If you're a Californian, you really ought to be reading Calitics (run by people like dday, eugene, thereisnospoon, and hekebolos) about tomorrow's elections, especially if you live in CA-32. In case you don't, I want to bring my perspective (which differs slightly from theirs) to this larger audience.
CA-32:
First, on CA-32 (where admittedly I do not reside), Labor Secretary Hilda Solis's old seat. Calitics's position is "Anyone But Assembleyman Gil Cedillo," based largely on his vicious (and I'd even say in a weird way racist) attacks on Board of Equalization Member Judy Chu (his main rival) and 26-year-old Obama Transition Team member Emanuel Pleitez (his main competition from the Latino community.)
The latter attack is something that all young members of this site, especially those who have Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, or other similar pages should be aware of. Cedillo snarfed all sorts of photos of Pleitez in bars, hanging out with pretty young women (most of them Caucasian or Black), and turned them into a character attack.
I don't know what the proper response is to managing one's Facebook page if one has political ambitions, but I know what the proper response is as a voter to a candidate who tries to misuse someone else's Facebook page to defeat him: vote for the person who can beat him. In this case, that clearly appears to be Judy Chu. Having seen how he has run this election, I don't want to see Cedillo in Congress (unless he comes down here and runs against one of the Republican rotters we have in Orange County, in which event he can be as nasty as he wants to be.)
Propositions 1A-1F:
I have made a short tour of local Democratic clubs in the past couple of weeks debating Proposition 1A with the state Democratic Party's Director for Region 16, John Smith, a guy who I didn't like very much a year ago when we were on opposite sides of the Obama-Clinton divide but with whom I now get along pretty well. After I requested to be heard giving the opposition arguments for these propositions, he was gracious enough to agree to include me in a full debate.
For the record, these are my summaries of Propositions 1A-1F, the package worked out between the Governor, the leaders of the Democratic Party, and those few Republicans who crossed over to support the state budget and end a half-year of impasse. (For 1C-1F, I include as much discussion as I plan to provide in these summaries):
Prop 1A would extend some temporary taxes from two years to four years, would establish mandatory restrictions on state spending (which Democratic opponents and Republican proponents call a "hard spending cap," a term that their opposites in both parties dispute), would give the Governor permanently enhanced powers to made unilateral midterm cuts in areas of the state budget (notably public education), and various other things. It's a complicated bill, hammered out in the dead of night, etc., that represented what California Democratic Party leaders say is the best compromise they could get with the Republicans who, despite having only three more seats than 1/3 of each house, can use the state laws against passing a budget or tax increases with less than a 2/3 margin to block the process.
Prop 1B would give money -- money that is already owed -- to the schools /contingent on the passage of Prop 1A. Tying this to 1A, to make schools grovel for money they are already due, is blatant political extortion. If Prop 1B passes while Prop 1A fails -- my preferred outcome -- it has no effect beyond symbolism.
Prop 1C would allow the state to securitize -- create a financial instrument in which people could invest now -- future profits from the California lottery, with the state being on the hook for any shortfall in lottery sales. Calitics has a long discussion on this; I oppose states getting revenues from any lottery for which they advertise -- I can grudgingly accept an Innumeracy Tax, but I can't accept spending tax dollars to promote Innumeracy -- so I oppose this on that grounds. Otherwise, I might support it.
Prop 1D would take money from certain areas where voters have mandated that it be spent on children's education and move it into the General Fund. I agree with the Calitics argument against it.
Prop 1E does the same with services for the mentally ill that have previously received dedicated financing by law after voter initiatives. Again, I'm with Calitics on this.
Prop 1F would prevent lawmakers from receiving COLAs or any other increase in compensation in a deficit year. I oppose this because it will simply make it harder for good people without substantial means to engage in politics. Symbolically, it's poweful; substantively, it's foolish -- and it disproportionately hurts Democrats. (The Democratic Party convention voted for it because it's the only one of these six initiatives that appears likely to pass and delegates didn't want the Party to appear to be on the opposite side of the voters on such a popular measure. (Sigh.)
