HOW TO MAKE CALIFORNIA COUNT AGAIN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2012 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“HOW TO MAKE CALIFORNIA COUNT AGAIN”

          Back in 1948, when most of America woke up the day after the presidential election and learned to its surprise that Harry Truman had defeated Thomas Dewey, California counted. It was only because of this state’s late-reporting vote that Truman won out.

          But there was no suspense about California’s vote this month: the television networks called the state for Democrat Barack Obama the moment the polls closed.

          In 1948, Truman whistle-stopped the state, speaking from the rear balcony of his campaign train in big cities and small towns like Madera, Turlock and Tulare. People saw their President in the flesh, something only a few wealthy Californians could do this year.

The outcome here was so certain this time – as it has been since 1992 – that neither Obama nor Republican Mitt Romney nor either of their vice presidential running mates held even one campaign rally in the Golden State. They came here only when their cash supplies began running short, essentially to recharge their wallets from the nation’s leading political ATM.

For votes they went to the “swing states,” with more than two-thirds of the last month’s candidate campaign appearances confined to just three states: Ohio, Florida and Virginia. There were occasional forays to exotic locales like Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, Nevada and Michigan, but not even many of those.

          As for states like Texas, California and New York – three of the nation’s four largest – forget about it. That’s because the outcomes in those states are foregone conclusions these days, so certain that candidates don’t even bother to advertise here.

          California’s place in the Democratic column grew even more solid during this year, as the state's Democrats registered several hundred thousand more voters during the fall than Republicans, who talked a lot about outreach, but did very little actual reaching. The state GOP sank below 30 percent of all registered voters for the first time ever, while Democrats moved up to about 44 percent, with most of the rest declaring no party preference.

          It’s not that California votes mean little; it’s just that the preponderance go Democratic and everyone knows it in advance. So how to give California voters as much clout as folks in Ohio, who are pestered non-stop during election season, both in person and electronically?

          It’s plain how to make the California presidential primary more important: Move it back up into early February, like it was four years ago when this state went pretty big for Hillary Clinton and almost deprived Obama of the Democratic nomination. By scheduling the most recent primary last June, state legislators almost completely deprived it of meaning.

          The solution for the November general election, when there's just one Election Day across the nation, is not so obvious, but California has already made a move in the right direction.

          That came with little public attention in August, 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bipartisan bill placing this state in the forefront of the National Popular Vote movement, the measure sponsored by the then-chairmen of both the Republican and Democratic caucuses in the state Assembly.

          If it ever becomes effective, this plan would lessen the emphasis on the Electoral College that causes candidates to concentrate their efforts on just a few swing states. It would also prevent situations like the George W. Bush vs. Albert Gore outcome of 2000, when Gore won half a million more votes nationally, only to lose the presidency in the Electoral College.

          The idea is for states to pledge all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. The plan was adopted by the Legislature in both 2009 and 2010, but vetoed twice by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It commits California to vote with the national popular majority, but not until states with a total of 270 electoral votes agree to it. So far, with places like Illinois, Massachusetts, Washington state, and Maryland aboard, the plan is halfway to its threshold level. So far all nine states signed on are “blue” – the went Democratic in this month’s vote. Like California, none of the others got much attention from presidential candidates.

          This plan would make an extra vote in heavily Democratic San Francisco or Los Angeles or heavily Republican Madera or Orange counties count as much as one in Kent, Ohio – not the case today. It would force candidates to campaign everywhere, something presidential aspirants did as recently as 1970, when Republican Richard Nixon visited 49 states and Democratic rival George McGovern went to 48.

          Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed this plan might deprive Californians of the clout their sheer numbers should command. He was wrong about that, as he was about many other things.

          For Californians have no presidential clout these days because they are preponderantly loyal to one party. Ironically, that also renders the other party’s votes almost meaningless.

          Put all voters everywhere on an equal basis, and candidates would have to spend time in the most populous places rather than merely chase electoral votes. That can only be good for California and almost all other parts of America.

