Agreed, Bill,
but in that case, how does Recall
Bush sound? Whats
good for the goose is good for the gander. Bush should step lightly. -
Karen
I feel that
Davis' stubbornness and unwillingness to drop out has hurt Bustamante who has
not been able to campaign normally. Davis did not create the problems but has
done nothing to fix them and is likely to turn California into a Republican
bastion for some time weakening Democratic chances in the presidential
race.
Bill
KWC: Davis
can be blamed for being inattentive and/or misguided, perhaps, but it was not
"his" deregulation that caused the loss to the state of California - there are
more bad guys here than just one.
A little historical perspective on the
California recall and direct democracy, which some of you may have not
seen.
OP-ED
CONTRIBUTOR
From
Pitchforks to Proposition 13
By
David M. Kennedy, NYT, Sunday October 5, 2003
STANFORD,
Calif.
On
Jan. 25, 1787, 1,200 desperate farmers brandishing barrel staves and
pitchforks attacked the federal arsenal in Springfield, Mass. They called themselves the
Regulators. Led by a debt-plagued
veteran of Bunker Hill and Saratoga named Daniel Shays, they sought firearms
with which to enforce their threats to close the courts in western
Massachusetts and compel the legislature to enact debt-relief measures,
including an inflationary paper currency and an end to mortgage
foreclosures.
A
single cannon volley killed four of the embattled farmers. Then a Revolutionary War hero, Gen.
Benjamin Lincoln, arrived with a militia that scattered the remaining rebels
and relentlessly hunted them down through the heavy snow. Yet the Regulators' failed outburst
had consequences that have shaped the character of American politics for more
than two centuries, up to the current recall election in
California.
The
uprising was handily crushed. But
it intimidated the Massachusetts legislature into enacting laws that menaced
the interests of the monied class.
Many leaders in the founding generation gagged on this apparently
craven pandering to the popular will.
Outright insurrection was one thing, but the state legislature's
cavalier disregard for property rights was a far more insidious threat. "An elective despotism," Thomas
Jefferson wrote, "was not the government we fought
for."
Shays'
Rebellion, in short, had demonstrated that America was not immune from the
inherent affliction that theorists of democracy had warned against since the
days of the ancient Greeks: that a government based on the will of the
majority would inevitably yield to the demands of the "mob" and lead to a
tyranny of the majority. Such a
polity would be resentful toward excellence and callous toward minority
rights. Worst of all, it would
wield the power of the state against more prosperous members of society and
confiscate their wealth.
To
protect the United States from that unhappy fate, leaders like James Madison
called for radically revising the Articles of Confederation, under whose rules
the fledgling republic was then governed. The result was the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, which convened four months after General Lincoln turned
back the rebels. At the
convention, Madison and others drafted a new fundamental law whose checks and
balances and elaborate federal structure would, among other things, frustrate
the confiscatory designs of future would-be Regulators. For better or worse, Daniel Shays thus
deserves to be recognized as a founder.
Over
time, many Americans came to believe that the Constitution's drafters had seen
their duty and overdone it. The
framers had created a federal governmental apparatus too well insulated from
the popular will, too difficult to mobilize for any common purpose, whether
confiscatory or constructive, and too easily hijacked by special interests
whose machinations eluded public scrutiny. At the dawn of the 20th century, that
kind of thinking animated a host of so-called progressive reformers,
conspicuously including a cantankerous California Republican named Hiram
Johnson.
A
self-styled "natural rebel" (and Arnold Schwarzenegger's improbable political
hero), Johnson was elected governor of California in 1910. In a flurry of political innovation
unmatched before or since in the state, Johnson flamboyantly battled giant
corporations like Southern Pacific Railroad and incorporated several radical
reforms into the California constitution. They included the direct election of
United States senators, previously selected by the legislature; the
initiative, by which citizens can directly write laws; the referendum, by
which they can undo the work of the legislature; and of course the recall,
which provides for the removal of elected
officials.
In
the spirit of Daniel Shays, Hiram Johnson sought to transform California into
a model of majoritarian, popularly responsive, direct democracy. But one must always be careful what
one wishes for: Johnson would probably be appalled by many of the results of
his reforms.
The
initiative process that he championed has contributed to the near-fatal
weakening of the legislature, and has created prodigious opportunities for
manipulating and mismanaging the state's political business. Legislators have been reduced to
diddling uselessly in Sacramento while various interest groups routinely
bamboozle the electorate with proliferating ballot initiatives that are poorly
written, often contradictory, and nearly always bad law. Proposition 13, for example, which
passed in 1978, addressed a real problem wildly rising property taxes with
an inept combination of inequitably defined tax limits and impossibly large
supermajority requirements for any revisions in the
law.
Proposition
13 led directly to drastic slippage in financing for local schools, and has
contributed heavily to the state's current fiscal crisis. But as Warren Buffett found out when
he urged Arnold Schwarzenegger to make the overhaul of Proposition 13 the
centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign, even suggesting changes to that
infamous initiative is forbidden.
(Mr. Schwarzenegger told Mr. Buffett that if he mentioned Proposition
13 again he would have to do 500 push-ups. Mr. Buffett has not been heard from
since.)
Proposition
13's untouchability, and Mr. Schwarzenegger's fierce commitment to it, suggest
that something has happened in American society that would have mystified
Daniel Shays and Hiram Johnson as well. In their very different ways, they
sought greater democracy as the means to a government that was more responsive
to the masses.
But
in California more democracy has produced not more attacks on the wealthy and
big business but chronic chaos and even paralysis a kind of political
catatonia perversely sanctified by neoconservative and libertarian dogmas that
assert, as another former governor of California put it, that "government is
not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." (Shays may have agreed with the second
clause of that sentence, but certainly not with the first; he wanted to use
the government to protect debtors and the
disadvantaged.)
To
the extent that Californians and Americans subscribe to that view, they
have confounded the predictions of countless theorists about the nature of
democratic politics. Among those
theorists, Alexis de Tocqueville is an exception, for he identified the
peculiarities of the American case now so vividly manifest in California, that
most American of states. The
characteristic social class that American society nurtured, said Tocqueville,
was composed of "eager and apprehensive men of small property." Though born in revolution, their
country was unlikely ever again to undergo revolutionary upheaval. "They love change, but they dread
revolutions," Tocqueville concluded, because "they continually and in a
thousand ways feel that they might lose by one."
That
social class of small property owners, and its attendant attitudes, are now
ascendant in California, and perhaps in the nation at large. Their influence explains why the
government from which Shays demanded relief, and the government that Johnson
tried to place more firmly in the hands of the people, has now become the
object of popular suspicion and hostility. Americans
apparently prefer misgovernment that will leave them to their own devices to
an effective government that might actually do something for them or ask
something of them.
We've
come a long way from the Regulator to the
Terminator.
David
M. Kennedy is professor of history at Stanford
University.
