California is infamous throughout the world for more than just its gorgeous vistas, great wine and long-established reputation for vice. It’s a renowned refuge for the kind of laughable, stupid state government that makes third-world countries and red states alike look to us and chuckle. We may have the best weather in the country, but, at the end of the day, we’re also stupid enough to elect people as vapid and intellectually bankrupt as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger to the highest managerial positions in the state.
The long-standing wars of attrition over the state budget are proof positive of this. Essentially, each budget cycle sees the same scenario repeated. The Democrats in the state legislature basically run around like headless chickens, attempting to curry enough favor with the state’s highly conservative Republicans in order to satisfy the state’s insane two-thirds majority vote requirement for tax increases and state budgets.
Meanwhile, Governor Schwarzenegger, no doubt disconnected with his massive unpopularity, sets himself to the task of biting chunks out of education, public programs and anything else that isn’t attached to business. His latest budget proposal, for example, would include massive cuts to the state’s In Home Supportive Services Program, costing the state jobs and many Californians a much-needed service, while taking inadequate action to raise revenue through necessary tax increases.
In any case, California gets what California deserves. A state as politically schizophrenic as it is, as subject to the whims, manipulations, competing interests, vicissitudes and vacillations of its geographically, ideologically and economically diverse population is bound to become entrenched in political gridlock. California’s open referendum system has exacerbated this situation, contributing to the creation of a contorted mish-mash of regulations that make the business of governance practically impossible. It has also made California’s Constitution one of the longest and most serpentine in the world.
Add to that mix a tendency toward electing incompetents into office (such as Mr. Schwarzenegger, who has always been better suited to the business of flexing and mangling dialogue than to the task of governing) and you get a state government that consistently sinks into political warfare, that runs up massive deficits while cutting funding for education and public programs, thus both crippling itself today and ensuring its paralysis in the future.
Part of the problem is the the state’s hugeness and preeminence. Bride at the wedding, corpse at the funeral and baby at the christening, the state is a perennial testing ground for both good ideas and catastrophic ones. Birthplace of the tech boom, it was also the chief testing ground for the sub-prime mortgage.
Meanwhile, its political culture—breeding ideologically-bankrupt and principle-compromising Democrats and out-of-the-mainstream Republicans who are given unrepresentative power in the legislature—has always been substandard. The Californian presidents- Hoover, Nixon, and Reagan- have all presided over ineffectual administrations and deflated economies. Moreover, California’s recent governors have all been politically hazy and ideologically vague. They’ve proved over and over again the depths down to which political expediency and inaction can pull an economy and government.
The coming months offer Californians an opportunity to reverse this, to reject the culture of political shallowness and ineffectuality that has gripped the state for decades.
On the one hand, they can fall for Republican Meg Whitman’s slick sales pitch, bowing before the massive campaign funding that the billionaire candidate and former eBay CEO is bankrolling. They can choose her for the state’s chief executive and replace the unqualified, elitist and dishonest Schwarzenegger with someone worthy to be his heir. On the other hand, they can go with someone with actual workable, progressive opinions that reflect the mainstream of the state and can promise real solutions to the majority of Californians. Jerry Brown, for all his faults, is the man that best fits that bill.
Whatever the choice in the fall elections, California must move toward reform in coming months.
UC Riverside Highlander Newspaper > News
California the stupid: A Golden State of dysfunction
Published: Monday, May 3, 2010
Updated: Monday, May 3, 2010 15:05
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