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      Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WIN FOR PET PROPOSITION PROVES BROWN DIFFERENT AS EVER

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WIN FOR PET PROPOSITION PROVES BROWN DIFFERENT AS EVER"

          Jerry Brown’s signature was notably absent from the ballot arguments in favor of Proposition 30, the tax increase measure he pushed so hard in this fall’s election. He was essentially responsible for its content and for the now-mooted triggered budget cuts that – barring a “Perils of Pauline”-style rescue – would have cost public schools and universities more than $6 billion over the next year alone.

          Brown, who raised most of the money for his measure and rounded up endorsements from business and labor that gave it added credibility, has prided himself for decades on being iconoclastic and different from other governors.

          Now he should become known as one of the most effective governors California has seen. For sure, his Prop. 30 win proves him pretty unique. A long string of California chief executives before him tried and failed to pass pet initiatives after state legislators refused to okay the laws they wanted. The list goes back at least as far as Ronald Reagan, who staged a special election in 1973 in an effort to pass a property-tax-cutting initiative, which lost badly.

          Reagan’s subsequent presidency, of course, stands as evidence that losing an issues battle at the polls does not necessarily mean the end of a political career.

          It was the same for Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in 2005 called another special election barely two years after ousting ex-Gov. Gray Davis in a historic recall. He ran four initiatives aiming to curb the influence of labor unions in politics and to give himself and future governors the power to cut budgets long after they’ve been signed into law. Voters saw that last notion as a kind of fiscal dictatorship and rejected it – just as they did this year in voting down Prop. 31, which included something similar as part of its far-reaching so-called reforms.

          Then-Gov. Pete Wilson tried much the same thing with his 1992 Proposition 165, and also lost. But like Schwarzenegger and Reagan, Wilson nevertheless went on to further electoral success.

      He didn’t write, design or sponsor the 1994 Proposition 187, with its draconian anti-illegal immigrant provisions, but he used it skillfully to win reelection – and in the process wrote a virtual death sentence for the California Republican Party, which has won major office since then only in races involving movie muscleman Schwarzenegger.

          Exit polls indicated voters saw Proposition 165 as a blatant Wilson power play. He tied the budget powers he wanted for himself and all future governors to welfare reforms, seeking to cut grants to mothers on Aid to Families with Dependent Children by 25 percent and demanding that the first year’s welfare payments to newcomers from other states be no higher than what they could get where they came from.

          Wilson predecessors George Deukmejian and Brown himself also lost initiative battles during their first terms, but both were reelected.

          Which means the claims that Brown’s entire electoral future was on the line with Proposition 30 were a tad exaggerated. Still, by winning, Brown has set himself up as a possible fiscal savior for California.

        The claim is yet to be tested, but he said in a pre-election talk that “This sets us on a path to a more harmonious California.” He noted that “Getting Republicans in the Legislature to approve new taxes has been a bit like getting the pope to back birth control.” With the new Democratic legislative supermajorities, maybe they won't matter much anymore.

         The win for 30 doesn’t guarantee that Brown will run again two years from now. But even before it passed, he hinted that he intends to.

         “My goal over the next few years,” he said in one speech, “is to pull people together. We have our antagonisms and we always have had some, but we can find a common path.” Why? Because “California matters to us and our descendants, and also to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.” The implication, of course, was that Brown wants to be the trailblazer finding that common path.

          No doubt, Brown would have had a tougher time both governing and winning the fourth term of his lifetime if Proposition 30 had failed.

          Plus, no one does better than Brown at making adjustments on the run. When he saw in 2010 that his campaign for governor was flagging, he ran commercials where he spoke directly into the TV camera, saying “No new taxes without a vote of the people.” He did exactly the same when Prop. 30 – the product of that pledge – began to sag in mid-October.

