California Crackup Gets Ruled

It's always nice when someone thinks your work is useful, so Joe Mathews and I were honored on Saturday when Californians for Electoral Reform, at their annual meeting in Oakland, gave us the 2011 Wilma Rule Award for California Crackup. CFER is a model of the kind of reform group California needs: grassroots, composed of people from across the political spectrum, committed to thinking deeply about how we can bring modern electoral and governing ideas into our creaky institutions. You can learn more about CFER at its website.

Redistricting: Did the Earth Move for You?

As we point out in California Crackup and as political scientist Jennifer A. Steen lucidly explains at Zócalo Public Square, redistricting reform had the heartbreak built in. Given how Californians have sorted themselves into communities of the like-minded and given the requirements of law, the best we can hope is that the Citizens Redistricting Commission created in 2008 by Prop 11 will produce a handful of competitive legislative districts.

And that is just what it has delivered in its draft maps. The open question is: How big is a handful?

Phillip Reese of the Sacramento Bee projects the new maps would increase the number of legislative swing districts from 3 to 7 (out of 120). Political scientist Vladimir Kogan estimates the maps will increase the number of “competitive” seats from 9 to 20. Democrat activist and writer David Dayen scorches PPIC political scientist Eric McGee for counting as competitive any district where Democrats’ voter registration advantage over Republicans is less than 10 percentage points but greater than -5 points. Using that standard, McGee projects the number of competitive legislative seats as growing from 12 to 25.

The problem here is that the word “competitive” means different things to different people.

To political scientists, a “competitive” district is one that has attributes like those of districts that have been observed in the past to swing from one party to another. The attribute Kogan uses—”a 0% to 3% Republican advantage in voter registration or a 0% to 10% Democratic advantage”—is one created at UC Berkeley because it was the range in which districts were most likely in the 1990s to swing from one party to the other.

And if you look at elections conducted over the last decade under the 2001 redistricting, what was true in 1990s was still true: every election that resulted in a party turnover fell into that range of voter registration. All seven of them.

To normal people who don’t talk PolySci, “competitive” means something more.

Here again, a look at the Assembly elections of the last decade (Senate and House elections had so little competition they aren’t worth remembering) is useful. After the 2001 redistricting, there were six Assembly seats meeting the test of competitiveness that Kogan uses. Of the 30 subsequent general elections held in those districts, only 11 were “competitive” in the sense that both major parties offered credible candidates backed with enough money to reach voters. Only two of those elections resulted in swings from one party to the other.

In other words, to be “competitive” in the normal-people sense of the word, a district needs not just to be the kind of place where real elections have sometimes been observed to break out. It needs to be a place where strong candidates are ready to jump in and big-money donors and groups are ready to invest scarce dollars. And to be a swing district, it’s almost always necessary that there not be an incumbent. Of the 400 Assembly general elections conducted under the 2001 districts, only six resulted in a party turnover and none of those unseated an incumbent.

So how big is a handful? Big enough that we will see additional “competitive” elections in the coming decade, in both the PolySci and normal senses of the word. But only because there couldn’t be fewer. And so small a handful that Californians will feel no happier with their legislature or their ability to influence California’s future.

The View from Mount Diablo

I’ll be celebrating the June 15 arrival of the budget deadline by speaking to the Diablo Valley Democratic Club in Walnut Creek. Full information about the event is available on the club’s site. Join us!

Budget and Redistricting: If They Had a Hammer

Kevin Yamamura and Jim Sanders have a story over at the Sacramento Bee that says Democrats are hoping that the maps to be released by the redistricting commission will free up some Republicans votes for a budget deal.

The story is remarkably thin. Yamamura and Sanders don’t quote a single Democrat as expressing such hopes. They do quote several people, all of them reasonably smart, as suggesting the release of the redistricting maps will have no effect or even the opposite effect. (Alas, the Capitol bureau of my old paper is well known for not letting complicating evidence get in the way of a good story angle or the conventional wisdom.) 

But what’s most remarkable about the story is that it fails to tell readers the big news this year about redistricting and the budget: that California voter approval in 2008 and 2010 of initiatives that removed the redistricting power from the Legislature and governor and handed it to a citizens commission has robbed leaders in the Capitol of a powerful tool for reaching budget agreement.

If voters had not passed the measure, Democrats would not be “hoping” that somebody else’s redistricting maps will change budget votes. It seems reasonably certain that they would be brandishing their redistricting power as a carrot and/or stick against recalcitrant legislators.

So far, Democratic attempts to leverage Republicans to vote for the budget have come to naught. Rounding up business support; threatening to concentrate spending cuts in GOP districts; scaring business by proposing to expand the taxing power of local governments: no tactic has worked.

