Posted on 08/11/2003 1:30:24 PM PDT by Sabertooth
Recalling California
Orthopoxy I was recently reading some commentary the California Gubernatorial Recall Election, and came across this phrase: “a pox on the purists.”
I thought a moment, and asked myself: which ones? The conservative purists, or the moderate purists?
There is a deep disingenuousness among some Republicans and Freepers on these matters. Their a priori position is that their world view represents "realism," therefore any other view is invalid. They argue from presumption and castigate those who differ, while failing to understand they are as equally unappeasable in their orthodoxy of so-called pragmatism. California, we're told, can't elect a conservative Republican, it's just too liberal. Yet, in the last 10 years, liberal California has passed the following state referenda:
1994 - Proposition #184: Three-strikes, life imprisonment for repeat felons. None of these issues sprang from Democrat talking-points, they reflect conservative values. In several instances, these initiatives were the first of their kind in the nation. The bottom line is that California is not as uniformly liberal as folks elsewhere would like to think. Our problems here arise from a very liberal court system and heavily gerrymandered districts favoring Democrats, along with some strikingly timid recent GOP candidates for statewide office. None of these failed California candidacies, and we can also include the Presidential campaigns of Senator Robert Dole in 1996 and then-Governor George W. Bush in 2000, addressed the conservative currents in the California electorate, currents which flow across party lines. Whether moderate or conservative, none of the GOP candidates at the top of the ticket, not Bush, Dole, Michael Huffington, Matt Fong, Tom Campbell, Dan Lungren, or Bill Simon, took up the banner of any of these issues, which Democrats opposed, in their campaigns against Democrats. None of the Presidential, Gubernatorial, or Senatorial candidates in California in the past ten years addressed the concerns of Californians on issues that play viscerally to conservative instincts in the California electorate, with one, lone exception: former Governor Pete Wilson.
First elected Governor in 1990 amidst California’s last major budget crisis, Wilson utilized the line-item veto and temporary tax increases (on which he kept his word and the repeal of which he later enforced) to bring fiscal sanity to the state budget. Still, there was a glaring, untouched money hemorrhage: the multi-billion dollar burden on California taxpayers of schooling, medicating, and imprisoning millions of Illegal Aliens who’d come here in the wake of the 1986 Amnesty, co-written by none other than then-Congressman Dan Lungren.
In 1994, Pete Wilson trailed Democrat gubernatorial nominee Kathleen Brown by more than 20 points in the Spring polls. At the same time, Proposition #187, a ballot initiative that would have denied the use of state funds for any services for Illegal Aliens, had found it’s way on the ballot. Early polls showed #187 leading every ethnic demographic, in defiance of the wishes and the collective wisdom of both the Democrat and Republican parties. Seizing the moment, Governor Wilson made the #187 cause his own, came from behind to defeat Brown, winning re-election handily.
Political Tectonics
To understand California politics, one has to understand that voters in this enormous state, while tolerant of a relaxed cultural back-drop, are also held captive by the tectonic inertia of timid, unimaginative and corrupt party politics as practiced by Republicans and Democrats in Sacramento. Fortunately, the populist reforms of Governor Hiram Johnson of the early 20th Century provided two means for the voters to bypass unresponsive politicians and reshape the landscape of government themselves: the statewide ballot initiative and, rarely, the statewide recall.
When voter frustration at Sacramento’s intransigence reaches critical stress, political earthquakes follow. Just as California’s natural earthquakes change the courses of rivers, so do our political earthquakes forever alter the political undercurrents here. We Californians go about our daily lives and shrug off the Loma Prietas and the Northridges, because that’s the way of things here along the San Andreas. We all live with the “Big One” looming inevitably in our futures. The populist rebellions of Proposition #13 in 1978, Proposition #187 in 1994, and now the Gubernatorial Recall of 2003 are examples of California’s political “Big Ones.”
Californians learn to live with our earthquakes. While quakes at 5 on the Richter Scale flatten cities and kill thousands elsewhere in the world, Californians survive 6.8s and 7.1s, because we build our structures to do exactly that. Therein stands the lesson for Republicans to survive and flourish in the political earthquakes here. Just as our buildings absorb and ride the tectonic shocks and aftershocks, so must the Republican Party structure it’s messages to the electorate to channel the energies of the unleashed fury to our advantage. However, Republicans cannot succeed by failing to address the conservative currents that run through a majority of voters here on a number of issues.
