Just a few short months ago, Californians voted by a 24% margin for hope and change. Hope that we could create a different and better way of engaging politically, that we could change the cynicism that arises from the widely-held belief that most politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, are a bunch of crooks and liars. Hope for an environment where we could trust our leaders to put the public well-being above their own parochial interests. Hope fueled by a candidate who refused to take money from PACs and proclaimed that his White House would operate in a lobbyist-free environment.
Because the public instinctively knows that when power and money compete with the public interest, we all suffer. If you’ve ever registered voters or walked precincts for a candidate, you’ve undoubtedly been greeted with this response: "I’m not going to vote because it doesn’t matter. All politicians are the same." And as the cynicism grows, voter turnout declines and the Decline To State registration escalates -- now approximately 20% of all Californians are registered DTS. So how do we combat the innate distrust that drives a large segment of our population to disengage from political parties and even voting? Well, Obama showed us a part of the solution. But history also gives us an answer to that question in terms of what NOT to do. And we don’t have to look very far back to find a good lesson in that regard.
The year was 1994. President Clinton had a difficult time working with his Democratic majority in Congress because they often-times seemed far more interested in protecting their personal fiefdoms than in providing solutions to the problems of the day. Congressional Democrats had enjoyed a stranglehold on power for decades and had grown complacent, arrogant and corrupt. While a narrative has developed that the ’94 Republican Revolution was the result of a backlash to Clinton’s tax bill, the assault weapons ban, DADT, etc., most Democrats have elected to overlook one of the primary causes of that game-changing election.
The Democratic Party had run the House for forty years and had been plagued by a series of scandals. The Republican Party, united behind Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, which promised floor votes on various popular and institutional reforms, was able to capitalize on the perception that the House leadership was corrupt...
And capitalize, they did. Of course, the Democrats made it incredibly easy for them. They were embroiled in the House Banking Scandal, the Congressional Post Office Scandal, and the powerful Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee was on his way to jail.
The Economist’s Adrian Woodridge summed it up this way:
When a party holds power for too long, says Wooldridge, "it grows fat and happy, [and] it also grows corrupt." The classic example, he believes, is the Democratic Party of the 1970s and `80s, which, spoiled by generations of congressional power, "became a party of insiders and deal makers without any sense of the principles they stood for, and eventually collapsed" when they were turned out in 1994.
And, boy, were Democrats turned out. The number of House Democrats dropped from 258 to 204 -- a 54-seat loss and a 12-year role in the minority. But the carnage was not just confined to Congress. Consider the breadth of the rejection.
When Clinton was first elected, his party had a solid majority of fifty-seven Senate seats. In the 1994 catastrophe the number dropped to forty-seven.
[...]
The 1994 election was just as big a disaster for Democrats at the state level as at the federal level. In 1993 Democratic governors outnumbered Republicans by thirty to eighteen, with two independents. After the 1994 election the numbers flipped: thirty Republicans and nineteen Democrats.
[...]
Just ten years ago [1991] Democratic legislatures outnumbered Republican legislatures by thirty to six, with divided control in thirteen. In 2001 the lineup is seventeen Democratic to sixteen Republican, with divided control in another sixteen states.
California was not spared. In ’94, the State Assembly shed nine Democrats, going from a Democratic majority of 48-32 to a 41-39 Republican majority.
Although the Democrats in the California Assembly recovered their majority more quickly, it took a long time for the national pendulum to swing and for the public to punish Republicans for arrogance and corruption, which, by then, they had taken to an entirely new level. But that punishment, as we’ve seen, was swift and severe. And now, Democrats seem poised to ride the big blue wave into the foreseeable future – that is, as long as our Democratic leaders don’t start acting with the same hubris that destroyed the party in the early ‘90s.
So far, on the national scene, we’ve already seen former Democratic Congressman Jefferson turned out of office in LA-02 by a 3% margin in a district that has a Cook PVI of D+28. D+28. That’s how totally voters will turn against the perception of corruption. Just ask Democrats in Illinois, where Obama’s Senate seat, which should have been an easy keeper, will now be hotly contested by Republicans trying to paint a picture of an entire state party that is morally bankrupt and in disarray.
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All of which is a long-winded introduction to the subject at hand. When previously disenfranchised voters, minorities, and the young are all flocking to the Democratic Party because we represent a new way, a vision of hope and change, why on earth would we want to take a giant step backwards to the bad old days? And yet that’s exactly what Democrats in California are poised to do this April. The California Democratic Party, instead of rising to meet the challenges of a new millennium with openness and inclusion, is set to reach back to one of the oldest and most entrenched political machines in California history for its leadership.
Enter John Burton, California’s much older version of Rod Blagojevich. There are so many reasons why John Burton is unfit for the role of Party Chair in California, that I’ll be doing a series of posts, each one dedicated to a disqualifying aspect of his background. All of the material I’ll be using has been obtained through basic use of the google, and the state’s Republicans could easily find and use it against California Democrats. And trust me, they will.
At the end of this series, I think you’ll agree that John Burton is the wrong person to lead the California Democratic Party in 2009.
x-posted at BurtonWatch.blogspot.com