That Goes Boom #3: California Seeks Electoral Irrelevance

For decades, California’s ballot initiative system has been the blind three-legged pet dog of American democracy. It’s cute, and you feel sorry for it, but it walks into walls and glass doors, can’t go where other dogs can, and every once in a while it craps all over itself and embarrasses everyone.

First, it was Prop 13 in 1978. What was supposedly a way to prevent sky-rocketing home values from financially crippling fixed-income and second-generation homeowners, was actually the first step to undermining the fiscal integrity of state governments. Its passage in California led to a taxpayer revolt, nationwide. So now we have deficit-spending as a fact of life, both at federal and state levels. State legislatures now have to choose between begging the voters for a tax increase to simply keep up with inflation, or just raise tuition rates at state schools.

Next, it was Prop 38, an attempt to keep Spanish-speaking voters from being able to vote by printing election materials in English only. This passed, as did the famous Prop 187 to restrict state services form illegal immigrants. Combine these two facts and we know that either; a) Spanish-speaking voters are a statistical irrelevance in the Hispanic population, otherwise they’d have shown up to defend themselves, or b) California is a lot more bigoted than their arrogant criticisms of the South would let on.

And of course, there was the Gubernatorial Recall of 2003 that made California’s electoral system seem more like the bar scene from Star Wars. All year, most of us were just waiting for Obewon to come in and thin the herd.

And that’s just their ballot initiative system at work. They’ve elected two actors to be Governor, one was a snitch during the McCarthy era, and the other’s a philandering Nazi-descendant. They elect car thieves (Darrell Issa), closeted mouthpieces (David Dreier) and the weaker half of Sonny and Cher (Sonny Bono) to represent them in Washington.

They put a guy in charge of San Francisco, the one city where it’s possible for gay rights to be pushed on a national level, who had the political seasoning of a 5th-grader running for student council because he was endorsed by both major parties, and still barely beat the Green Party candidate. Then, instead of being smart and coordinating a gay-marriage movement with people who know what they’re doing, he opens the doors to city hall and holds a costume party outside. By the time the national media had gotten done sensationalizing the issue, Gavin Newsom had personally turned hundreds of thousands of voters across America, many of them religious African-American’s, against the party just in time to help Bush take Ohio in 2004.

Now, California seems to be supportive, and I know it’s over a year away, of splitting their electoral delegates along congressional district votes. That would’ve meant that in 2004, Kerry would’ve gotten 33 votes, and Bush would’ve gotten 22. If you figure a net-gain, for a 10-point win, of 11 electoral votes, California becomes only as important to candidates as Washington, Missouri, or Tennessee. And that’s only if you can win by 10 points. In a close election, California becomes Wyoming.

This is annoying for two reasons. One, California’s obvious arrogance, with Hollywood money pushing socially liberal issues that have politically hurt a message of economic populism and ending the war, is about to screw the entire country on a very regular basis. The only time Californian’s vote together is when a Californian runs for office. I’m sorry, but the two biggest bastards, Nixon and Reagan, in the last half of the 20th century came from California, and I don’t want to know who else they’ve in store for us (please God, no Arnold for President).

Two, they’re going to turn themselves into the electoral equivalent of a bonus round. The fifth-largest economy in the world will be completely ignored by every general-election presidential candidate from that day forward. They had a chance, with Prop 77, to remove gerrymandering from their political process and take a step towards better democracy. They didn’t take it. But now, they think they’re going to make themselves more pure by turning a win in California into a quarter you find on the sidewalk; serendipity, nothing to go out looking for.

To be completely honest, I’d rather have the Democratic Party completely ignore California altogether, and focus on the needs of Middle America. The loudmouth nonsense that the left coast produces reminds of how I feel every time I’m in Boulder, Colorado. Everyone there seems really liberal, what with the pot and promiscuity. But do anything that affects property value or taxes, or show a white girl with a black guy, and suddenly everyone’s turning their Che Gueverra t-shirts inside out and putting up “Musgrave for Governor” signs.