Gray Davis and California Recall results thread

I work for the INS, and I cannot think of one person who is for driver's licenses for illegals. It opens a huge can of worms and further legitimates those of illegal status. Even though they submit a thumbprint (something that can be altered) they are not subject to any law enforcement checks along the way. I do not see how this would help law enforcement or the INS in anyway. I do, however, see how it can lead to a mess of problems.

 

Garth said

You would be right, if the name only continued to refer to that incident; but it does not. What it refers to, on the whole, is a support of progressive policies and politics. Good try, Red-Seven...I almost agreed with you.

Can't even call MoveOn.Org a left wing liberal website, can you?

 

Recall Arnold!! No, not really!

No, I don?t actually think that Arnold should be recalled. But there are people who do: lefty blogger Chris Mooney says ?just tell me where to sign.? And lefty site The DailyKos wants to launch Recall Arnold saying, ?It?ll now be our turn.? (Then there?s the Doonesbury cartoon from a couple of weeks back, which included a ?recall Arnold? petition in its last frame.)

Other lefties disagree: Kevin Drum writes: ?Trying to mount a recall against Arnold would be bad for California, bad for the Democratic party, and only distracts attention from the bigger task at hand: electing a Democrat to the White House in 2004.? But then he notes that his readers don?t seem to feel the same way: ?Well, so far the comments are running pretty strongly in favor of all-out war.? And Aziz Poonawalla writes that Democrats should be focusing on Bush, not Arnold.

My own feeling, for what it?s worth, is that launching a recall campaign against Arnold would look childish. But what do I know ? I didn?t think the Davis recall would succeed when it first appeared, either.

Regardless, though, I do think that people who criticize the whole idea of recalls as anti-democratic are missing something. (And, to be fair, that?s the real point of Chris Mooney?s comments ? he wants to create so much chaos that California voters will amend away the recall provision.)

Recalls aren?t anti-democratic. They are, if anything, anti-republican ? by which I mean that they?re inconsistent with the ?republican principle? of representative government over direct democracy. (It?s ironic, isn?t it, that at the moment the main champions of this republican principle are Democrats?) And representative government, for reasons that Madison, et al., spelled out in The Federalist, is a good thing.

But it?s not the only good thing. A danger faced by all governments ? including representative governments ? is the danger that they will be taken over and paralyzed by what economist Mancur Olson, in a famous book titled The Rise and Decline of Nations, called a ?web of special interests.? Because it pays for special interest groups and politicians to collude, lining their pockets at the taxpayers? expense, Olson argued that nations ? and perhaps especially representative ones ? would tend toward paralysis over time, as special interest groups locked up government revenues and fought off changes.

That sounds a lot like what has happened in California, where the power of public employee unions and other special interests has gotten the state into a political and budgetary crisis from which it?s now trying to escape, but where the very same political structure, pre-recall, made it impossible to fix things because any serious change would threaten too many powerful interests. Olson wrote that it would take a major shock to break the web of special interests ? he noted that Germany and Japan recovered so well after World War II in part because pre-existing special interest relationships were disrupted ? and wondered at America?s comparative freedom from special interest webs given its long history of the same kind of government.

I explored these issues at much more length, and with more sophistication, in a law review article entitled Is Democracy Like Sex? which you can read here. But the bottom line is that, short of a war, the recall process is a pretty good method of breaking up the web of special interests. All the cozy lobbyist-and-campaign-contribution relationships that existed under the Gray Davis regime will be rather drastically changed in the Schwarzenegger administration. And that?s probably a good thing for California?s long-term prospects, regardless of whether you think Arnold will be a good governor or not.

The recall process has hit the California political communi

 

Way off topic:

Can't even call MoveOn.Org a left wing liberal website, can you?

I am working on getting away from hotbutton buzzword labels that limit us to one dimensional politics.

Progress = moving on. What more do you want Trip?

Besides, why would I label it that anyway, when I've got you to do it for us?

