Obama or McCain, California is still in trouble

When I moved to California in 1988 I had this notion that it never rains, and sure enough it didn’t rain from the date I arrived (June 1) through November. In fact we were in a drought. To paraphrase Spock sometimes having is not as good as wanting.

It has always bothered me that the state does not have an effective form of government, where budgets require a 2/3 majority and the initiative process delivers generally cruddy legislation (cf, Props 1a, 5, 13, 99, 187, etc). My favorite was SF Proposition BB in 1993 when Officer Bob Geary managed to garner enough signatures for this lovely question, “Shall it be the policy of the people of San Francisco to allow Police Officer Bob Geary to decide when he may use his puppet Brendan O’Smarty while on duty?” And he won.

I grew up in a state where an honest politician stayed bought (NJ), but our roads and bridges were maintained and our school systems remained relatively competitive. In the meantime, California’s infrastructure degraded at a time of great prosperity, where people invested in their SUVs, Wiis, and wide screen TVs (not to mention prisons), with only a modest break when Grey Davis (who otherwise was quite awful) drove resources into the schools.

Now with California having the highest foreclosure rate in the country we already see the crisis of municipalities cutting services, and schools are next in line. My friends in Asia think the U.S. is finished. They think that our reputation is so tarnished, and our finances so wrecked, that we will not recover in our lifetimes. They may be right.

While Obama or McCain might be able to fix our reputation, no matter who wins tonight, California, the 5th largest economy in the world, cannot expect the federal government to fix the above messes that Californian citizens made. Whether Prop 8 passes is absolutely insignificant compared to what has to happen to get things on the right track. To me that includes an overhaul of the taxing policies, review of how we fund our schools, opportunistic use of emminant domain to fix public transportation and power distribution, and most of all, a fix to the initiative system, which should be a last resort, and one that requires a super-majority to prevail.

So sure! Get out and vote. But then think about real change in California. It will take a lot of work.

Electoral Differences between McCain and Bush

Why is it that John McCain picked Sarah Palin? The answer lies in how George W. Bush won the presidency. President Bush jumped on a wave of conservative ire aimed at the Democratic Party and President Clinton on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. By driving a convincing message that he would realize the conservative agenda, Bush energized the huge electoral machine of right wing moralists. This shifted the field to the right, and required VP Gore to play a more moderate game than he would have otherwise played, and it just did not ring true to anyone. Bush didn’t really play to the moderates, except to be some sort of compassionate conservative.

McCain argues that he is a moderate, and so he should have played to them. Instead, he tried to play President Bush’s game of driving to the right after the primary was won. The New York Times recently had an article that compares the campaigns to the faux campaigns found in the last two seasons of West Wing. In that series, at one point it is argued that the Republican candidate (Vinick) could wiin ALL fifty states by expanding the moderate base of his party. This is what McCain could have tried to do, but it is not what he did. Instead, he attempted to play to both bases, and he argued neither convincingly. By bringing in Sarah Palin he alienated the center. And it wasn’t enough to sooth the right.

There was no way that George Bush’s strategy would work for John McCain. McCain is also the victim of bad timing, with regard to the economy, an issue about which the public as blamed the Republicans nearly exclusively. Barack Obama, merely has to mention the economy and McCain’s ratings drop. That is vaguely reminiscient of President Clinton’s old slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Were it only the economy, perhaps McCain could have survived. However, the War on Terror also looms like an albatross around the neck of Republicans. People are sick of it. Finally.

And so, before Democrats start to crow too loudly, one should point out that neither of these two problems, the economy or our current geopolitical environment, are simple problems, and both will require serious consideration and absense of hubris to repair.

The Case of the Missing President

I had been wondering what had happened to President Bush. Here is a man who is clearly self-aware enough to not engage in campaigning, knowing that not only does he have no coat tails, but that his presence actually does harm in some places. This is vaguely reminiscient of what happened to President Clinton at the end of his term. At the time there was a lot of talk about how VP Gore did not use the president effectively. That same conversation is now occuring with regard to Mssrs McCain and Bush, as the New York Times reports.

Past Political Themes: Compassionate Conservative

Some time ago – in fact just over eight years ago, Governor George W. Bush started describing himself as a “compassionate conservative”. Here’s the question: what was so compassionate about this president? Did he actually help the poorest members of society? Did he help those who were most disenfranchised? I see no evidence of his doing so. Perhaps it is unfair to judge him in this light given that he now seemingly defines his presidency as how he responded to the attacks on September 11th. Or perhaps we should simply not speak ill of the lame duck, not because it’s in bad taste but simply because it is not worth our time. But feel free if you like.

Update: Obama now up by 14

This according to a new CBS/New York Times poll. Why? For the precise reasons I’ve been writing: McCain has managed to dirty himself with the mud he and his running mate have been throwing. The funny thing is that the mud just keeps on coming. The next trick will be a new message from the McCain campaign. We call that “too little too late”.

Now some people are talking about The So-Called “Bradley Effect”, where Tom Bradley ran against George Deukmejian for California Governor and peaked too early and lost. This should not be confused with the Tom Bradley Blunder of the Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool. In the case of the Bradley Blunder, one of the invitational entrants mysteriously requested that Tom Bradley’s name be struck from her list of people to die. It later emerged that she had met the former mayer of Los Angeles and liked him. The lesson: never meet people who you bet money will die.