Schwarzenegger Counter-Populism (CA Prop 14)

I only heard about CA Prop 14 today. (My bad. I'm on the Right Coast, don't you know.)

It is supposed to go into effect in 2011, pending inevitable court challenges, and will dispense with the California state election system until now.

If I've understood it, here is how it works: There are no longer any primaries. There are also no longer any party lines on the ballot, which is probably what made it seem so seductive to populist sensibility across the political spectrum. All candidates enter a single primary, regardless of party. They don't have to announce an affiliation.

The top two vote-getters are put on the November general election ballot. Everyone else is out.

On the face of it, it's like a run-off system. The idea might not have been a bad one - if it had been coupled with severe reform in campaign finance and media access. But how will it work in a state where one of the primary winners, Meg Whitman, paid more than $100 million out of her own pocket to get the Republican nomination? I heard today that she paid $150,000 for each vote she received in the Republican primary!

(Tangent: Pretty inefficient. Straight bribery would have got her 15 times, perhaps 150 times as many votes. I can see why the rich are still so frustrated by the system, and think it could favor them even more than it does. She could have also had an equivalent number of voters deported to reeducation camps and brought back as well-trained commandos willing to die for her, for less than what she paid.)

Prop 14, also called the "Top Two" proposition, was touted as opening the way for "moderates" and "independents" to get around party dominance, and as a move that will strengthen the "center" and weaken the "extremes" of left and right. Interestingly, the only two counties where the vote went against Prop 14 were San Francisco, which should require no introduction, and Orange, which most of you will also know as very right-wing, sort of the birthplace of Reaganist thinking and the anti-tax revolt of the last four decades.

Everyone else fell for the scam. All four of the small parties on the California ballot campaigned against the measure, alongside the Democrats and the Republicans.

It should be a tip-off that Schwarzenegger was a big advocate. He got where he is thanks to a similarly fake-populist abuse. Huge money went into the Gray Davis recall, with Schwarzenegger as the automatically annointed of the corporates who initiated the recall (largely in order to avoid prosecution for their role in the Enron-run California "energy crisis" of 2001).

The recall ballot was a joke: it ran for several pages, and had dozens of candidates, all of them identified by profession: "Joe Schlabotnik, Businessman. Jane Soandso, Businesswoman." In the middle of this phone book, a Hollywood star who kills every problem he confronts. The idea was to capture all the outrage at systemic corruption and channel it into the idiocy that a depoliticized hero of "character" will arrive on horseback with "new ideas" to save the day, with no actual specifics or social movement required for "change."

I can imagine this will be what the Tea Party nonsense mutates into as it moves toward something more palatable to the blue-state "center": atomized politicians with no obligations whatsoever, everything more personalized than ever.

Huge corporate money went into the Prop 14 Yes campaign. In practice, it will of course serve the worst of the Republocrat Demoblicans and incumbents of all kinds. Incumbents will practically be guaranteed their spot in the top two, as they are today. Any upstarts who benefit will get in on the strength of money, nothing more. Americans will continue to fall into the bizarro camp of depoliticized revolutionary outrage. The problem is "politics," the solution is "individuals" of "character" who don't have an ugly party affiliation next to their name and who claim to know nothing of left or right.

At best, this is a waste of the energy that could have gone into a genuine reform, like proportional representation or a public campaign finance system. (In related news, the Supreme Court overturned Arizona's public financing system as undemocratic, because it would limit the speech of those who want to spend lots and lots more than what the public system allows.) A lot of people in California imagine they just pulled off a populist coup. It's counter-populism, just like the Tea Party.

it will be undermined.

About $80 - $90 million spend and about 1.1 million votes.

Prima facie I should have found it suspect.

SORRY.

Teaches you all to think I'm a genius. ;)

Especially for such a large state... To put it in perspective, if Obama had spent $80 per vote in the general election (mind you Whitman was only running in a primary), he would have spent 5.3 billion dollars!!! Of course, he only spent a small fraction of that - 0.74 billion, less than one seventh the amount Whitman spent per vote. This lady spent so much money only to paint herself as a right-winger and ensure her doom in November. Perhaps she'll really go all out and end up in the poor house.

for being about election process and California, two big ones.

