How to Beat a Billionaire

Now that California Attorney General Jerry Brown has made his candidacy for governor official, does he have what it takes to beat back his likely Republican foe, billionaire Meg Whitman?

Sixteen years ago, I managed the gubernatorial campaign of Brown’s sister, then-State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, who was soundly defeated by incumbent Governor Pete Wilson.

Jerry was a quiet bystander during that campaign, contributing only $150 to his sister’s cash-starved campaign as a protest against the power of money in politics.

Now Jerry must raise tens of millions to beat Whitman, an adversary with unlimited personal wealth who is anxious to paint him as an over-the-hill 1970s retread.

He should also take note of critical lessons from his sister’s failed quest in 1994. Like “Jerry 2010,” “Kathleen 1994” faced several major obstacles. Read More »

NATIONAL EMERGENCY

James Fallows recently wrote a long piece in The Atlantic titled, “How America Can Rise Again.”

We should listen to him.

While pundits claim that America’s greatest challenge is the bitter economic aftermath of our recent near-Depression, Fallows disagrees. “The American tragedy of the early 21st Century…is a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke,” he writes.

“When the United States Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had ten times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Now the most populous, California, has 69 times the population as the least populous, Wyoming. And yet they both have the same two votes in the Senate. A business organization as inflexible as the United States Congress would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry.”

In other words, our ossified and creaky political system is increasingly unable to address and solve the problems of the American Commonweal. Or, as Fallows succinctly states, “our government is old and broken and dysfunctional and may even be beyond repair.”

During such desperate economic times, government reform may seem disingenuous and disconnected from our real problems. But just read the headlines:

The right makes a goal line stand against health care reform. An $800 billion stimulus package can’t bust out of Washington. Double-digit unemployment persists even as seven figure bonuses rain down on Wall Street. Budget deficits storm in like tornadoes – more than $1 trillion in Washington, $20 billion in Sacramento and $500 million in San Francisco. Polls by both CNN and The Wall Street Journal reflect the unpopularity of President Obama’s policies.

Republicans crow that these are all examples of Democratic failure and government’s inability to work effectively and efficiently.

But the nihilistic attacks of so many ideologues against “big government” are nothing more than a puerile denial that we need government at all.

In fact, a robust, vibrant government is the only forum that exists in a democratic society where we come together to address our most daunting challenges. Read More »

Power to the (Local) People!

Imagine for a moment that you’re a kid again. Maybe you have a lemonade stand or your parents give you a small allowance each week. It’s not much, but it’s enough to cover the general operating expenses incurred by a seven-year-old.

Enter “Cal,” the school bully who lives down the street.

Cal is the most feared eighth grader in your school. He’s twice your size and his egotism is matched only by his avarice. He’s always broke, so his favorite pastime involves punching you in the stomach and taking your money.

If this scenario sounds familiar to you, there’s a decent chance you’re a local government official or service provider in the state of California.

Thomas Jefferson would be appalled by the past 40 years of California’s political history. A firm believer that government is most responsive when it is closest to the people, Jefferson would undoubtedly recoil at Sacramento’s relentless assault on local governments.

Indeed, the only thing more predictable than serial budget crises in Sacramento is the subsequent attempt to close the gap with local revenues.

If you think the state’s multi-billion dollar budget shortfalls are some abstract, far-off problem, think again. Local governments – cities, counties and special districts – have become the piggy banks of last resort for a state government that has come unhinged. Read More »

Reform Fever

Before the progressive movement swept through California in the early 20th century, there was a growing sense throughout the state that Sacramento had ceased working for regular Californians.

Shackled by special interests and rife with corruption, the capitol had become a playground for corporate lobbyists who exerted unfettered control over the legislative agenda.

Over time, public displeasure with the system became public disgust. Reformers of every stripe began to speak out against the corruption and graft in Sacramento.

Once relegated to the political periphery, suffragists, environmentalists, labor activists and good government groups began to coalesce under the banner of “progressivism,” which aimed to take back the state from the party bosses and corporations that were perceived to be running it into the ground.

What a difference 100 years makes.

