Indeed, politics in California has entered a bizarre post-terminal stage, a sort of rigor mortis punctuated by violent twitching. The twitches are 80-second television ads, which constitute the sum and substance of the campaign. There are no crowds, rallies, speeches or town meetings (the state is said to be too big to stump). There was one debate. The “issues” are those that can fit into a television commercial, and Pete Wilson-unloved and unremarkable, a human fallback position-stands as the reigning genius of the form, able to reduce the entire electoral process to a few symbolic issues, impaling his opponents without the ugly personal attacks that are the usual fodder of these witless ceremonies.
This year Wilson’s opponent is state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, who has seemed unable to define herself as anything more than the sister and daughter of other California governors. The “issues” have been crime–especially the death penalty–and illegal immigration. The latter has been particularly hot, the subject of one of California’s famous ballot questions (Prop. 187), which would deny public services–school, health care–to those who are here illegally. The governor freely admits that passage of the measure would only produce a lawsuit to elicit a Supreme Court decision on states’ rights in these matters. It would have no immediate impact on the lives of Californians (nor would the death penalty, for that matter). And so, the race for governor in a state that has seen vast economic and social upheavals in the past four years consists entirely of ephemera. There are conservatives who defend the vapid cynicism of the enterprise: the bottom line is antigovernment, they say. But that is much too cute. The real bottom line is the preservation of the status quo, a vast, anachronistic state bureaucracy that has slowly strangled the nation’s most vibrant state.
Pete Wilson is more a mechanic than an ideologue. He governs less divisively than he runs (a trait inherited from his mentor, Richard Nixon). He came to office in 1990 promising “preventive” government–that is, a mix of social programs like prenatal care and early education, plus new strictures on welfare, to discourage dependency. But he was quickly overwhelmed by disasters. “This poor man was hit with more plagues than they had in the Bible,” said Judy Penny–cook, a Salinas Republican. The state’s defense-dependent economy collapsed with the end of the cold war. There were riots, fires, floods, earthquakes. There were huge budget deficits to close. Wilson closed them by raising taxes and slashing programs–but not bureaucrats, whose number actually increased in his four years. It was not inspired governance; Wilson was assumed beatable–and Brown was running 20 points ahead, until the advertising began.
Meeting Kathleen Brown is something of a shock: she is energetic, personable, optimistic–and she has a plan. She would launch a “performance review” to cut the bureaucracy, as Texas and the federal government have done. Texas saved $5 billion; the federal government, enough to fund the $30 billion crime bill. California’s swollen bureaucracy would seem an equally plausible target. Brown says she wants to hire more cops, cut business taxes and enhance the schools (more likely she’ll use the savings to balance the budget). But she’s had a tough time communicating this–a consequence of ineptitude and indecision, and the nature of the game. It’s a difficult message, one that requires a leap of faith-that politicians will move against their own kind. This is a Knievel-like leap in Brown’s case, as she’s often seemed a wholly owned subsidiary of the state’s reactionary and dreadful public employees unions. “But they know there’s a crisis,” she says. “They know when you’re sick, you have to take medicine-and it’s bitter, and painful, but it’s the only way to get well.”
There is a curious calculus to public life in California: once in office, politicians can only do the unexpected. Pete Wilson was able to get a tax increase only because he was a Republican–his GOP supporters joined tax-prone Democrats to pass it. “Kathleen could never get a tax increase from the Republicans,” says Benjamin Zycher of UCLA and the libertarian Cato Institute, “so she’d be forced to deal with the spending side.” Most Californians will not know this as they go to the polls. They will be voting on the issues Pete Wilson has defined, especially illegal immigration–which seemed to be turning sour last week as people realized that the only way to enforce the law would be a system of ID cards (which Wilson seems to support). And Kathleen Brown, suddenly playing sound-bite politics as well as her opponent, dashed over to the Motor Vehicles Bureau for a press conference: “You like this place?” she said. “Well, Pete Wilson wants to create another bureaucracy just like it . . .”