          Having lost a run for the Senate in 1982, and two tries at the presidency, Brown is well aware he’s not immune to the same sorts of defeat virtually almost all governors have suffered during the initiative era that began in 1970. The relief for him, and for the schools and colleges that might have been cut, is that this time he won’t have to demonstrate how to respond constructively to defeat.

          -30-

     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

PROP. 32 LOSS SHOWS VOTERS WANT LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“PROP. 32 LOSS SHOWS VOTERS WANT LEVEL PLAYING FIELD”

If there was one big reason why “paycheck protection,” on Tuesday’s ballot as Proposition 32, failed for the third time in the last 16 years, it was this: The concept by itself is simply unfair.

          Like its predecessors in 1996 and 2005, Proposition 32 aimed to deprive labor unions of their voice in California politics while not touching corporations or the billionaire political class that has become increasingly active in recent years.

          This time around, paycheck protection tried to hide behind a bit of a fig leaf, but it just didn’t work. Even the television commercials aired by the extremely well funded “yes” campaign had holes in them wide enough to drive several trucks through, holes obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention.

          The fig leaf was this: Rather than just banning unions from using member dues for political purposes unless members sign off for it every year, as both previous paycheck protection bills tried to do, this one also included a provision banning direct contributions from both unions and corporations to political candidates.

          So there was the surface appearance of even-handedness. But reality is that most corporate and individual donations don’t go to candidates anymore, anyhow. Especially since the 2010 Citizens United decision of the U.S. Supreme Court – the one letting corporations spend unlimited amounts on politics – most corporate campaign money has gone to so-called “independent expenditure committees.” These are nominally beyond the control of candidates, even though many prominent ones in the last few years have been headed by immediate past aides of the politicians those so-called “Super PACs” support.

          The intent, then, was to deprive labor unions of much of their political capital while letting corporations and the ultra-rich keep pouring as much cash as they like into their own causes and candidates.

          The primary funding for the measure came from billionaires, who also give large sums to Super PACs because state and federal laws limit direct donations from individuals to candidates.

          One way to equalize this would be to put corporate shareholders – even those who own stock indirectly through mutual funds or pension funds – on an equal footing with union members. Let both classes of citizen (yes, some people fall into both classes) have the power to withhold their money from political uses. If union members get the power to restrict use of their dues, shareholders should be able to say no to political spending by companies in which they invest, in proportion to the shares they own.

          So far, no one has attempted an evenhanded initiative like this, one with the potential to dramatically reduce political spending on all sides.

          Proposition 32 backers, including the state Chamber of Commerce, clearly knew this idea has great public appeal; hence the design of the fig leaf they deployed this time.

          But plenty of others saw through it instantly. And the many TV commercials for 32 that were funded by the likes of the Kansas oil-baron Koch brothers, producer Jerry Perenchio, billionaire heir and physicist Charles Munger Jr. and venture capitalist Tim Draper were almost laughably amateurish.

          “No loopholes, no exceptions,” one ad blared, over and over and over. But the loopholes were obvious to anyone who looked beyond the mere text of the commercials. There was plenty of room for corporations and the extremely wealthy to keep donating as and where they like. Even labor unions could easily have found loopholes via tactics like creating social action committees to spend the union dues money that now goes to politics. Those committees could put out cause-oriented advertisements that just might happen to favor causes and candidates favored by Big Labor.

          This was a classic case of the sort of lawmaking ineptitude and prevarication that gives ammunition to critics of the initiative movement, folks who say there are always flaws and loopholes.

          But this putative measure lost, like about 83 percent of all initiatives historically do. Which means the voters aren’t as dumb as some in politics think and the initiative process worked just fine, as it generally does. They saw through this one despite the blizzard of ads for it, and the only group that will ever profit from it all is political consultants, who often get a percentage of every advertising dollar their clients spend.