Today, Californians are similarly disgusted with the state of affairs in Sacramento. Last week’s Field Poll on voter attitudes painted a comically bad picture for the state legislature, with only 13 percent of those polled registering approval. And although he doubled the legislature’s score, Governor Schwarzenegger can hardly brag about his own 27 percent approval rating.

A second poll released by Field indicated significant voter support to overhaul state government from the ground up. Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo stressed the importance of the numbers, noting that “a majority sees the need for making fundamental changes to the state constitution and would support calling a constitutional convention to develop the reform proposals.”

In short, people are fed up. Read More »

Save California

Is California, once the striding colossus of the American economy, about to go the way of the Soviet Union?

In its final days, the USSR was a flailing giant – a paper superpower with an imploding economy and a deteriorating ability to exercise rational public policies.

Sounds a lot like the Golden State.

With an ossified and impotent state bureaucracy, diminishing public services and a wholesale meltdown of the California economy, the analogy isn’t too far-fetched.

Even the state’s leading historian, Dr. Kevin Starr, has his doubts about California’s ability to recover from its current downward spiral. Quoted in a recent article in Great Britain’s Sunday Guardian, Starr warned that California may become “America’s first failed state.”

Foreclosures have leveled suburbs from Riverside to Merced. California is home to one of every four mortgages in the country where the loan is worth more than the property.

Employment numbers have plunged even more dramatically. At 12.2 percent, the state’s unemployment rate is the highest it has been since the 1940s. In many areas of the state, the job picture is almost surreal. The central valley town of Mendota, for example, is grappling with 38 percent unemployment. Nearly 5,000 East Bay jobs will disappear in one broad stroke when Fremont’s NUMMI auto plant closes early next year.

There are other alarming crisis indicators as well. The poverty rate in Los Angeles has climbed to 20 percent. Our schools, once the backbone of California’s ingenuity and progress, are now ranked 47th out of 50 states. This, coupled with spiraling higher education costs, has resulted in a 13-percent reduction over eight years in the number of 19-year-old Californians enrolled in college.

This isn’t a game. Californians need to wake up to the urgency of the situation. Read More »

Earth to Meg: Voting Matters

The shocking story that California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman – the 53-year-old billionaire former CEO of eBay – never cast a ballot before 2002 continues to astound.

How can a candidate who never took the time to vote in any election until six years ago even presume to place her name on a ballot – let alone for the highest office in the largest state in America?

Whitman’s smug declaration that “Californians need to trust their government again” is a new high in the decoupling of political rhetoric and truth.

With a straight face, Whitman has spun a running list of answers for her failure to participate in our democracy ranging from “I’m sorry,” to “I was too busy.” Believe it or not, she even likened herself to the late singer Sonny Bono, another apparent non-voter before running for office.

That’s setting the bar pretty low.

I’m sorry, but when I was a kid, my parents voted. My dad was a milkman for Berkeley Farms Creamery and worked six days a week. My mother was a housewife who raised 10 kids while running a vending stand at the Oakland Coliseum for 26 years. They were busy. Their friends were busy. But they considered it their civic duty to take the time to be informed and to vote.

So, forgive me if I don’t buy Whitman’s excuse that she was too “focused on raising a family, on my husband’s career,” to vote.

The fact is that Whitman’s political consultants are so cynical about the reputation of our democracy among voters, they have advised their client that the issue won’t matter.

They know there will be a period of negative stories and turbulence, but they think interest will quickly evaporate and new rabbits will appear for the newshounds to chase.

But Whitman and her advisers may have underestimated the renewed enthusiasm Americans across the political spectrum are exhibiting for their democracy. A newly energized electorate is participating in politics more than at any time in our history. Read More »

Governor eBay

Here we go again. Meg Whitman, the latest in a long line of corporate chieftains promising to “run government like a business,” has formally announced her candidacy for California governor.

The conceit of America’s business elite is striking. Even after our entire financial system was nearly scuttled last year through the incompetence and greed of so many “brilliant” executives, they continue to peddle the myth that they are better qualified to run the country than anyone else.

Their attitude stems from the worn out “government/bad, private sector/good” argument. By this logic, we are supposed to believe that a billionaire CEO will run California better than a career civil servant or another qualified candidate.