But redistricting would have been a much bigger cudgel. The redistricting power touches on something Republicans care about even more than taxes: their own skins, and their party’s hold on the U.S. House of Representatives. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders might have used control over the shape of districts to win over enough votes to break the minority veto on the 2011-12 budget.

Instead, because voters listened to the siren call of “good government” “reformers” who believe that democracy can be improved by taking the politics out of politics, the state’s elected leaders this year have one tool fewer for rounding up a budget consensus. If the result is even deeper cuts in higher education and schools, the goo-goos will have a lot to answer for.

State of the Dimming Dream→

The San Francisco Chronicle asked me to write about whether California’s ongoing crisis has changed state government as we know it. My answer, in this Sunday Insight article, has been released from behind the Chron’s pay wall. Check it out.

Big Pensions, Badges, and Bugles

The number of California public worker retirees collecting pensions of more than $100,000 a year has quadrupled since 2005, Phillip Reese reports in the Sacramento Bee. Unfortunately, his story buries the lede. What's most significant is how many of those big pensions are going to those who wore badges and bugles. A lot of what is seen as a pension problem is really a problem of public safety pay.

Reese is reporting about the number of $100,000-a-year pensions only because the $100,000 pension has been transformed into a political symbol. The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility and other groups campaigning to eliminate or modify defined benefit pensions for public employees use $100,000 as a proxy for excess.

What does a pension of $100,000 a year mean? Well, it certainly tells us something about California’s pension system. But it tells us more about the overall pay for particular worker or group of them.

An annual pension is the product of three factors: years worked, a benefit factor (the percentage of wage credited for each year worked), and the salary against which the benefit factor is applied. (To simplify, we’ll leave aside the question of normal retirement age and the size of the reduction for early retirement.) In this equation, you’ll notice, only one of those variables—the benefit factor—is solely determined by the pension system.

If you are a Nobel Prize-winning physician who spends your career teaching at a University of California medical school, you will likely retire with a pension in excess of $100,000 even under a modest pension system with a low benefit factor. That’s because, as the top person in the world in your field, you can command a high salary in the market. You might even earn as much as the minimum for a rookie utility player in major league baseball ($414,500 in 2011). And when you retire, any reasonable retirement plan will deliver a benefit that reflects your lifetime earnings. Certainly few people would find anything excessive about a $100,000 pension in your case.

In other words, to assess $100,000 pensions, we have to know who is on the list and what put them there.

Not surprisingly, California’s list of big pensions is sprinkled with Nobel Prize winners, retired university presidents, and former city managers and other executives at the largest public organizations in the state. Their presence on the list is is mostly a function of the salaries they commanded in the marketplace while they were working.

But a lot of the $100,000 pensions (Reese says “big chunk” but doesn’t give an exact percentage) go to public safety retirees, most of whom worked for local government.

Why? Because California is off the scale when it comes to compensating people with badges and bugles. Police, firefighters, and prison guards come up big on all the variables in the pension equation. They have the most generous pension formula, which allows many of them to retire with 3 percent of salary for each year worked. And they have the highest pay in the country. California prison guards earn 50 percent more than the national average. California police and firefighters earn 33 percent and 22 percent more, respectively, than the national average.

The irony here is that politicians who talk about reforming pensions routinely exempt public safety workers. Meg Whitman, for example, proposed to leave safety employees out from her plan to shift public workers to 401(k) plans. Her plan would have meant less retirement security for teachers, who make up the single largest segment of public employees and whose current retirement benefits “are only modestly higher than the private sector,” according to a recent report from the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, the pension reform group. But it would have left the $100,000 pension club open to police, firefighters, and prison guards.

People in uniform do hard and important work. But their work is not a third or more harder in California than it is elsewhere in the country. In the way it conducts its politics and structures its government, California has let public safety compensation get out of hand.

As Reese’s reporting underlines, that is why the the $100,000-pension club is growing so fast. No pension reform plan can be judged serious if it doesn’t bring that public safety compensation back to earth.

Redistricting for Togetherness

Over at California Progress Report, Peter Schrag notes that the hearings of the Citizens Redistricting Commission are swinging to a different tune than the one sung by sponsors of redistricting reform. Instead of political competition, the voters want this:

The Captain & Tenille sing "Love Will Keep Us Together" (Neil Sedaka-Howard Greenfield) ________________________________________ Neil Sedaka fans believe it's high time for Neil to get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. http://www.sedaka.be/neil_sedaka_petition/entry.htm CLICK HERE to sign the petition, started by Neil Sedaka fans!

The Phony Shame Over Arnold's Love Child

You’d think Jon Fleischman, guru of Flash Report and former consigliere to convicted Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona, would have a stronger stomach. But the delicate Fleischman reports himself sick over news of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child. “I mean, the fact that that I voted for him twice makes me nauseous,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Sorry, I’m not buying it, not from Jon and from any of the others who once supported the former governor and now claim to feel soiled by him.