Like many others here (mostly from the Calitics crowd), I was a delegate to last month's California Democracy Party convention, where we voted on whether to endorse Propositions 1A-1F, the package worked out between the Governor, the leaders of the Democratic Party, and those few Republicans who crossed over to support the state budget. The party only endorses with a 60% vote. They got 50% for each of these measures, but on the most important one, Prop 1A, they missed that threshold by 22 votes, thanks largely to the efforts of the Calitics crew and the overlapping Courage Campaign. (To see where and how not having that endosement makes a difference in campaign literaure, check out thereisnospoon's Calitics diary comparing literature for (endorsed) Prop 1C with that for Prop 1A. Wow.) Calitics endorses "no" votes on all six propositions. The Party endorses "yes" votes on 1B, 1C, and 1F and makes no recommendation on the others; John Smith favors 1A through 1E and opposes 1F. I go along with Calitics except on Prop 1B, which I support.
I support 1B for two major reasons: (1) predictions from the polls notwithstanding, 1A might somehow pass, and if it does, I certainly want 1B to have passed as well, and (2) once 1A-1E fail, as seems likely, the argument will begin over why they failed -- was it the tax increases (as the many Republican opponents would have it) or something else, like the spending limitations, enhanced Gubernatorial powers, etc.? To me, the gap between 1A and 1B -- ideally, with 1B passing, albeit to no effect -- will show that voters were not afraid of raising and spending money but rather didn't like the chicanery of 1A. I'm not inclined to argue the point much; I just like the message that "1B passes, 1A fails" sends more than the message where both fail.
Before getting to the central issue of dispute tomorrow, Prop 1A, I want to say a few things that deviate most strongly from the line I see my friends at Calitics taking.
I don't think that this is an obvious or easy vote. I also don't think that there are villains here, among party Democrats, pretty much all of whom want to get rid of the blasted "2/3" requirements (which, translating that as ".666," I like to call "The Margin of the Beast") and pass a state budget that does none of these things. It defies common sense that Democrats could hold 65% of the Legislature and still not be able to push through a budget -- yet that, in truth, is where we are, thanks to years of faux-populist anti-tax initiatives. (We have got to reform the initiative system, too.) Asked to cut the baby (here a metaphor for government services) in half, Republicans are happy to say "go ahead"; they don't like the baby anyway. So, for structural reasons, the Democrats are in a worse position when it comes to negotiation (and, without the 2/3 tax requirement being eliminated, would be in hard shape even with a Democratic Governor and the 2/3 budget requirement gone.)
So, our legislative leaders -- good people like Karen Bass and Darryl Steinberg -- say that they gave it their best shot and that this was they best they could do. They're probably right that, in these negotiations, this was the best they could do. And they worry that if these initiaties go down, the next best deal will inevitably be worse, because the Republicans who compromised are already being hounded out of the GOP. (To me, though, this should make them more likely to compromise again; what do they have to lose? But it will be a problem if they are recalled.)
Anyone who has been in a, or followed, unions is probably familiar with the situation where the union reps come back with a draft agreement and say "we don't like this either, but this is really the best we could do." That is pretty much the situation we have here. The question is: is "the best they could do" good enough?
I think that it isn't. Sometimes you have to send the negotiators back and say "try again."
The benefits in this plan -- which accrue in 2011 and 2012, although they could improve our bond ratings in the meantime -- are temporary. We already have the benefits of tax increases in 2009 and 2010 in the budget, which still leave us a huge deficit. The detriments, on the other hand -- the spending cap, enhanced midyear recisssion authority -- are permanent. We already have a history in California of putting things into the state Constitution hoping we can someday get them back out, if need be, and finding that we can't. I see these as more such measures.
