Editorial, THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY TRIBUNE
Credit California’s voters with at least one thing – creating the prospect of a wild ride from here to November with the dueling Brown-Whitman drag race.
Well, credit them with two things: On the five propositions voters offered for voters’ consideration this week, they came out spot on.
Californians voted for Proposition 13, allowing seismic upgrades to our homes to be exempt from new property taxes. They voted for more ballot choices by approving the open-primary rules of Proposition 14, though smaller parties will challenge that in court, and the bigger parties don’t like it, either. They took a look at the interesting experiment in public financing offered by Proposition 15, but rejected the odd social-studies class project version presented to us that would have just incorporated secretary of state elections instead of all races. They made a mockery of the selfish $46 million in expenditures – paid for by the ratepayers – doled out by PG&E in the giant private utility’s effort to lock in monopolies rather than allowing municipalities to vote for their own public utilities. They properly rejected another private company, Mercury Insurance, in its efforts to improve its business model to the detriment of those of us who have to buy auto insurance. So maybe California’s proposition system is not broken after all – not when the electorate can make such good choices even when presented with a confusing ballot and big-bucks propaganda campaigns.
But with Republican nominee Meg Whitman, a political novice, and former Governor Jerry Brown, trying to make a comeback 36 years after first being elected governor, California is presented with an incredibly clear choice. There is nothing similar whatsoever about their backgrounds, and is likely to be nothing similar about the way they will campaign to turn around the troubled Golden State.
In their acceptance speeches Tuesday night, they got their engines roaring at the starting line.
“Jerry Brown has spent a lifetime in politics and the results have not been good,” Whitman said. “Failure seems to follow Jerry Brown everywhere.” Well – he has been elected to governor, to secretary of state, to mayor of Oakland, to attorney general. True, he failed miserably in his quixotic efforts to become president. But since then, he’s been sticking to his crafty California knitting.
“It’s not enough for someone rich and restless to look in the mirror one morning and decide, `Hey, it’s time to be governor of California,”‘ Brown said, clearly referring not only to billionaire Whitman but to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “We tried that. It didn’t work. Puffery, platitudes and promises won’t balance our budget, won’t fix our schools and won’t create any new jobs.” True. But Brown, son of another governor, has worked in the public sector for almost his entire life, and Whitman, the former boss of hugely successful Internet site eBay, has created quite a few jobs in her time.
It’s going to be quite a race, as is the all-woman – rare in American politics – duel for the Senate seat that another former Silicon Valley executive, GOP nominee Carly Fiorina, will battle incumbent, establishment Democrat Barbara Boxer for.
We can only hope against hope that the tone set in these races will not be the same as in the primaries. No matter what their campaign advisors say, Californians are looking for a contest of real ideas to fix our state’s economy, not for a summer and fall of duking it out over who is more against illegal immigration than the other candidate. We know where you stand on immigration, folks. That’s not the issue here. The issue is restoring California’s once-robust economic climate so that we can continue to thrive in one of the greatest places on Earth in which to live and to work. That’s what we came here for. That’s what has kept us strong. With moderate, sensible, jobs-oriented, environmentally sensitive leadership from a governor and a senator for all of California, that’s what will keep us strong in the future.
Tags: consumer, contributions, Editorial, Mercury, Prop 17, surcharge, trust, voters
