such limited power – particularly in fiscal matters, which require two-thirds votes – that the state’s future is likely to be roughly the same no matter who wins the election.
That future is bleak: more and more waves of budget cuts that hurt important institutions such as the university system, more accounting gimmicks to paper over persistent deficits, and more borrowing. Debt service is already the fastest-rising part of the budget. The next governor, whether he or she wants to or not, will be managing debt and decline.
When you look at that unhappy reality, I can think of one person in the state best suited for that kind of job: Bill Gross.
We Love You, Arizona
When you get beyond the anger and the calls for boycotts and the real possibility of major civil rights violations, the new Arizona law on immigration really is a good thing.
It gives so many different people what they want. Republicans can use the law to appeal to their anti-immigrant base. Democrats can use the law to appeal to try to drum up Latino turnout at the polls.
And best of all, Californians can look to another state with a sense of superiority.
We don’t get enough chances to do that these days.
Feeling bad about the California budget? Arizona’s budget, in percentage terms is in much worse shape than ours.
Whitman Trails Poizner by 26 Points!
There’s the old math, there’s the new math, and then there’s California Republican gubernatorial primary math.
So if you read Steve Poizner campaign chair Jim Brulte’s April 23 memo to supporters of the state insurance commissioner’s gubernatorial campaign, you’d learn where this race really stands:
Poizner’s got this primary in the bag.
The Seinfeld Campaign and Goldman Sachs
Since California doesn’t have any governance problems that require action or merit discussion, isn’t it nice that the race for governor is focused on the question of: who is more tied to Goldman Sachs?
The answer to that is easy: Meg Whitman was on the board and got favorable treatment in IPOs. But I’ve been reluctant to weigh in. Like everyone else, I have so many conflicts of interest that I wonder if I too am a Goldman stooge. A close friend works for Goldman. Another friend did a real estate deal with some Goldman guys. The co-author of my new book is a former shareholder. One of my first editors at the Baltimore Sun has edited terrific stories for McClatchy’s Washington bureau that have exposed Goldman’s bad dealings. And Goldman is my fellow creditor in a bankruptcy fight over my former employer, the Tribune Company.
Plus, as an American taxpayer, my money was used to help save Goldman.
Why Brown Should Drop the Debate Demand
If you read the newspapers or the state’s political bloggers, you might think that Jerry Brown’s demand for a debate with the two GOP gubernatorial contenders was a strategic masterstroke.
The verdict was nearly unanimous. The LA Times and Contra Costa Times gave Brown’s demand, made during a high-profile speech last weekend to the California Democratic Party convention, favorable coverage. Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle gave Brown an award for “Best headline-grab,” arguing that the once and perhaps future governor “tossed off a savvy political punch and dominated the news cycle, while delighting his base.” And the journalistic wise men at Calbuzz scored it “a shrewd tactical win-win” for Brown.
This was an honest-to-goodness consensus: Brown had fired up Democrats at the convention, won the news cycle, and helped buck up underdog Steve Poizner, who could do more damage to Brown’s likely general election opponent, Meg Whitman. Brown himself seems to agree. His campaign has spent the week reviving the demand, and trying to make an issue of Meg Whitman’s quick refusal to accept the challenge.
Just for fun, let’s lob a contrarian grenade into the journalist-Brown love nest.
Brown’s debate demand is a significant mistake, in two ways.
When $2000 Is Cheaper Than $200
The Assembly recently passed legislation that, over a six year period, would raise the current $200 fee for filing ballot initiatives at the attorney general’s office up to $2000.
The legislation addresses two real and related problems, but in a way that reinforces the worst features of the state’s initiative process.
Those two problems? The first is administrative cost. The current $200 fee doesn’t begin to cover the administrative time and effort necessary to review such measures and give them an official title and summary. Effectively, the low fee is a state subsidy to initiative sponsors. Establishing a higher fee is an attempt to cover more of the administrative costs.
