I am a West Coast person. Born and raised in the OC, I went to school at UC Berkeley (Go Bears!) and now live in Seattle. I've never lived more than a few miles from the Pacific Ocean or some related body of water (SF Bay, Puget Sound) and I hope I always will. I cannot imagine ever living anywhere else.
But man, do our Democratic governors suck. At least, poll-wise.
Reading that poll and some of the comments about it really crystallized for me just how bad things are out here, how much the state Democratic parties suck, and how they are letting every single one of us down. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more.
Why is that? Why does one of the most liberal, progressive parts of this country have an inability to put forward strong Democratic leadership?
Some thoughts below.
First, I don't think it's that West Coast governors are bad,
per se. Gov. Christine Gregoire (D-WA) has just led a brilliant legislative session that balanced the state budget, dealing with a deficit while not cutting back much spending. She also shepherded through a much-needed gas tax that helps pay for critical transportation projects around the state.
I know less about Kulongoski in Oregon. But Gray Davis, CA's recalled Democratic governor, did wonderful, amazing things for California policy-wise. Under him a great deal of progressive legislation, benefiting labor and the environment to name but a small number of things, was enacted. And yet he got the ax. Why?
Connecting to Voters
Davis and Gregoire suffer from the same problem - an inability to get voters to like them. I suspect this stems from an inability to really, truly connect with voters, to gain the voters' trust.
Yet CA and WA are two of the most Democratic states in the union. Why is it that states that want to vote Democratic are given such bad Democrats to vote for in statewide races?
Some of this goes back to the weakness of the state parties. WA State Dems are better organized, better on their message, than CA Dems. But that's a relative comparison - CA Dems have virtually no organization or outreach at all. WA Dems are poor at outreach, poor at communicating their values to voters, but since they at least appear to live and breathe, they look better than the awful CA Dems.
Part of this is balkanization and petty insider politics. Gray Davis is best described as an apparatchik - he cut his teeth in the Jerry Brown administration in the '70s and as state Controller in the '90s built up chits and favors with important political insiders who could deliver votes. But nowhere along the line was Davis forced to build an electoral movement himself. Not until 1998 did he have to sell himself in a serious way. He benefited from a strong economy and a right-wing opponent (Dan Lungren) - more on the GOP's role later - and thus gained a big victory. In 2002 he won a much narrower re-election margin, hurt by the economic collapse and the Enron-created energy crisis, and again owed his victory to the wingnut-ness of his opponent, Bill Simon.
Christine Gregoire also had a similar problem. She rose to prominence as a bureaucrat - head of the state Department of Ecology - and then as Attorney General, another fairly bureaucratic post. She had won statewide elections, as had Davis, but had never truly been at the center of attention. When the spotlight was on her in 2004, she performed very poorly - again, her path to power had not forced her to build a strong rapport with voters.
But if we look beyond the top of the ticket, we see a great deal of rot beneath the facade of power on the West Coast. Sure, CA Dems control the State Legislature, but that control rests on very thin ice. The Dems in the Legislature have been almost totally unable to sell themselves to voters, and as a result Arnold was able to take advantage of this disconnect to paint the Dems in the Leg as the problem (when in fact most of CA's problems can be laid at the feet of the obstructionist GOP). Arnold crossed a bridge too far when he attacked the teachers and nurses and public safety workers, but he remains on safe ground when he attacks the state Dems.
CA Dems need a media strategy to rebuild their good names. Arnold as a celebrity governor has a ready-made media presence. We need to find some way to counter that.
The GOP
Democrats' failures here on the West Coast have been exacerbated by a generally well-disciplined conservative movement. Wingnut Republicans have been unable to win the governorship in all 3 states, but conservative Republicans who downplay their wingnutness have done better - think Pete Wilson or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Shithead (Gregoire's opponent).
I think this is because in opposition, they have been forced to hone their arguments. Being out of power forces discipline, whereas power breeds laziness. I don't agree with some here at dKos who have argued, bizarrely, that we need to "punish" Dems by electing Republicans - that's like cutting off your leg to heal a corn on your foot - but instead we need to take an active role in our party, and articulate ourselves better.
The WA recount issue is proof of this. The Republicans are fighting two battles - the battle to win the recount in the courts; and the battle that seems more important to them, the battle to undermine Gregoire and the Democrats in the court of public opinion. Our side and our party has repeatedly failed to counteract this second issue. It's as if nobody gets it here. Nobody seems to understand that the Republicans win if they can tar Gregoire as an illegitimate governor. And we are insane if we think victory in a court case will in itself undermine the Republican cause. It's a textbook example of how state Democrats get outplayed and outthought by Republicans - if Shithead loses the court case but succeeds in preventing Gregoire from assuming legitimacy or popularity, he has a strong chance of beating her in 2008.
The fact that no Democrats in WA seem to understand this scares the shit out of me.
Liberal Bureaucrats, Not Liberal Movements
I think part of our problem is that we don't have truly liberal movements in these states any longer. We just have a vague set of policy interests that we'd like to see our legislators enact, but little popular mobilization behind them.
Take the WA gas tax for example. This state needs transportation help and fixes, and the state legislature finally obliged, under Gregoire's firm and excellent leadership, with a 9-cent hike in the gas tax, spread out over 3 years.
But a backlash to this is starting to spread around the state, stoked by right-wing talk radio and whiny locals who lack an understanding of state needs and state issues (some of these folks are Democrats).
Stopping this backlash isn't difficult if the Dems and Repubs who voted for the tax took the time to go around the state and sell this to voters. But they're not. All we hear is silence. No media strategy, no grassroots strategy. It's as if the state Dems feel that the legislative victory is enough, when it clearly is not - has anyone in this state learned anything from 1993-94?!?!
The state Dems in CA and WA, and presumably OR as well, have never stopped to take the time to craft a strategy to rebuild a movement. Instead they are content with small victories that if not properly defended lead to corrosive political outcomes.
Final Thoughts
I don't feel like I've really put my finger on the root causes in this diary. This diary isn't my best. But I think it raises a critically important issue. If our party is barely clinging to power in its bases of the West Coast, how the fuck are we going to ever rebuild a majority?
In a sense this diary is calling on the carpet the state Democrats in Washington, Oregon, and California. It's time for a performance review, and the performance sucks. In a comment on the main page diary I wrote that:
It's as if the state legislators need to be shipped off to a reeducation camp led by George Lakoff for a summer, preferably in the mountains outside Yakima (hot and dry) and not allowed to return to Oly until they have demonstrated that they have learned their lesson - defend your goddamn votes and policies!
There is real frustration and anger behind that sentiment. Our leadership is failing us. But it's not enough to complain. We need to retake the party in order to remake it.
We need a more general commitment to an effort to remake West Coast Democratic Parties. The status quo is insufficient, nobody can honestly defend the current state of affairs. We need to reconnect with voters and sell our ideas to them. We need to not be technocrats but democrats - small d. We need to articulate a message to voters that they understand. And we need to promote Democratic leaders who understand the need to build lasting majorites, instead of apparatchiks who only wind up digging our holes deeper.