re: "Californian's jammed polling stations, turning out in record numbers,"
Just because there were record numbers is no indication of anything but record numbers. If it was then Twinkies would be considered a great dessert.
Here is what noted member of the "liberal media" George Will had to say about it...
A Conservative Travesty
By George F. Will
Thursday, October 9, 2003; Page A37
California's recall -- a riot of millionaires masquerading as a "revolt of the people" -- began with a rich
conservative Republican congressman, who could think of no other way he might become governor,
financing the gathering of the necessary signatures. Now this exercise in "direct democracy" -- precisely
what America's Founders devised institutions to prevent -- has ended with voters full of self-pity and
indignation removing an obviously incompetent governor. They have removed him from the office to
which they reelected him after he had made his incompetence obvious by making most of the decisions
that brought the voters to a boil.
The odor of what some so-called conservatives were indispensable to
producing will eventually arouse them from their swoons over Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Then they can inventory the damage they have done by
seizing an office that just 11 months ago they proved incapable of winning in a
proper election under ideal conditions.
These Schwarzenegger conservatives -- now, there is an oxymoron for these
times -- have embraced a man who is, politically, Hollywood's culture leavened
by a few paragraphs of Milton Friedman. They have given spurious plausibility
to a meretricious accusation that Democrats are using to poison American
politics, the charge that Florida 2000 was part of a pattern of Republican power
grabs outside the regular election process.
Schwarzenegger's conservative supporters have furled the flag of "family
values" while mocking their participation in the anti-Clinton sex posse. They
were unoffended by Schwarzenegger's flippant assertions that only the
"religiously fanatic" oppose human cloning -- not just stem cell research but
cloning. These faux conservatives' new hero said that only "right-wing crazies"
supported the proposal on Tuesday's ballot to bar the state from collecting the
racial data that fuel the racial spoils system.
Some conservatives insist that they have been not empty-headed but
hardheaded: They say a Republican governor will markedly strengthen the
Bush campaign in California. Perhaps. But Republican governors did not
prevent Bush from losing Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2000.
During the coming presidential campaign, California's Republican governor
will be busy proving the fatuity of his proposal to solve California's budget
crisis by cutting waste, fraud and abuse -- things for which there is no
constituency. In 2004 President Bush will not campaign in a California seething
with resentment of spending cuts and attempted tax increases advocated by a
hugely unpopular Democratic governor. Instead, Bush will campaign in a
California in which the Republican governor will be illustrating the axiom that
today only a Republican governor can substantially raise taxes.
This is so because the people, in their zeal for majority rule, have mandated,
through the initiative process, a two-thirds supermajority requirement for
raising taxes. Which means the Republicans' legislative minority is large
enough to block a Democratic governor's request for tax increases but probably
is not starchy enough to resist a Republican governor's request for --
Republicans believe in recycling, at least of squeamish rhetoric -- "revenue
enhancements."
Then again, some Republicans might resist, because their principles need not
threaten what is really important -- reelection. Almost all legislators of both
parties represent safe seats because the political class has put an end to much of
California's politics by using redistricting to protect all incumbents. This is one
reason why politics has reemerged through the recall process, which allows the
people to vent against their chosen representatives.
The put-upon people of California, groaning under the weight of decisions
taken by California's electorate, have repeatedly taken lawmaking into their
own hands through initiatives that mandate this and that allocation of resources. So an estimated -- no one
seems able to say for sure, which says much about the consequences of California populism -- 60 percent
to 80 percent of the budget is beyond the control of the governor and Legislature.
One of the new governor's two noteworthy campaign promises is that he will not cut education, which --
thanks to what the public did in a 1988 initiative -- is roughly 50 percent of state spending. His other
venture into specificity during the campaign -- a campaign in which he said, brassily and correctly, that "the
public doesn't care about figures" -- was his promise to promptly increase by 50 percent a deficit already
at $8 billion by repealing the car tax that Davis and the legislature recently tripled.
A Washington-based Democrat who was making election eve get-out-the-vote calls to African American
households in South Los Angeles knew Gray Davis would be recalled when voter after voter told her,
emphatically and specifically, the precise dollar amount that the tax increase was costing him or her. The
new governor should repeal it because it is unjust. And because the people deserve to get what they
demand. Don't they? |