The news may add a previously invisible branch to the Schwarzenegger family tree and a detail to Arnold’s biography. But it doesn’t say anything new about his character.

The full Arnold Schwarzenegger was on display, naked and oiled, before anybody ever cast a vote for him. The narcissism of a life lived in front of movie cameras and the mirrors of body-building gyms. The hunger to hear the roar of the crowds. The appetite for pleasure and sensation. The delight in bullying and humiliating opponents. The chameleon politics. The sense of entitlement of someone who believes he is above others and doesn’t have to live by the rules. And, of a piece with everything else, the abuse of women and particularly, as we learned through the 2003 reporting of the Los Angeles Times, of female underlings powerless to fend off or report his advances.

Californians knew all that in 2003, or could have. And nothing they knew was inconsistent with the possibility of secret love children. They voted for Schwarzenegger anyway.

Indeed, as Joe Mathews reports in The People’s Machine, the Times’ reporting of Schwarzenegger’s sexual misconduct validated his standing among conservative voters and led many to give him their votes in the 2003 recall. In other words, some people voted for him not in spite of his character flaws but because they saw the revelation of those flaws as a signal that Schwarzenegger was one of them. And among those voters was Fleischman, who went with Schwarzenegger, an abuser of women and a Republican “squish,” over the principled and upright (but less electable) conservative Tom McClintock.

The transaction was clear from the start. Republican political pros were using a celebrity of dubious character for their purposes even as Schwarzenegger was using them for his. It’s politics as usual. What’s strange here is for a journalist to cooperate in the charade that the transaction made them queasy. If that were so, there would not be enough marijuana in all of Humboldt County to quell the nausea or priests enough to take the confessions.

California's Unserious Elite

Every once in a while California’s business leaders rouse themselves to opine on the state’s problems. Their latest effort, a letter to the governor and Legislature on how to solve the budget crisis, makes you wonder why they bother.

Let’s look at their letter point by point:

They begin by saying we need to fix the “underlying conditions” that got California in trouble. And who would quarrel with that? But they fail to identify those underlying conditions. Most people agree that the budget crisis is partly economic and temporary—the loss of revenues from the Great Recession—and partly structural. Where they disagree is over which structural factors to stress. The big tax cuts in the years of the Internet bubble? Unfunded increases in pensions and retiree health benefits for public workers? Three Strikes and other unfunded “something for nothing” initiative measures? Unprecedented amounts of borrowing for infrastructure and to cover deficits? Which of these would they fix? The business leaders don’t say.

Yes, they do call for a “workout” plan. The word immediately sends up warning flags. We’ve been here before. In 2004, in the wake of the recall, business leaders similarly called for a workout plan. They joined Arnold Schwarzenegger in promoting a ballot measure that involved borrowing $15 billion and putting new budget discipline language in the state Constitution. How did that work out? Seven years later we’re still paying off the debt from the last “workout.” The lesson? Beware of business leaders bearing workout plans.

There are more warning flags in this section. It is not true that “since 1998, every annual budget has spent more than it received in tax revenue.” In the go-go years of the late 1990s–how could our business leaders forget that wonderful moment?–the state ran large surpluses even after heeding the advice of business leaders to cut taxes and increase spending on infrastructure and education. The state ran an operating surplus again briefly at the height of the housing bubble. This may seem like quibbling. But it doesn’t inspire confidence when you’re would-be leaders haven’t read the budget documents, or can’t.

However, here’s where they go off the rails: “Constitutional spending controls must be put place to ensure fiscal discipline.” This is doubly wrong.

It’s wrong, first, because California right now is in no danger of spending too much, as they themselves seem to understand in their criticism of the Republicans who seek “an all-cuts budget that will scar California’s future.” The share of California’s resources spent by state government will fall next year to either a 40-or 45-year low.

It’s wrong, second, because California’s constitution is already chock-full of budget whips and chains imposing budget discipline in various ways. Among these is the constitutional spending limit on the state and local governments.

California’s business leaders ought to know about the spending limit. They wrote it. In the late 1980s, after business leaders realized that the Gann spending limit adopted by voters in 1979 was preventing the state and local governments from making needed improvements in schools and infrastructure, they joined in writing Proposition 111. That measure revised the state spending limit so public investment could keep pace with the growth of California’s economy. Today, state government is $18 billion below that limit.

You can see the confusion here. Business leaders don’t want the state to spend too little; business needs public investment. They don’t want a budget with deep cuts. Yet they still worry about too much spending even though the state is far below spending limit they themselves wrote. And they think the right response is to create even more constitutional whips and chains. Among them would be “performance metrics” against which to benchmark programs and a requirement that legislators spend more time judging the “effectiveness” of the laws. Yet it is hard to find a single California happy about the operation of all the constitutional shackles we’ve already imposed on ourselves. Why are business leaders, if they care about “effectiveness,” prescribing more of the medicine that has already proven to be poison?

