Tactical Confusion
OF ALL THE SLY tactics commanded by the backroom bosses of initiative campaigns -- elicit fear, evoke compassion, pander to greed -- one of the simplest is this: sow confusion. If politics is a rhetorical form of combat, few weapons are more effective than the fog of war.
A perfect example confounds voters now -- Propositions 78 and 79 on the Nov. 8 ballot appear to be quite similar but in fact have crucial differences. But this is hardly the first time that the state's famous affinity for ballot measures has forced the electorate to make a baffling choice.
Even in the state's fondly remembered postwar Golden Age, gamesmanship surrounded the initiative process. In 1952, Democrats and Republicans mounted competing measures to reform the state's system of primary voting.
Republicans wanted to preserve "cross-filing," which allowed politicians to compete in the primaries of multiple parties, because it helped them win more seats in the Legislature. Democrats sponsored a ballot measure to abolish the practice, which they branded a sneaky political relic. Republicans countered with their own ballot measure, designed to weaken but not eliminate cross-filing. On top of that, the Republican secretary of state assigned the Democratic measure the unlucky number 13 and gave the GOP-backed version lucky number 7. (In the end, the GOP outsmarted itself. Voters approved the Republican measure, but the changes still ended up benefiting Democrats.)
The clutter of competing measures has only grown more complex. In 1988, for example, an array of initiatives dealt with the sharply rising cost of car insurance. Voters eventually adopted Proposition 103, cutting rates sharply, but first they had to navigate through the cacophony of electoral background noise surrounding the issue, including the hype for Proposition 104, a no-fault insurance proposal backed by the insurance industry and dismissed by many consumer advocates.
Then there are times when confusion is the result not of multiple initiatives but misdirection in the way a single measure is written, so that the wording disguises who is behind it or its likely outcome.
In 1996, the owners of mobile home parks were among the sponsors of an initiative that was pitched as a way to increase affordable housing, although its real purpose was to loosen up rent control in the parks. Just last year, card clubs and racetracks sponsored a measure ostensibly designed to extract a "fair share" of state taxes from the gambling profits of Indian tribes with casinos. In fact, it was more about legalizing slot machines for those same clubs and racetracks.