Quite independently of whether my thoughts on it are hot or not.

I really want to hear more on this from informed Californians.

Our public school system, once one of the best in the nation, was funded by property taxes. If there was one thing that we could count on is the steady and stable rise of real estate values, thus our schools would grow as our state grew in population. Then this idiot named Howard Jarvis convinced a bunch of people to freeze property taxes by saying that it would help older people keep their homes. It may have done that, but the real effect has been to ensure that corporations and other businesses pay as little in taxes as possible. Our funding for education was completely undercut. We had to base funding on income taxes which fluctuate wildly. Just as important, Proposition 13 made the requirement for any future revenue increases dependent on a 2/3 majority which means that a minority party could hold the state hostage.

Then we voted for term limits, thinking that they would take out the influence of special interests. How? All term limits have done is take the institutional memory out of our legislature.

We kicked one of the most knowledgeable politicians out of his governorship for something that was not his fault and replaced him with an idiot who knows nothing.

As I said, it is just business as usual here in the Golden State.

The way the prop was worded really made it seam like it might be a good idea. Quite clever, if you admire underhanded linguistic manipulation. I'm glad I looked into it in order to make an informed choice; I'm afraid most Californians didn't. :(

The concept was simple. Open balloting irrespective of party registration with the top 2 candidates advancing to the general election. The problem is as Jack stated, that it was sold as an end to the political mess in Sacramento. Many of my fellow Californians fell for it. I saw through it right away. Open primaries only work if the playing field is even to begin with and if all candidates are allowed equal representation. This piece of shit was sold as reform. Whenever I asked a proponent "How exactly it would fix anything?" They would say, it gives the little guys a chance. So stupid!! How the hell would that happen. They are already on the General Ballot even though they have little chance of winning. Now they won't even get that far unless they have 80 million to spend.

It was not clever, some of us in the Golden State are just dumb. The only way to make elections fair is to take the money out of them and to make elections about the issues and not the ads. Money is not speech and purchasing is not democracy. If you can stand in front of me and answer my questions about the issues and change my mind, or conversely if your record of service shows that you care about the things that are important to me, then you have my respect and my vote. Otherwise go to hell.

This makes them vulnerable to cosmetic change dressed up as such.

To me, the simple and fundamental change in the system will only ever be achieved when MONEY is no longer considered speech. We HAVE to take money out of elections and make the candidates work for votes by actually answering to the voters in the form of debates, town hall meetings, and press conferences. Meg Whitman spent 81 million dollars to flood the state with ads and her stupid 48 page booklet with maybe 10 pages of infomercial information about her "vision" for California. Brown has challenged her to a series of debates which I think are highly unlikely to happen because she knows he would make her look like the fool she is. Instead she will spend another projected 70 to 100 million to try and buy the governorship.

It isn't rocket science. It is really pretty simple. When you can substitute money for substance, the system is going to be flawed and eventually fail.

And in heavily D or R districts, it's eliminated one major party as well.

horror after horror is purchased with lies on TV and written into law. i saw this from a mile away -- and to think prop 15 failed? insufferable.

the proposition system needs to be abolished! it's responsibility that cannot be used judiciously -- rampant abuse, end it now!

By your own post, it's clear that what needs to cease immediately is the ability of those with money to purchase "horror after horror" "with lies on TV." That is independent of the referendum system.

A poorly informed public is a danger whether they're voting in referenda or in elections. By your argument, they also shouldn't be allowed to vote in elections. If the lawmakers are purchased, the possibility of the people to occassionally vote their will by referenda makes no great difference either way. I'll take my chances with the stupidity of the people over a monopoly of power for self-appointed elites. There is a much better chance that the people eventually will learn from their mistakes.

For me, the tragedy of Prop 14 is that it gave people the illusion of changing something, not that the change in itself is going to make any difference. Clearly, California and states with stricter limits on popular propositions are equally corrupt and equally fucked. In New York we get to vote on almost nothing, it's predetermined that all power in Albany will lie with three officials almost entirely immune to democratic control or petition.

It will be a great day this year when California votes to end one of the greatest atrocities in US politics - the drug war. That will be one of the most important turns in this country's politics ever, and it's only possible because of the petition system.