Two events this week could be harbingers for the kind of year Democrats face in California. The latest Field Poll finds that 95 percent of Californians believe we are in “bad times,” and 60 percent say their own well being has worsened over the past 12 months – since Barack Obama became president. This is not exactly “change we can believe in.”

The second event, of course, is the Massachusetts Miracle, Sen-elect Scott Brown’s triumph for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat. It has fallen like a brick on a teacup, and it has important implications for California. Could the Republicans do here what they did in Massachusetts?

To answer that, it pays to look at Massachusetts and the Brown campaign. This is the most Democratic big state in the country; more Democratic than California. The last time a Republican won a US Senate race was 37 years ago. If it could happen there, it can happen here.

But the Republicans had a remarkable candidate in Scott Brown; he was a moderate member of their legislature, pro-choice, and he ran exclusively on economic issues – the very thing the Field Poll says Californians want addressed. He campaigned hardest in working class towns like Worcester.

Politics is cyclical, and Scott Brown’s victory in last night’s special Senate election in deep-blue Massachusetts proves that 2010 will be nothing like 2008.

Since Barack Obama has taken office, the Democrats have lost control of the governor’s offices in Virginia and New Jersey, forfeited the opportunity to control the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and now the United States Senate seat previously held by Ted Kennedy.

For the Democrats, there is no nice way to spin the loss. Massachusetts does not have a single Republican House member, and the party is virtually an endangered species in the state legislature. It is not a “purple” or competitive state – Massachusetts is Democrat country, and yet the incumbent Attorney General could not win a race that should have been a walk in the park.

The party in power brought this debacle on themselves.

Any campaign press release typically should be read with many grains of salt readily available, but the latest blast from Republican Carly Fiorina’s Senate effort also should include a couple of asterisks.

Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer’s campaign fired out a release Tuesday, patting themselves on the back for raising more than $1.8 million in the quarter ending Dec. 31, their best showing of the election cycle.

Californians are writing those checks “because they understand we are fighting for the future of our state,” the senator said in the release.

Not so fast, said Team Fiorina. Those fund-raising numbers, combined with new poll numbers actually “spell storm clouds” for Boxer’s campaign.

The sky over Massachusetts is reported to have fallen last night. But California isn’t Massachusetts, and it certainly isn’t Washington, D.C., where the reverberations are being felt.

If, at a superficial level, both the Bay State and the Golden State can be labeled reliably Blue, yesterday’s outcome may bolster the hopes of California Republicans who are fueling their 2010 campaigns with the hope that their party is not destined to chronic irrelevancy.
But if you look at the size and ethnic make up of both states’ electorates, it is immediately evident that the two places have little in common politically.

Barbara Boxer, Jerry Brown and every one of California’s Democratic leaders would be well served to scrutinize the data coming out of Massachusetts, and to overlay that information on what they already know about political attitudes and trends in California. But they need to be very thoughtful about the conclusions they draw.

One little-recognized impact of this Great Recession is the hastening of California’s next retraining economy.

For years, even before the Recession, there was enormous movement, resembling Brownian motion, of California workers among jobs. In the 1990s and early 2000s when the economy was running well, and unemployment below 6%, the number of job turnovers, of hirings and separations, totaled over 40% of total employment per year in California, as elsewhere in the United States.

What has changed in the Recession is the shift from movement due to voluntary job changes (“quits” in Bureau of Labor Statistics terms) to movement due to job layoffs/discharges. Nationwide, the quit level, the measure of workers’ willingness to change jobs, was 1.8 million in September 2009, 43% lower than its peak in December 2006. At the same time, the discharge level for September 2009 was 2.1 million, 35% higher than its trough in January 2006.

Tom Campbell launched his campaign for United States Senate arguing that the fiscal deficit is the number one issue in Washington and that his background of fiscal conservatism makes him the perfect candidate to deal with the problem. One of Campbell’s rivals for the nomination, Carly Fiorina, immediately challenged Campbell’s fiscal credentials.

The Fiorina campaign put out a broadside declaring Campbell’s fiscally conservative credentials expired long ago. In his recent run for governor Campbell supported a temporary gas tax increase to help balance the state budget.

I asked Campbell about that at his Friday news conference.

Campbell said his proposal for a temporary tax increase was a pragmatic, responsible approach to California’s budget problem. He said his overall proposal for the state budget was to cut three dollars of spending for every dollar of tax increase.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week tagged Rep. Dan Lungren as one of its prime targets in November, but the former GOP candidate for governor probably has more to fear from the state Legislature than from the voters in the Third Congressional District.

If Lungren does survive the election, look for the Democrat-controlled Legislature to paint a bulls-eye on his back in the redistricting that will follow this year’s census, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looking on approvingly.

Complaints – along with outright threats – from Pelosi and other California congressional leaders convinced backers of the Prop. 11 redistricting reform measure in 2008 to leave the congressional seats out of the initiative.

That means that while a pointedly non-political citizens’ commission will draw the new district lines for state legislators, it’s back to the same partisan drawing board when it comes to Congress.

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, a Republican appointee who is presiding over the trial in the federal legal challenge to Prop 8, has been asking lawyers and witnesses versions of the same question, over and over again. Why is the state involved in sanctioning marriages anyway?

These queries, which seem to spring from a libertarian perspective, might seem harmless, and suggest the judge is sympathetic to the cause of marriage equality. But the judge’s questions should make supporters of same-sex marriage nervous.

It’s because the judge is trumpeting one of the most frivolous – and thus dangerous – ideas in the debate over same-sex marriage. Let’s just take the government out of the marriage business.

This is a bad idea for two reasons. First, marriage is both a private and a public institution, with a long history. It’s a tradition at the center of family life, and thus a lot of law. Upending that would create change and turmoil that goes far beyond same-sex marriage. As such, to decouple the government from marriage is a radical notion. Legalizing same-sex marriage, in contrast, isn’t particularly radical at all. It extends marriage, with all history and traditions, to a small percentage of the population.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the major candidates for governor were asked to answer a single question: How would you deal with California’s budget problems?

Republican Steve Poizner: “Cut taxes and freeze spending.”

Republican Meg Whitman: “Rein in state spending and fire 40,000 government workers.”

Democrat Jerry Brown: “Well, since I’m not an official candidate for governor at this point …”

That answer’s getting old. There’s no one in the state, including the guy sitting in the attorney general’s office in Oakland, who isn’t convinced that Jerry Brown is running for governor.

Sure, the campaign account in the secretary of state’s office is called “Brown for Governor 2010 Exploratory Committee,” but any “exploratory” questions about a run for governor were answered long before Brown set up that committee last September. He told KGO radio in San Francisco Thursday that he has about $12.5 million in the bank for the race, which is a mighty official sounding pile of cash.