Ronald Reagan crystallized the argument in his inaugural address, attacking government as America’s biggest problem. But Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently turned that mantra on its head, gently reminding us that during last year’s financial meltdown, business was the problem and government was the solution.

In the halls of power, business lobbyists love to contrast the mythological competence of corporate executives to the abject ignorance of elected politicians. They tout the private sector’s efficiency over the public sector’s profligate wastefulness. But the credibility of these clichés has been sorely eroded by the near-death experience of our free enterprise system. Read More »

March on Sacramento

Rome is burning. But this time, the reformers aren’t fiddling.The CCC – California Constitutional Convention – can’t happen soon enough.

The alarming spectacle of our state capitol going up in smoke has moved the Bay Area Council – a Northern California group of business leaders led by its savvy executive, Jim Wunderman – to call for a constitutional convention to repair California state government.

I have known Wunderman since he was a young star in the office of then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein. Over 20 years, he has evolved into one of the state’s true leaders. Fed up with the dysfunction in Sacramento, Wunderman hatched the idea of a constitutional convention to set things straight.

The proposal has caught on.

In an unusual turn of events, California citizens are listening to a business group. By a 59% majority, state voters favor a convention to rewrite California’s constitution.

The Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News and Sacramento Bee have backed the convention with editorials. Longtime Capitol observers such as the Bee’s Dan Walters and George Skelton of the Times have given up on the legislature’s ability to self-correct and strongly endorsed the idea.

Widespread support from local governments and citizens signals that a constitutional convention may really occur.

The proposal on the drawing board calls for a 2010 initiative to empower the citizens to call a convention, a reform convention in 2011, and a set of proposals on the 2012 ballot alongside President Barack Obama.

But the voters patience may not last that long. Experts predict another budget crisis lurking around the corner that will fire voter disgust and ignite the kind of popular explosion that produced Proposition 13 in 1978. Read More »

Eric & Gavin’s Divorce

It was a déjà vu moment.

Last week’s big political story was the resignation of Gavin Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign manager, Eric Jaye. Newsom is vying for position with Attorney General Jerry Brown for the Democratic nomination in next year’s primary.

Jaye’s abrupt departure took me back 20 years to my own resignation as Dianne Feinstein’s campaign manager in her gubernatorial primary campaign against then Attorney General John Van de Kamp.

Both Newsom and Feinstein built their reputations as Mayor of San Francisco. I managed Feinstein’s 1983 re-election campaign and later directed her victory over a high-profile recall effort. In that race, she obliterated the recall with 83 percent of the vote.

Now 50 years old, Jaye broke into political consulting 25 years ago with Clint Reilly Campaigns. The young Jaye was a political natural. Even then he had a brilliant mind and the stamina of a marathon runner.

It didn’t surprise me when years later he steered a young, dynamic San Francisco supervisor – Gavin Newsom – into the mayor’s office. Four years later, he engineered Newsom’s re-election victory.

Political consultants are dependent upon the fate of their clients. Likewise, when candidates like Feinstein and Newsom try to move up the ladder from mayor to governor, they initially lean on their existing cadre of experts, including their former consultant. Read More »

The Value of Rectitude

Where was the standing ovation when our elected leaders managed to “fix” the state’s $26 billion budget gap? Blame it on drama fatigue.

Like a tiresome game that drags on for years, Sacramento’s increasing dysfunction and dwindling credibility has simply exhausted the state. The serial budget cliffhangers are a turn-off.

A disenchanted public sits on their hands while newspaper editorial boards offer only tepid praise.

The daunting size of the original gap startled everyone, including legislators. But the accounting legerdemain employed to close it has given rise to rampant skepticism.

As Sacramento Bee columnist and unparalleled Capitol observer Dan Walters noted in his July 22 column:

“Desperate to ‘score’ revenues or savings on paper and claim to have balanced the chronically imbalanced budget, they often draft decrees that are slammed into law without any thought of long-term consequences.