The deed undone
There is unfinished business in California, and much depends here on whether Republicans are willing to finish it: Proposition #187, and the four to six million Illegal Aliens currently squatting in our state. Even during the 1994 campaign, national Republican figures like Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp sought to distance themselves and the GOP from the concerns of Californians, and the retreat has been evident ever since, to disastrous electoral results. Contrary to the self-congratulatory “wisdom” of the Republican National Committee, the string of GOP failure in major statewide elections stems not from the victory of 1994, but from the retreat that followed; a retreat on which they insisted. The Republican Party refused to get its hands dirty nationally on Illegal Aliens, and left Californians to pound sand.
That misguided and craven surrender climaxed in the poetic injustice of the 1998 gubernatorial campaign, when 1986 Illegal Alien Amnesty co-author, Dan Lungren, ran a pathetic, losing campaign against Gray Davis, who would later spit in the eyes of California voters by arbitrating the leftist-court-bogged Proposition #187 out of existence. National Republican leaders wore Davis’ flouting of the will of California voters as a feather in their own cap, as if the consequences of their retreat validated its dubious wisdom. Moderate, RNC-inspired timidity became the rule of major campaigns here, and the recipe for their subsequent failures.
To be sure, under the guidance of the RNC, conservative candidates don’t win statewide in California… but neither do moderates. The problem here isn’t one of substance, it’s of style, and the RNC style is a determined, willful lack of substance, spine, or any attempt to address the concerns of California voters, even and especially when those concerns tilt toward the electoral advantage of Republican candidates in California.
Yet, astonishingly, the RNC-inspired record of failure here in elections since 1994 is held by many, especially from any of the other 49 states, to be “pragmatic,” and “realistic.” This position is no longer tenable, and it’s simply dishonest to continue to cling to it. The RNC strategy is a transparent tautology from the Imperial wardrobe. It is not now, nor has it ever been, sufficient armor or weaponry to carry Republicans to statewide victory in California.
Now
So where do we find ourselves, in the recall election (or “de-election”) of Governor Gray Davis, in this rarest and strangest of all populist earthquakes in California History? Californians will vote up or down on Davis, the corrupt, incompetent political hack who thwarted the will of the people by sidestepping both the ballot box and the appeals courts in killing Proposition #187, while spending California into cataclysmic debt. If, or more probably, when, Davis falls, Californians will choose to replace him from several possible candidate. Foremost among them are Democrat Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante, Republican State Senator Tom McClintock, and actor Arnold Schwarzeneggar, also a Republican. Aside from over a hundred unknowns, the name-recognition contingent in the field is rounded out by independents Arianna Huffington and Peter Ueberroth, defeated 2002 GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon, porn merchant Larry Flynt, and former child actor Gary Coleman, the only remotely high-profile black candidate in the field. While none of the latter group appears to have any serious chance at winning the replacement election, any of them could conceivably pick up more than 1% of the vote, and cumulatively impact a race in which the winner might not get even 30% to 40%. They’re all variables
Among the three most serious candidates, Cruz Bustamante is the nakedly racist La Raza face of the future of Democrat Party politics, who has managed to offend all but the most diehard partisans with insults and gaffes against every non-Latino demographic in California, while pandering in every possible way on Illegal Aliens. On behalf of Bustamante and Davis, Art Torres, the Chairman of the California Democrat Party is racializing the recall election by bringing up the unfinished business of Proposition #187 (not that Republicans should complain, he’s doing us a great favor). Torres is attempting to divide and intimidate Republicans, while scare-mongering Latinos, by slamming #187 champion and Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Campaign Chairman, former Governor Pete Wilson, as well as by bringing up Arnold’s own support for the anti-Illegal Alien measure.
