Virginia Doesn't Have Earthquakes

Unfortunately, I'm told that Tim Kaine's opponent, Jerry Kilgore, wants to imitate the Golden State's misbegotten governance-by-plebiscite. Please don't let him even mention it without sending him the thunder of your shout-down. Let the disastrous condition of California's ballot proposition system raise the alarm for the citizens of any state not already subject to a similar burden. In other words, if you're not already stuck with a ballot initiative provision in your state, shut the door ? quick ? on any politician who tells you having one is a good idea.

The Law of Unintended Consequences
California's system was instituted, almost a hundred years ago, with the most noble of intentions. Hiram Johnson, one of the founders of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party (Johnson was Roosevelt's running mate in 1912 and his natural successor as party leader), was a crusading reformer. When he was elected governor of California in 1910 it was with the promise that he would clean out the corruption, the corporate cronyism ? the special interests ? that infested the State House and the legislature. His particular target was the Southern Pacific railroad. Its power and control were such that Johnson had no hope of reform from within. His solution was to take legislating out of the hands of the legislators and give it to the people. Thus the initiative, the referendum ? and the recall.

Fast forward to 1978, Howard Jarvis, the first flowering of the Tax Revolt that became the Reagan Revolution, and Proposition 13.

Prop 13 put a low cap on property taxes and thus was wildly popular.  However, true to the law of unintended consequences, it gutted revenues and ultimately ruined what had been the finest public education system in the country. It set the precedent for tax cuts qua entitlement. It set the precedent for requiring supermajorities to pass bond issues and other money bills. Ultimately it, and its spawn, have created an untenable situation: at every level of governance in California there is very nearly no budgetary discretion. Almost everything having to do with the getting and spending of money is controlled by a thirty-year accretion of rules ? many of them contradictory ? put in place by ballot initiative. Our elected representatives, in every municipality and county in this state, find themselves in a fiscal straitjacket. 

(Prop 13 is known as the "3rd rail of California politics." When no less a personage than Warren Buffet told our incumbent governor it should be done away with, his advice met with humerous disdain and then was completely ignored.)

Money, money and more money
Santa Barbara is a liberal, slow-growth community, renown for its aesthetics and its sensitivity to environmental issues. When Fess Parker (yup, Davy Crockett), who is a very rich vineyard and land owner and developer here, wanted to build a big, environmentally and aesthetically insensitive hotel on the beautiful boulevard that fronts our splendid beach, he was turned down by the Planning Commission and the City Council. He was turned down twice. And twice he tried to nullify the decision of our elected representatives by putting the question of whether or not to have the hotel directly to the people ? via a ballot initiative. Fortunately, the good people of the town rebuffed him. But not before millions of dollars were spent by proponents and opponents.

And there's the rub.

Hiram, old man, you must be twirling in your grave to see what has become of your effort to root out the special interests. Because what your initiative, referendum and recall have become is the battleground of the special interests. It is expensive to mount a public campaign for or against a ballot proposition, even at the local level. At the statewide level it is outrageously expensive. Gathering the requisite number of good signatures comes with a stiff tab. (Typically signature gatherers are paid operatives, not volunteers.) The administrative costs are huge. And selling people on voting your way involves lots of direct mail and that scourge of all modern politics: the media buy.

Taxpayers are forced to pay some of these costs themselves. But most of the important funding comes from the special interests. The special interests with deep pockets. This is a quote from ElectionWatchdog.org, chronicling the backers of an anti-consumer initiative the California Chamber of Commerce put on the ballot last year: 

Many of the initiative's corporate donors have also written checks to Governor Schwarzenegger, who has received $1.3 million from firms which have given more than $2 million to the initiative. Common donors to Schwarzenegger and the Chamber ballot initiative include: Blue Cross, State Farm, Citigroup, GlaxoSmithKline, Southern California Edison, Oracle, Microsoft, Safeway, Bank of America, Pacificare, Ameriquest, AIG, Intel, Kaiser, and General Motors.

The abuse of the process that Johnson put in place for all the right reasons was never more egregious than in the 2003 recall of Gray Davis. Californians had made other attempts to remove their duly elected governor ? almost on a whim, one might think, since the intention of the recall provision was to remove a governor from office for dereliction of constitutional duty, not for mere ineptitude, or because you didn't like him. (In that intention it was meant to be the equivalent of  the impeachment and removal of a president.) Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, and Pete Wilson were all the subject of recall attempts, any of which might have succeeded with the kind of money muscle we saw in 2003.

The Davis recall was funded from the private fortune of the man who hoped to succeed him, Republican Congressman Darrell Issa. With magnificent irony, Issa was forced to retreat from the field (in tears, some noted) when Hollywood glamour and the Big Republican Money Machine propelled Arnold Schwarzenegger to the front. The recall became a circus, with more than 100 candidates jockeying for position on the ballot. And it was confusing. It required you to vote on two separate measures: one for or against the recall, the other for a candidate. If the recall succeeded, the governorship would then go to the candidate with one vote more than the runner-up.

Dazed and confused
This raises other critical points about initiatives. They proliferate. On any given ballot there will be a multiplicity of them, municipal  as well as statewide ones. They are often obfuscatory, in title and text. Sometimes there are two that do essentially the same thing, and both must get a majority, with the one gaining more votes than the other the text that prevails. There are other permutations and combinations. This makes it hard indeed for ordinary citizens to make proper judgments, with the result that we are even more than usual at the mercy of direct mail imprecations and the 30-second TV ad. We are simply not qualified, as just folk, to parse the legalisms and language complexities of the texts themselves. Nor do we have the context in which to assess the probable effects. Some optimistically, or euphemistically, call this "direct democracy." But in my view it is more akin to Plato's definition of democracy: anarchy.

Blowback
It is harder to run California than the Governator had imagined. He was unable to negotiate successfully with the legislature to put in place the measures he calls his reform package, but which have been seen as direct threats to a number of key constituencies in the state: nurses, teachers, public employees, police, firefighters. And so he decided to take his program directly to the people in what the Christian Science Monitor aptly called a political end run. Thus there is to be a Special Election this November ? which is estimated to cost California taxpayers $70-80 million. On top of that there are the millions Aahnold has raised from his pals in corporate America in order to promote his package.

(Sidebar: In a peculiar deal of the cards, Arnold Schwarzenegger went to Florida to raise big money for his Special Election campaign, only to find that Jeb Bush is fighting there against the use of the initiative, fearful that big money from outside the state will hijack the process.)

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the ballot box: Schwarzenegger's early popularity has evaporated ? his approval rating stands at 34%, and continues to drop. A string a broken promises, political mis-steps, some outright gaming of the system, and in fact the whole Special Election hoopla itself have left his program in shambles. As of today there is even the possibility that he will call off the Special Election rather than risk utter humiliation in November. At the moment, prospects for his re-election in 2006 do not look good; that is, if he even decides to run.

We have learned the hard way in California that the ballot initiative is not a cure-all, but in fact too often creates more problems than it solves. We would be well advised to pay far more attention to our choice of representatives during regular election cycles, and continue to make our citizen voices heard ? through all the techniques we have learned in these last few years ? to hold them accountable to us during their term of office.

Ours is a representative democracy and must remain so. Else we will be held hostage by the powerful interests that mirror the ones Hiram Johnson fought so successfully in his long life as a public servant. If you still have any doubts, please read this. And then make damn sure that Virginia doesn't fall prey to the evil practice that is already too widespread in the land.

Respectfully,

Ellen Dana Nagler
Santa Barbara, CA
The Broad View, a blog
BE for Change, a PAC

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