“The latest dead-of-night budget deal between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders offers multiple examples of desperation-tinged policymaking…”

At a recent Los Angeles press conference, representatives of the League of California Cities called the latest budget agreement a “Ponzi scheme” and a “smoke and mirrors scam” for taking nearly $2 billion from cities and counties. A lawsuit is on the way.

When corporations miss their earnings and revenue guidance to analysts and stockholders over a couple of quarters, the stock price is pounded relentlessly.

California, however, produces multi-annual shortfalls like a herd of cows churns out manure. Long years of such irresponsible policymaking now threaten our core asset.

There is one thing worse for California than a budget gap: a credibility gap. Read More »

Culture of Capitol-ism

Sacramento is not just a big small town or the capital of America’s biggest state. It is also a symbol of governmental gridlock and dysfunction, the political version of General Motors or Lehman Brothers.

But unlike GM or Lehman, California won’t go bankrupt – not while taxpayers are guarantors of last resort. So, the blunders continue.

Sacramento isn’t just a place; it’s a culture. Let’s call it a culture of “Capitol-ism.” Legislators are now “Capitolists” who commandeer billions of tax dollars and special interest contributions to re-elect themselves rather than govern California. The Capitol is no longer the seat of government – it is the home office of a massive 24/7 public relations company.

I first noticed this distorted reality when I began managing campaigns in the 1970s.

Incumbent Assembly members had access to a large pool of consultants on the state payroll whose primary job was to legally orchestrate year-round campaigns. The entity was called “Majority Consultants,” and the staffers really worked for the Speaker of the Assembly.

These political operatives manufactured press releases and cranked out expensive newsletters to constituents – paid for by the taxpayers. At election time, they exited the state payroll and seamlessly appeared on the campaign payrolls of members involved in tough races. Read More »

Disrespecting our Elders

John F. Kennedy once said that the strength and durability of a society can be judged by how it treats its elderly.

Proving his point more than four decades later, the careening state of California is considering cutting off vital in-home services to thousands of dependent seniors.

Of course, with the Golden State staring down the barrel of a $24 billion deficit that swells with each passing nanosecond, we must expect our elected officials to make difficult spending decisions.

But the proposal to dramatically slash In-Home Supportive Services is best described with one word: “stupid.”

Or perhaps two: “astonishingly stupid.”

IHSS is one of a select breed of programs that serve thousands and actually save the state money.

The program helps pay for in-home caregivers for more than 400,000 elderly and disabled Californians.

These home-care providers are often responsible for the most intimate self-care tasks that most people take for granted, like feeding, bathing and dressing. They also do day-to-day chores, provide transportation to and from medical appointments and administer various other medical and domestic services.

It’s a big job, but it doesn’t exactly equate to big bucks. The statewide average hourly wage for an IHSS provider is less than $10. In many rural California counties, home-care providers are making minimum wage for their efforts.

So, yes; IHSS costs the state money. But consider the alternative. Read More »

BUSTED

It is said that a hardcore drug addict needs to hit “rock bottom” before recovery is possible.

Life must become so hellish and circumstances so dire that they have no choice but to accept reality and begin to change.

For the sake of all Californians, I hope that the state has finally reached its own rock bottom moment.

“Our wallet is empty. Our bank is closed. Our credit is dried up,” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently told a joint session of the state legislature.

But even with the state tumbling toward fiscal oblivion, Californians continue to look for easy answers. Everyone wants to maintain crucial public services but no one wants to pay for them.

In many respects, the state of California today resembles an addict desperate for a fix. We are addicted to expediency and unrealistic expectations, and to prosperity without sacrifice.

After years of rampant borrowing, budgetary sleights of hand and collective finger crossing, it’s time to pay the piper.

Never mind the piper; we can’t even pay the teacher, the nurse, the policeman or the firefighter. The only way out of our $24 billion predicament, we’re told, is by taking a chainsaw to vital state services.

In short, this isn’t a good time to be in California if you’re young. Or old. Or poor. Or sick.

As the Golden State unravels beneath our feet, we should be doing more than blaming the legislature and the governor. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Instead, every Californian should be rallying for the fundamental structural reforms that this state so desperately needs.

But for this to happen, we need to wake up. Read More »