The second is the proliferation of ballot initiatives. More than 100 initiatives were filed with the AG’s office last year, but only a handful of those have qualified for the ballot. What’s driving all that filing? For one thing, the low fee represents a very cheap way for a Californian to get attention for an idea however wacky (Consider the initiative filed on Christmas music last year). The other is that initiative sponsors, because of strict California rules that make it nearly impossible to amend measures once they have been filed, are filing multiple versions of the same measure to cover their bases.
The Redistricting Commission Won’t Stop Calling
Let me begin by reassuring my wife and family: I am not
having an affair with Elaine Howle.
But I can hardly blame my wife if
she’s suspicious. Howle, the state auditor, and her office have been emailing
me daily for weeks. Over the last week, the obsessive phone calls have started,
wondering where I am and if I’m thinking about what she’s asked me to do.
Howle is in charge of the process
of selecting the new redistricting commission, created by Prop 11, to draw
state legislative district lines next year. And next Monday, April 19, is the
second-round application deadline for anyone who wants to be on the
redistricting commission. I know this because the calls and emails reminding me
of the deadline – and my failure to meet it – never stop.
At first, these missives were
helpful-they referred me to workshops and organizations that would help me
complete the application. But in recent days, the tone has grown more urgent,
more pleading – part doctor’s office wondering why you won’t call for the test
results, part over-caffeinated professor who thinks you’re going to turn the
paper in late again.
Brown, Black Holes and the Chamber Ad
Every time I read about the Large Hadron Collider, the huge new particle accelerator in Switzerland where they’re crashing protons together to make black holes so physicists can learn more about the nature of the universe, I think of Jerry Brown.
And not merely because of his interest in advanced technology. Brown is capable of creating vacuums all by himself.
The latest exhibit is the Chamber of Commerce’s now-withdrawn ad about Brown’s first governorship. Now let’s be clear: the ad was fundamentally dishonest. It criticized Brown for opposing Prop 13 but then blamed him for big increases in state spending and a state deficit that were the direct result of Prop 13. The chamber should have picked a lane.
But – and this is a big but – there was no small measure of justice in this injustice to the Brown campaign. The fact that Jerry Brown can be attacked this way is Jerry Brown’s fault.
Kafka on the Margins: Electronic Sigs Suffer a Setback In Court
San Mateo County Superior Court Judge George Miram this week ruled invalid the first electronic signature submitted on an initiative petition.
It’s an important ruling and not unexpected – but nevertheless it’s a setback for those of us who hope that electronic signatures might make registering voters and qualifying initiative petitions cheaper, and thus give more power to individuals and organizations that don’t have deep pockets.
What was Miram’s problem with the signature submitted by Michael Ni, founder of a Silicon Valley company that developed a technology that, it claims, allows voters to sign their names securely on their smart phones?
According to his four-page ruling, Miram’s problem wasn’t so much with the signature as it was with the nature of the electronic copy of the petition on which Ni signed his name.
One was technical. Noting that the election code requires a one-inch margin for initiative petitions, Miram found that the electronic petition that Ni signed with his iPhone was invalid because it didn’t have such margins.
Europe Embraces Electronic Signature Gathering While We Fight It
Leading California politicians and unions are fighting electronic signature gathering here. This week, the European Union embraced it.
The occasion was the announcement of legislation to implement a new citizen’s initiative process for the 27 members states of the EU. The ECI, or European Citizen’s Initiative, was part of the new European constitution approved last December. This isn’t a ballot initiative, though it may be a precursor to one. This initiative process allows citizens, by gathering 1 million signature across 9 different states of the EU, to introduce legislation for the continent. That puts the people on par with the member state governments and the European Commission (the EU’s executive body), which currently are the only two entities that can introduce legislation.
The news here are the choices the Europeans appear to be making about how to structure the new signature gathering process. In almost every way, their process represents a vast improvement on what we have in California. Consider just two features: