Mathews Joe - California crackup: how reform broke the Golden State and how we can fix it

CALIFORNIA CRACKUP

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the
generous support of the Lisa See Endowment
Fund in Southern California History of the
University of California Press Foundation.

How Reform Broke the Golden State
and How We Can Fix It

JOE MATHEWS AND MARK PAUL

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished
university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the
world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences,
and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England

2010 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mathews, Joe, 1973

California crackup : how reform broke the Golden State and
how we can fix it / Joe Mathews and Mark Paul.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26852-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-26656-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. CaliforniaPolitics and government. 2. Constitutional
historyCalifornia. 3. Direct democracyCalifornia.

I. Paul, Mark, 1948II. Title.

JK8716.M38 2010

320.9794dc22

2010004469

Manufactured in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post
consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified
and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and
manufactured by BioGas energy.

To Anna, Ben, Mom, and Dad.

To Robin, who makes all good things possible.

PART I
BUILDING AND BREAKING CALIFORNIA

4. From Teachers to Janitors:
Direct Democracy Demotes the Legislature

PART II
THE CALIFORNIA FIX

Epilogue. Good Rules
to Match Its Mountains

Every Californian who lives along the San Andreas Fault knows the moment. The house shudders, the doors rattle against their jambs, the glasses clink on the kitchen shelves, and the question rides out across the city at the speed of the P wave. Is this, finally, the Big One?

It is the same question Californians are asking themselves about this civic moment. They ask not just because the state is in crisis. California has never been far from crisis but has always found a way out, perhaps accounting for what the philosopher Josiah Royce, writing in 1886, called Californians extravagant trust in luck. They are asking the question because, in this moment, it feels like the luck has run out.

As we write, Californias unemployment rate has reached 12.5 percent, higher than in any recent recession. A few days before the jobs report, the University of California announced it was raising tuition by 32 percent for higher-income students. Angry students, fearful that they would be priced out of their college dreams, demonstrated and occupied buildings on campuses around the state, and dozens were arrested. Frail elderly and disabled persons found themselves unable to hire caregivers because of budget cuts and bureaucratic confusion in the in-home services program. A task force of business leaders in San Diego recommended that the city declare bankruptcy if it could not agree on a package of steep spending cuts and tax increases. The Legislative Analysts Office released its long-term state budget projection, which forecast annual deficits of 20 billionroughly equivalent to what California spends on prisons and higher education combinedfor years to come. In a six-week period, more than forty initiative proposals were filed at the attorney generals office for the 2010 elections.

The civic moment is defined by more than bad news. What makes this moment seem differentmakes it feel like what Californians call earthquake weatheris that California seems unable to talk about the crisis in a way that gets to the bottom of things and points toward a better day. The crisis struck the state at the beginning of the campaign to elect the next governor. But in its early months, at least, the campaign offered little of the honest conversation the state needs. The candidates were all longtime establishment insiders in business, politics or both, wrote Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine, two of the states savviest and most experienced political journalists. They are campaigning on shopworn rhetoric, threadbare ideology and conventional ideas, offering scant inspiration to alienated voters and angry citizens distrustful and disgusted with the Capitols ossified operations. At the heart of the civic moment is the fear that California lacks even a language, and an understanding, equal to its calamity.

This book is meant to fill that need. It comes in two parts.

The first part tells the story of how California built and broke its government, sometimes in the same gesture. Others have told pieces of this story, often in greater detail, and in ways that illuminated the meaning of California, both to itself and to America. We stand, in particular, on the shoulders of the great journalists Carey McWilliams and Peter Schrag. McWilliams, writing in 1949, as California emerged as an economic powerhouse and beacon of a better life, showed how California had been the Great Exception in the pattern of U.S. history;unworkable. It is meant to present a usable past that points Californians toward understanding what went wrong, so that it might be fixed.

The second part of the book puts forward our ideas for repairing California. It sketches the elements of a new, more democratic operating system, designed to work as an integrated whole. Readers aching for their own policy views to be confirmed will be disappointed. California needs policy solutions for its many problems. But what makes this civic moment so fateful is not just the policy choices California has or has not made. It is that the governing system does not easily permit any firm choices.

Our method has been to stand above the political frayhigh enough to be out of earshot of the empty spin and consultant-speak that dominate political talk and the media, but not so high, we hope, as to lose sight of how politics works (and could work better). Our concern is not to advance the policy preferences of the left or the right. It is to re-imagine government in a way that lets Californians debate their choices, settle on the best ones, hold elected officials accountable for results, and choose anew if something doesnt work or the world changes. Like anyone else, we have preferences about what policy ideas we would like to see win or lose. But the task we have set ourselves here is to rewrite the rules to make the game better and fairer for everyone, so California might be governable again for whatever team and agenda voters democratically choose.

The civic moment in California is dire, but it is not unfamiliar to Americans. There was another such time: Government wallowed in debt. Plans to fund that debt foundered on the requirement that the needed taxes be approved in a supermajority vote. Lawmakers bent far in the direction of giving voters what they wanted, but the people remained frustrated that they were taxed too much for governments that delivered not enough. Businessmen dependent on international markets for sales and capital decried a business climate hostile to new investment. Essayists and orators found the system at once too attentive to the popular will and yet not democratic enough.