 

Analysis from The Economist

...It is easy to count the reasons why Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory may be a special case, without wider significance. He won partly because of his exceptional celebrity, and partly because the recalled governor, Gray Davis, had all the popularity of a cat at a dog show. That circumstance may not repeat itself very often. He won as an outsider in a state that is peculiar anyway, in an election that was more than peculiar, when voters were uncommonly angry with elected officials.

Yet the fact remains that Mr Schwarzenegger has instantly become the second-best-known Republican in the country. He has become governor of a state with 55 Electoral College votes?a state, moreover, that many Republicans had almost written off (Al Gore won California by 1.3m votes in 2000, and 44% of Californian voters now register as Democrats, compared with 35% as Republicans). He brought a disaffected cohort of voters into the electoral process and into his party. Republicans would be foolish to write this off as merely another weird consequence of Californian voters spending too much time in the sun.

The key to the wider meaning of Mr Schwarzenegger's victory lies partly in his policies?much more liberal than those of most Republicans?and even more in the kind of person he is, including the sexual accusations that surfaced in the last days of the campaign. He is the first nationwide political figure to have embraced the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s (in its weaknesses as well as its strengths) and still stayed a Republican.

America was not unusual in experiencing the hedonistic, anti-authority, free-wheeling, drug-taking, free-sex counter-culture...But America was extremely unusual in experiencing a strong backlash against that revolution. Large parts of the country explicitly rejected almost everything it stood for. The counter-culture was pleasure-seeking, socially liberal and predominantly urban. The backlash was censorious, strict in its views on the family and personal morality, and predominantly suburban. The counter-culture was rooted in opposition to the Vietnam war. The backlash was strongly patriotic. The counter-culture was secular, or bound up in New Age spirituality. The backlash was especially strong among born-again Christians. This time, California was not the epicentre: the south was.

In America, Republicans became the party of the backlash. They won their most stalwart supporters among southern conservatives. They opposed abortion and homosexual marriage. They led the great set-piece battle of the culture war, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, partly for louche sexual behaviour.

Mr Schwarzenegger is the antithesis of censorious Republicanism. He supports gay rights, gun laws, environmental regulation and affirmative action...In his personal behaviour, as well as his policies, he represents a different kind of Republicanism.

...Over the past decade, Americans as a whole have become socially more tolerant, with declining disapproval of homosexuality, inter-racial dating and people with HIV or AIDS. In this respect, the Republican Party has been swimming against the tide, despite its successes at the polls.

...The problem is that America has an electoral system which exaggerates the importance of way-out opinion. Politicians control the drawing of district boundaries and frequently use that power to map out safe constituencies for themselves. California is an extreme instance. In the last redrawing of district boundaries, all but one of the state's 53 districts were in effect secured for the incumbent.

With their seats gerrymandered, elected politicians understandably align themselves more with the partisan views of activists (who have the power to propose another candidate for their seat) than with the moderate voters who actually elect them into office. It takes either an unusual figure or unusual circumstances to cut through this incumbency-protec

 

As in the Democratic party, we see a fragmentation where more high profile parties should truly be. This one dimensional political rightleft nonsense needs to be thrown out with the bathwater. Even the graphing mechansm for pigeonholing one's self in 2D doesn't do our country's diversity justice.

The breaks might just come from within, and not from without, as the Greens thought in '00. Once there is a big enough movement of resistance within a party, it's gotta bust. I know it would rally the "other side", but it seems both "sides" have internal resistance. Will it be a contest to see which "side" maintains a complacency towards its own internal rifts long enough to outlast the other?
From without?

Perot almost had something. Ventura's message to people that parties besides the two dominant ones is a great message, even if he couldn't gorvern very well (his governance is something about which I know very little).

Thanks for sharing that article, Red.

 

My only real opinon on the entire recall is that too much attention is being given to it. Gray Davis stayed or Arnold or McClintock or Bustamante got in, I didn't much care. It somehow seems... pretty unimportant if you don't happen to live in California.

