Bruce Maiman
Some of you may feel like Claude Rains in “Casablanca”: You were shocked, shocked, that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s approval numbers in the latest Field Poll were at a personal-low 27 percent.
And yes, you were shocked that 59 percent of registered voters think he’ll leave California in worse shape than he found it.
I hope you’re happy, because his legacy, whatever that is, is not his alone. It’s yours, too.
And if the state is worse off now than it was under Gray Davis, maybe voters, too, deserve a 27 percent approval rating.
True, we have a state Legislature which, when not engaged in childish partisan bickering, plays hand puppet to unions, lobbyists and special interest groups. We don’t like that much, but we keep sending the same faces back to the statehouse only to complain about them. Again.
How many more clues do voters in even the most gerrymandered districts need? How many more speeches do we have to hear from California lawmakers before we finally face the music? The state is broken, ungovernable, unable to save itself. Democrats and Republicans failed, as did we.
Rather than demand that lawmakers address the systemic problems behind our dysfunctional government apparatus, voters turn to ballot measures which have, at best, been a placebo. The referendum process isn’t really ours; it’s in the hands of powerful interests with enough money to organize a petition drive and get something passed which is either flawed, like Proposition 13, unconstitutional, like Proposition 187, or poorly conceived and legally vulnerable like Proposition 8.
But we never learn. Today, Scott Brown in Massachusetts is the hope du jour. To Californians, that should be déjà vu all over again. The same reasons that drove voters there to elect a Republican to the Senate drove Californians to boot Davis: Angry voters, people splitting from party ranks, Democrats going independent saying, “No, I don’t like Davis and we’re gonna send a message!”
My question is: How come nobody got the message in 2003? Why are we sending a message again in Massachusetts when we just “sent a message” electing Barack Obama the year before?
You can’t just send a message to politicians; you have to stay on message, the heat turned up like a blast furnace. The recall was a fool’s errand, indicative of voter negligence. Short of a felony, there’s no reason to remove a duly elected person from office. You take responsibility for your choice. The plurality of Californians who cast a “yea” vote in that recall essentially cast a ballot for a vote of “no confidence” against their ability to responsibly govern themselves.
That’s why the state is broken. We’re not diligent, we’re not vigilant, we don’t pressure.
Lawmakers don’t fear us. We act as if they’re in charge. No: They work for us. But we’re lousy employers who make bad hires for a company so broken – California – that closing it down might be its best and only hope.
Maybe we should let California fail. I don’t mean governance; the state has already proven itself a failure on that front. I’m talking about insolvency – complete bankruptcy.
Sometimes I imagine all 38 million of us standing at the Nevada border, pushing until California breaks off and floats out to sea, and then dispatching a submarine from San Diego to torpedo the state and sink it into the Pacific.
Maybe letting the state collapse would wake up enough of us to stop being spectators, roll up our sleeves, and fix this mess rather than rely on political parlor tricks like recall elections or outsiders trying to buy an election by spending their millions telling us, “We need to create jobs.” Really? Wow, aren’t you the genius! California has a long list of problems that needs fixing, and we can all make a good list. But the solution isn’t in what things need to be done; it’s a question of who will do them. We voters blame the government but the problem is we voters are the government.
Democracy does not work unless you work it. Right now, the only ones I see working it are politicians and the special interest groups to which they are beholden. That can only end when we demand they end it.
When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, a woman approached Benjamin Franklin to ask, “What are we, are we a monarchy, an oligarchy, a democracy?”
Franklin replied, “We have given you a republic – if you can keep it.” We’re not very good keepers. We’re letting the inmates run the asylum.