          

           -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

SLEEPING GIANT STIRS AS LATINO VOTERS WIN FOR OBAMA

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“SLEEPING GIANT STIRS AS LATINO VOTERS WIN FOR OBAMA”

          Weeks before Tuesday's election, President Obama began to realize his only chance for victory: Awaken the so-called sleeping giant of American politics, the approximately 50.5 million Latinos or Spanish-speaking U.S. residents, 26 million of whom are eligible to vote.

          “If I win,” he said in late October, “it will be because of Latinos.”

          Obama and his private pollsters, then, may have had a clue that something was happening among Hispanic voters, those whose ethnic roots lie in Mexico, Central and South America, as well as Spain and Portugal.

          Something important was indeed occurring. So now there’s the possibility the same effect which turned California from a generally Republican state to a reliably Democratic one in presidential politics may spread elsewhere. This state changed from mostly red, in television parlance, to almost exclusively blue after the anti-illegal immigrant 1994 Proposition 187 passed handily, threatening millions with loss of public schooling, emergency room care and other services.

          Within three years of its passage, more than 2.5 million Latinos became naturalized citizens and registered to vote in California, almost all of them solidly Democratic then and now.

          What happened Tuesday was an extension both of that and the 2010 “Harry Reid effect,” in which all supposedly reliable polls showed Reid, the Senate majority leader, losing his reelection bid to arch-conservative Republican Sharron Angle, a Tea Party-backed candidate.

          But those surveys, measuring the sentiments of what they called “likely voters,” badly underestimated the number of Latinos who would turn out. Reid, who went into Election Day trailing by five points in the polls, won by about six points.

          This year, the last pre-election versions of polls put Republican Mitt Romney ahead by one percent to two percent in the national popular vote. But when the final popular vote is in, Obama will lead in that count by at least 1 percent, besides winning big in the Electoral College.

          The key for him was among Latinos.

          “When you look at polls in any state that’s competitive with a big component of the electorate being Latino, you tend to see that they tend to underestimate the Latino vote,” University of Nevada political science Prof. David Damore told a reporter.

          Added Matt Barrero of the University of Washington and the Latino Decisions polling outfit, “Pollsters missed a component of the correct proportion of Spanish interviews. They underestimated a growing part of the electorate, and this is the part that is most heavily Democratic.”

          Barrero’s outfit predicted that Latinos nationally would vote for Obama over Romney by about a 3-1 margin. It was greater than that in swing states like Nevada and Colorado, not to mention California.

          Obama won in 2008 by getting record numbers of minority and youth voters to turn out. He won about 80 percent of non-white votes that year, while losing the white vote to John McCain by 6 percent. This year, Obama won not much more than 35 percent of white votes, but even more minorities turned out than four years ago. In an increasingly diverse country, where Latinos are the No. 2 ethnic group behind only Caucasians, that was enough. The Latino vote was about 25 percent larger than in 2008.

          “We knew Latinos would vote in record numbers,” said Eliseo Medina, national head of the Service Employees International Union, whose membership is heavily Hispanic. “There is no longer any doubt we are a political force to be reckoned with.”

          And because virtually all Latino citizens whose families have been in this country for two generations or less have some blood tie to at least one illegal immigrant, the treatment of illegals became the central issue for them. While Romney was calling for “self-deportation” and campaigning with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the chief author of Arizona’s SB 1070, the racial profiling law detested by almost all Latinos, Obama granted administrative relief to as many as 4 million youthful illegals.

          That helped make up for the letdown his Latino supporters suffered when he failed to produce a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.

          But Latinos voted not just on immigration. “We certainly don’t need any more profiling laws like AB 1070,” said Medina. “But we also didn’t need repeal of a healthcare law that will cover 9 million more Latinos and we don’t need a tax system that rewards the 1 percent. As much as some candidates manipulate their rhetoric, we can read between the lines.”

          That all spelled another four-year term for Obama and guarantees both parties will pay even more attention to Latino issues than they have. It also means polling firms like Gallup and Rasmussen, whose readings were mistaken, need to go back to the drawing board.

         -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net