All the luck to Arnold, except... could the media please apologize to everyone outside California for wasting everyone's time with this?

 

Didn't read it mentioned above in R7's links but one difficulty with having another recall is obtaining the required 12% of total number of voters from last election sign a petition.

Because so many more people voted this time out than last year, the 12% bar is now higher.....and unlikely to be reached.

 

The problem with Arnold being elected is imply this:

-There's basically no way he's going to raise 8 billion dollars without raising some kind of tax. If he can raise that by doing car washes more power to him.

-The budget has already been set for next year. 80% of the budget is already set. Once again, there's no way to overcome an 8 billion dollar deficit with 20% of a budget. In fact, the deficit is larger than Maryland's entire budget which is insane.

-Arnold has already proposed to repeal Gray Davis's car tax and some other random taxes. This will bump the deficit UP to 12 billion dollars. 12 freakin billion dollars.

-With a democratic lt. govenor, and a Democratic controlled House and Senate...well can anybody say gridlock?? Fillibuster???

There's no way he's going to be that effective of a govenor. If he is, like I said more power to him.

 

Well here's my breakdown of what we can expect to see from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

- Socially, he's pretty close to Gray Davis and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, unless you count immigration issues as a social issue. So don't expect to see (gay) "domestic partnership" benefits or abortion rights go away anytime soon. Basically, the social climate of California will probably be the same.

- He opposed both the illegal immigrants' driver's licensing bill and the business-required-to-provide-health-care bill that has just passed into the law, and has promised to fight to repeal the driver's license bill. (This may provoke a backlash from Latinos, many of whom voted for him.) To my knowledge he hasn't mentioned the health care bill, but sooner or later he might try to go after that too.

- The biggest difference between his administration and Davis's will be on the budget and economy. He's been vague on his plans for balancing the budget but has promised no new taxes (except for an emergency) and luring businesses back into the state, as well as cutting "wasteful spending". To me, that sounds UNCOMFORTABLY like cutting social programs and slashing taxes for corporations. This is the part about him I am most worried about.

 

As usual, awesome article on the split between moderates and conservatives in the GOP, R7.

 

Blogger post on Arnold's proposed 'Energy Policy'

Positive reviews, in terms of innovation and creating value for Californians.

 

I am curious whether Arnold will continue to press forward with Bustamante's suit against the energy companies that allegedly defrauded California out of approximately $9 billion according to the suit (there is your deficit solution) or will he let them out on a sweetheart settlement?

Also, Arnold has a strategy to request that the federal government compensate border states for dealing with illegal immigrants. Estimates are he might be able to extract a billion or two from Dubya.

 

A billion or two too little

 

Meanwhile, Gray Davis is signing everything he can. One bill, a ban on the sale of ephedra, will cause Metabolife, Inc. to probably move operations out of California.

I will not go into the merits of the ban. However, it is clear that the new law will only hurt California's economy more. And people wonder why California has a bduget problem? I hope Governor Schwarzenegger recognizes this for the scorched earth politics it is.

 

He opposed both the illegal immigrants' driver's licensing bill and the business-required-to-provide-health-care bill that has just passed into the law, and has promised to fight to repeal the driver's license bill. (This may provoke a backlash from Latinos, many of whom voted for him.)

Ah, but the Latinos who voted for him were - I hope - already able to obtain drivers' licenses. If they immigrated legally, they may see no reason to oppose Schwarzenegger's stance on illegals.

 

Exactly. The Latinos who voted for him know his how he feels about the DLs for illegals. People seem to forget there is a deep seated, conservative sector of Hispanic voters and that many Hispanics are just as against illegal immigration as everyone else.

 

womberty, chibiangi: True. Perhaps the legal Latinos voters might have friends and family that are illegals? I don't know for sure. But a new poll shows that a majority of Californians (I think it's somewhere in the mid 60's) oppose that law, so political support for its repealing might be easy to obtain after all.

