I don't know if this is an old adage or a new one I've coined based on years of depressing observations, but it seems that California's political leaders mostly operate according to the following principle: The best way to avoid taking action on something is to call for "action."
The aftermath of the May 19 special election affords us an especially good look at this principle in, well, action.
With a couple of exceptions, the declared and putative candidates for governor in next year's race have taken pains to dodge its real implications, beyond seconding Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's view that the public must be frustrated with Sacramento and observing that something must be done.
Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner (GOP) called for an "immediate restructuring of state government," which is pretty safe since everyone knows that on the Gonna Happen scale, that's a "not." Ex-EBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman (GOP) endorsed a mass layoff of 30,000 state employees, which may or may not be consistent with her support for "making government more efficient and effective." You make the call. Anyway, that's about as explicit as she got.
On the Democratic side, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown has been largely silent. I asked his spokesman if Brown thought a constitutional convention should convene to reconsider the two-thirds legislative supermajority needed to pass a budget, term limits and ballot-box budgeting. He said Brown thinks it's "premature to comment on a proposal whose basic elements have yet to be defined."
As prepared statements go, this one is just nowheresville.
In terms of the state's fiscal condition and its cracked governance model, "we're about where we were in 1996-97" (that is, in the wake of several years of recession), Fred Silva, senior fiscal policy analyst for the good-government group California Forward, told me last week.
Silva, who served on the constitutional revision commission of that era, adds: "We need the same discussion we had then, but we need to hurry up." He notes that the legislature never took up the commission's recommendations because by the time they came up, the budget was flush with dot-com capital gains. We're now paying for that dereliction.
Which brings us to the Democratic mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, and ex-Republican congressman and state Finance Director Tom Campbell.