Schwarzeneggar, the charismatic moderate, and Tom McClintock, the thoughtful conservative, are the Republicans with the best chances of defeating Bustamante and the Democrats in the likely event of Davis’ recall. Schwarzeneggar’s poll numbers show a substantial advantage over McClintock in the early going, but many McClintock supporters remain unimpressed. Thus the stage appears to be once again set for another struggle between Republican strategy visions for statewide election in California. However, the “pragmatists vs. purists” and “moderates vs. conservatives” models are simply not instructive, since neither side has won a statewide election for the GOP since 1994. Since both moderates and conservatives have both followed the RNC’s hand-wringing strategies to failure, it’s crucial for both McClintock and Schwarzeneggar to run campaigns that address the concerns of average Californians in ways that are advantageous to Republicans.
There are a few of these… taxes, spending, schools, and crime all ought to be addressed. However, one issue that will be unavoidable in this campaign, because the Democrats believe it will play to their advantage, is the matter of Illegal Aliens. The Democrats are correct here, only if the Republicans retreat from the fight. Californians of all walks and ethnicities are just as weary of this ongoing burden and blight to our state, and either of the two leading Republicans can capitalize on that, if they choose. The best wedge issue now available to divide Democrats is the issue of CA state driver’s licenses for Illegal Aliens. The Democrats have been pushing SB-60, a bill that would allow Illegal Aliens to get into motor-voter lines and obtain driver’s licenses, through the state legislature and Davis has promised to sign it. They may well succeed before the recall election is held on October 7th, but it is crucial that both Schwarzeneggar and McClintock declare war on this legislation and vow to fight it by any legal means possible, including leading a state referendum next year to overturn it.
The Republican who best addresses the concerns of Californians that play to our advantage is the Republican with the best chance of winning the replacement election in the Gray Davis recall. Who will that be?
The principle purists, or the pragmatism purists?
The grass roots purists, or the RNC purists?
1994 - Proposition #187: Cut off state funds for Illegal Aliens.
1996 - Proposition #209: Ended statewide Affirmative Action
1998 - Proposition #227: Ended bilingual education
2000 - Proposition #22: Defined marriage as one man - one woman.
Here is another view on the recall:
Its not like the problem can't be solved; the problem is that there is NO political will to do it, at least on the part of those elected jerk-offs who stand to make a lot of money from the ilegal labor pool. Those who benefit most from this influx of cheap, off-the-books labor, like the giant agribusiness conglomerates of central California, spend millions of dollars on lobbying efforts (read: bribery efforts) of members of both poltical parties in Sacramento. And why shouldn't they? Both parties love the money-laden gravy train supplied by these interests. Its a great scam: hire illegals who get paid in cash; no social security, no medical, no retirement, no nothing in extras. The saving to agribusiness is enormous. At the same time, the scheme sticks it to the California taxpayer to pick up the slack. So free medical care, free education, free food stamps, free social welfare goodies, all on the taxpayers dime. And the agribusiness interests use the lame excuse that "we supply cheaper produce because of all the itinerant labor."
I'd rather pay $5.00 for a head of lettuce than to be nickel and dimed to death by this scam. Nothing of substance will be done about this problem as long as agribusiness controls the money flow to elected politicians. And both parties are involved up to their eyeballs.
You nailed it! The "conservative currents" that run through California's electorate.
To be sure, under the guidance of the RNC, conservative candidates don’t win statewide in California… but neither do moderates. The problem here isn’t one of substance, it’s of style, and the RNC style is a determined, willful lack of substance, spine, or any attempt to address the concerns of California voters, even and especially when those concerns tilt toward the electoral advantage of Republican candidates in California.
Yet, astonishingly, the RNC-inspired record of failure here in elections since 1994 is held by many, especially from any of the other 49 states, to be “pragmatic,” and “realistic.” This position is no longer tenable, and it’s simply dishonest to continue to cling to it. The RNC strategy is a transparent tautology from the Imperial wardrobe. It is not now, nor has it ever been, sufficient armor or weaponry to carry Republicans to statewide victory in California.
I hope you are sending this to the RNC, CA GOP, and Republican publications far and wide. The "conservative" vs. "moderate" infighting needs to stop so we can move to addressing the needs of Californians and thereby winning elections.
calgov2002:
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Thanks. Here is yet ANOTHER candidate on the ballot ...
jtill, you should enjoy this!
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