 

It's certainly a possibility. There may also be many citizens who initially immigrated illegally, but eventually gained legal status. However, it's also possible that once here legally, they are trying to bring their family members over by legal means - which can take a very long time, and you can see how they might be offended by the state's support of illegal immigration. It's like the annoyance you feel when someone cuts in front of you in line, only on a grander scale.

Also worth noting, many of California's legal immigrants do not have families from Mexico and Central America that are immigrating illegally - because those immigrants are from other parts of the world, and while it might be possible for people from India and China to immigrate illegally, it probably takes a lot more money to cross the Pacific than the Rio Grande.


As for opposition to the drivers' licenses, if someone wanted to start a proposition to repeal the law it would probably pass. I guess you would just need someone to fund the petition drive...

 

Good point.

I could be wrong, but I believe that some people are already putting together a referendum on the driver's license law that will be on the ballot sometime next year.

 

With verve and luck, Arnold Schwarzenegger's politics may work

Are we ready for the Governator??

...One obvious precedent for the 38th governor of California, who will be sworn into office on November 17th on the steps of the Sacramento Capitol, is the sainted Ronald Reagan. But it could just as easily be Jesse ?the Body? Ventura, the wrestler who in 1998 rode a populist wave to become a one-shot, ultimately ineffectual, governor of Minnesota.

The sceptics are already preparing the political obituaries. Unlike Mr Reagan, Arnold is too inexperienced. There is still that past sexual misbehaviour to rake over (?playful?, according to the supposedly remorseful culprit; grossly offensive, according to the alleged playthings). The state's problems are too intractable. The budget alone is enough to make any Californian moneyman tear out his transplant....

...However, the underlying challenge has to do with the partisan nature of Californian politics, where the state presents an extreme version of the national picture. Thanks to redistricting, the state legislature is split between increasingly left-wing Democrats (who have big majorities in both houses) and a rump of increasingly hardline Republicans, typified by Tom McClintock, the conservative state senator who refused to bow out of the governor's race. How hard is Arnold?who claimed he would ?send a message to the political class that it will no longer be business as usual??prepared to push the legislature?

...If Arnold stands for anything it is ?thinking positive?, a mantra that sounds less of a cliché when you consider his extraordinary career. He has already bullied into life a team of advisers who span the political spectrum from Willie Brown, the liberal mayor of San Francisco, to George Shultz, a former Republican secretary of state. His education adviser is Richard Riordan, a former mayor of Los Angeles, and his finance director is Donna Arduin, who has balanced budgets in New York, Michigan and Florida. Already there is talk of a clever route out of the budget mess: Mr Schwarzenegger will ask the voters to approve both a borrowing of $20 billion and a cap on future spending. In other words, there will be enough money to cover the deficit, the governor will have kept to the letter (if not entirely the spirit) of his pledge not to raise taxes, and he will have sidelined the legislature.

Another reason why Mr Schwarzenegger's governorship of Californian unity stands a chance is because the legislature is in something of a funk. In theory the lawmakers' positions are impregnable (thanks to gerrymandering, only 15 of the 100 legislature seats up for election next year look competitive). But none of the party barons foresaw the sacking of Gray Davis, re-elected as their governor just one year ago, and the polls show that the legislators are even more unpopular than he was.

Momentum alone may give Governor Arnold a honeymoon start. He should get a special session of the legislature that would quash Mr Davis's idea of giving illegal immigrants driving licences and would also carry out a pro-business reform of the compensation given to injured workers. Then much depends on the economy. But if Mr Schwarzenegger's luck holds (and, like Mr Reagan, he has a knack of attracting that invaluable political commodity), the state could be well on the way to recovery by the time people start thinking about the 2006 election. Politicians may have to bite their lips and follow Mr Schwarzenegger. For all his weaknesses, the gubernator has a chance.