Meanwhile, Republicans such as outgoing Assembly Minotiry Leader Mike Villines are trying to drum up support for the provisions by talking about how they will prevent Democrats from supporting "pet programs" -- programs that we see as essential.
This is one of those cases, common on DKos, where the question comes down to how much power you think we really have to do what needs to be done. I'm often on the "be willing to negotiate" side of those disputes here; I distrust activists' expressions of bravado. But here, I think that collapsing in this situation sents a horrible message, and that we hold more cards than we might think.
Republican intransigence up until now -- primarily legislative, but from Arnold as well -- has appeared in an environment where they have expected Democrats to cave. (And, who knows, if we hadn't blocked the party endorsement, maybe 1A would have passed. Our legislative representatives do not want to go back into those negotiations, and I can't blame them. They would have spent a lot of party money pushing 1A in particular.) Now they face a different environment, one in which they didn't get what they wanted. Now they join us in staring into the abyss.
The conventional wisdom, which I take seriously, is that a deadlock of this sort helps the party out of power. If the voters say "throw the bums out!" – a popular, populist, and usually lazy and dumb message – then the party out of power will, on average, do well. After all, most of "the bums" who are in are Democrats. Maybe this takes Republicans further from dropping down to 1/3 of the electorate.
That’s what we’re afraid of. That’s what they’re hoping for. But – maybe not.
We are, after all, in as favorable a political environment as we could want, in a bright blue state. We are led by Barack Obama. They are led by nincompoops. The public may want to throw the bums out but – especially given what is expected to be more competitive legislative districts after Prop 11 passed last fall – may be a lot more discerning in assessing who actually is and is not a "bum."
And then there’s the question of what happens if things get really bad, as is likely. First of all, voters who favored these measures won’t blame the Democrats. We almost endorsed 1A, which put us on record as supporting it overall without the cost of allowing the party to campaign for it. We didn’t want to cut the baby in half. We have been behaving as responsibly as possible.
We come out of this looking pretty good, in fact.
On the other hand, Republicans come out of this looking not only like the party of "no," but the party of "no even if it closes down the schools, the hospitals, and the prisons." Is that what the public really wants?
Right now, neither side will be candid about what happens on May 20, after 1A through 1E fail. Schwarzenegger is threatening to sell the Coliseum, to let the oil companies lease offshore oil fields – anything he can to scare the public. On May 20, we can expect him to sound a bit more reasonable.
One thing he can do is pass a budget with fee (even if not tax) increases. If he wants the legacy of not presiding over a state hurtling into the abyss, that may be his only hope.
If he doesn’t, then we move into highly unusual times, where politically anything can happen. The Democratic proponents of Prop 1A seem to think that the likely alternative is state bankruptcy (though I have a hard time seeing Obama allowing it, rather than giving the state less in loan guarantees than it gave to AIG or GM.) Republicans might like the idea of California going bankrupt – breaking union contracts and all – but they might like it a lot less in practice than in theory. It would be a Republican failure, after all.
Another alternative would be a Constitutional Convention to revise (and I’d say, finally give us a proper version of) the state Constitution. That would be happening at the absolute pinnacle of Democratic popularity compared to Republicans.
If Republicans don’t want that to happen – and they probably shouldn’t – then they would have to agree not to cut the baby in half. We already compromised. Will they do it?
If we pass Prop 1A, we’ll never know. As one who thinks that the political environment favors us, I think that this is a time to take a deep breath, stand tall, and see where the future takes us. We may have a huge fight ahead of us. We’ll need to get ready for it and work our asses off. But my money would be on us.
And if the Republicans are honest with themselves, this should scare them to death. So, with apologies to our poor Democratic Legislators, I say "NO ON PROP 1A." Let’s go back to the table and get a better deal.
Update: Stupid diarist left "NO ON ALL" out of the poll. Use "OTHER" to give that answer. Stupid, stupid, stupid!