Author: Joel Fox

An interesting editorial in the Los
Angeles Times yesterday in which the Times editorial board charged that the
Steve Cooley for Attorney General campaign boasted about an earlier negative
Times editorial on Cooley under the assumption that if the Times says Cooley is
bad, he must be okay.

All the hammering the mainstream media has received over the
last couple of decades, certainly some justified, has set up a scenario for
many readers that if a newspaper says one thing, believe the opposite. 

Yesterday’s Times editorial recognized the inherent
contradiction in trying to analyze the motives of this reverse psychology:

Tony Quinn argued here yesterday that Steve Poizner‘s campaign was wrong in tying itself to Congressman Tom McClintock because McClintock’s philosophy has failed to win him a statewide race in four attempts.

The Steve Poizner of today is not the same Steve Poizner of yesterday. That may not necessarily be a bad thing depending on why Poizner changed directions. As Benjamin Franklin said after the Constitutional Convention, he changed opinions even on important subjects with “better information and fuller consideration.” However, the Tom McClintock of today is the Tom McClintock of yesterday and that consistency throughout his public life and has set him up as a measuring stick for others to stand by.

McClintock’s conservative line may not move the majority or be enough to capture statewide elections from an electorate that may not want to take bitter medicine, but his analysis of fiscal issues very often has been right on the mark. Remember too, that a couple of his statewide electoral efforts went into overtime, with the final count declaring his opponent victorious coming days after all the other elections on the ballot were decided.

Here’s something beer and politics have in common — an endless debate over what’s most important in their product. For those of you who remember the two decade long advertising campaign for Miller Lite beer, the question argued was the beer was good because of “Great Taste” or because the brew was “Less Filling!” In politics you hear the debate centered around whether a candidate must be faithful to a party’s perceived principles or be centrist enough to get elected.

What brings this to mind was a couple of questions from the recent USC/L.A. Times poll that caught my attention. The questions dealt with which kind of candidate the Republican Party should put forward. Should the standard bearer be a conservative who can rally the base? Or should he or she be more centrist to capture crossover voters from the Democrats and Independents?

The pollsters found that registered Republicans and unaffiliated voters who said they would vote Republican were fairly evenly divided on the question. These voters were asked whether it was important that the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator or Governor be a “true conservative.”

While the Jerry Brown campaign was successful in pressuring the California Chamber of Commerce to pull the Issue Advocacy ad off the air, one thing the campaign won’t be able to do is have the issues raised by the Chamber go away.

A Brown campaign spokesman called the ad “misleading,” but the facts are clear that Jerry Brown campaigned against Proposition 13 and left the state in deficit. Those issues will come back via other vehicles.

Brown’s position on Prop 13 now is: I was against it before I was for it and now I don’t want to talk about it.

Can he maintain that position through Election Day in November?

Business must be heard on the important issues in this upcoming crucial gubernatorial election. The public employee unions rushed into the fray months ago creating Independent Expenditures, eagerly responding to Democratic candidate Jerry Brown’s request that the unions attack his opponent on issues. The California Chamber of Commerce was right to begin laying the framework for a debate on important issues by advocating on one of the chief concerns business will face under a Brown administration: Taxes and spending.

The Chamber’s issue advocacy television ad campaign comes months after public employee unions established their efforts to badger Republican frontrunner Meg Whitman. Brown has urged them to do more.

Jobs and the economy are major concerns for the voters in this election cycle and the business community has an obligation to step into the hurly-burly of politics and inform the voters on issues such as taxes and spending that will endanger economic recovery and job growth.

The effort to do away with the two-thirds vote to raise taxes has been camouflaged with an argument that “democracy” must be served by applying a majority vote to all state revenue issues. UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff’s initiative to lower the two-thirds vote to majority rests on this argument.

No one is fooled. The attempt to remove the two-thirds vote IS about taxes.

Lakoff’s first initiative effort will not have the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. He has filed a new initiative hoping to get a different title and summary out of the attorney general’s office. The first initiative title and summary told potential petition signers what the initiative was all about: “Changes Legislative Vote Requirement to Pass a Budget or Raise Taxes from Two-Thirds to a Simple Majority.”

Lakoff argued in the Huffington Post that taxes should not be mentioned in the title and summary because the measure is simply about setting up a democratic majority vote for legislative acts. Further, he argued that most people would not face taxes anyway because: “No one in the legislature wants to raise taxes on most voters.”

Yesterday, a study issued by Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research declared that California faces a state pension liability of a half-a-trillion dollars. The study’s title, “Going for Broke,” tells you all you need to know about the dire situation the state faces with unfunded pension obligations.

David Crane, the governor’s special advisor on jobs and the economy spelled out the pressure the pension problem will put on general fund spending in today’s Los Angeles Times. Crane argues the lack of reform on pensions rests with a legislature that is controlled by public employee unions. As Crane puts it, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, “Instead of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we have become a government of its employees, by its employees and for its employees.”

Crane traces the political takeover by the unions to the Dill Act signed by Governor Jerry Brown in 1978 giving the public unions collective bargaining. As the unions power over the legislature has grown the concern is reform on the pension front will be more and more difficult to accomplish.

The USC/L.A. Times health care poll released over the weekend could prove the oft-stated observation that a poll represents only a “snapshot in time.” The poll indicates that, unlike other regions of the country, Californians are in favor of the health care reforms recently signed into law by the president. By a 46%-29% margin poll respondents said they would vote for a congress member who voted for the bill.

However, from comments made by those polled it appears people like the “idea” of health care reform, even if they don’t know how this particular reform package will play out.

One respondent told the Times that he did not understand the mechanics of the bill but was positive toward it because: “I just know we have an issue with healthcare. To see something being done about it makes me happy.”

Some who have taken a closer look at the reform package have come to a different conclusion, but the question we are exploring here is will the favorable attitude represented in the poll hold?

When it comes to oil, California is the new Nebraska

The Obama administration thinks that off shore oil drilling is important to meet America’s energy needs. However, it is only important enough to open up underwater oil fields off the southern Atlantic coast, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. California and the West Coast states are treated differently where off shore oil drilling is still prohibited.

Guess this continues the Washington trend of cutting political deals to move the ball on big issues. California, Washington and Oregon fall into the same class as Nebraska. Recall in the heated healthcare debate Nebraska was given concessions to secure a crucial congressional vote.

In the case of California, the administration is not so much after the votes of senators or congress members but to help keep the biggest bundle of electoral votes in the president’s corner.