The confusion deepens in the second point of the plan. If there are any programs that have proven to be ineffective in creating jobs, they are redevelopment and enterprise zones. This year, the governor and lawmakers have done what business leaders say government ought to do–sort out and eliminate what doesn’t work. And what’s the business response? To ignore the evidence of “the metrics” and pimp for preserving their own handouts. It is hard to take unserious people seriously.

Many pundits say that California can’t hope to overcome its governing crisis unless ordinary Californians get better informed and engaged. That’s asking a lot. I’d settle just for having better informed and engaged elites.

Pension Debate: Think Big Instead→

Over at Fox and Hounds, Joe Mathews complains, rightly, that the California pension debate is “small and boring.” We ought to be thinking about what adequate retirement security looks like for all workers, not just public employees.

In a paper published last year, Micah Weinberg and I did some of that thinking. You can check it out here.

Teachers, Go Home

Joe Mathews has been hammering the teachers and others who’ve been protesting budget cuts at the state Capitol for wasting their energy in the wrong place. (Especially when, as he notes, the protestors didn’t even recognize Assembly Republican leader Connie Conway when she walked right past them. Comedy writers couldn’t make this stuff up.)

So where’s the right place? How about back home, where teachers have the chance to teach the voters a thing or two?

The last time I looked, the California Teachers Association was supposed to be a labor union. And what labor unions used to understand, at least before they became full-time political action committee/lobbyists, was that direct action was their most powerful tool. The advice that teachers give to their writing students—don’t tell me, show me—applies equally in writing a political story.

Don’t tell me that failure to extend the temporary taxes will result in big cuts in schools, including a shorter school year. Show me. Announce that, beginning Monday, every teacher in every school in the district of every Republican legislator who has failed to vote for the Governor’s budget plan will be out sick. So will every other school employee. There will be no janitors to unlock the school doors, no bus drivers to pick up the kids, no principals to shuffle the papers. Everyone will be laid up with an epidemic of heartsickness over what will happen to the schools if the current temporary taxes aren’t extended. And the epidemic, they can make clear, is sure to last through the remainder of the school year.

This direct action is sure to cause some hardship. Students will miss some lessons. Seniors who had counted on receiving a diploma next month will not get one, and many will find themselves, as a result, unable to go college. Teachers will risk losing some pay (although their fellow union members in the Democratic districts will surely be willing to share some of their own money in solidarity).

But these hardships are no different than the hardships that will come from further budget cuts. Without the tax extensions, the school year will be shorter and students will learn less. Fewer California students will be admitted to the University of California and California State University, and there will be fewer classes at community college.

The hardships that would come from a school sickout would be different in only one way: those affected will only be in the parts of the state represented by Republican legislators. Direct action will treat voters in those districts as adults, who must be assumed to intend the consequences of their own acts. And that is far more likely to trigger a response than more Kabuki protest in Sacramento.

Those Not-So-Independent “Independents”

Congratulation to the alter kockers over at Calbuzz for trying to push a big rock up a steep hill: showing journalists that “independent” voters aren’t the same thing as “moderates” or “Decline to State” voters.

Political scientists have been pointing out for many years that many “independents” vote more reliably for one party or the other than do many people who are party registrants or who identify themselves with a party. But the brain-dead media keep ignoring the evidence.

In a culture that denigrates partisanship and promotes the notion that sophisticated people should be seen as thinking for themselves, it’s easy to see why more people these days describe themselves as “independents.” But why do journalists, who are trained to get a confirming source even when their mothers say “I love you,” take them at their word? If DTS voters are really “independent,” why are there such a high percentage of them in San Francisco and other Bay Area counties that vote overwhelmingly for Democrats?

Now that California has abolished party primaries and adopted a two-stage general election, party registration has become essentially meaningless. Your party registration matters only in presidential primaries (and even there it matters little if the parties continue to allow DTS voters to participate in their primary.) We can expect that more and more voters, as they register and re-register, will list themselves as DTS.

And as they do, expect to read and hear breathless accounts reporting that California voters are becoming more “independent.” You can lead the media to data but good luck in making them think, especially if it requires breaking with the conventional wisdom.

Broken Government? Blame Your Readers

Stuart Leavenworth is baffled. Editorial editor page editor of the Sacramento Bee, my old stomping grounds, Leavenworth says he’s read all the recent literature on California’s governing disfunction, including California Crackup (“radical, but well-argued,” he calls it) and The Economist’s recent special report on the Golden State. And he wonders why none of the things he’s read explain why Californians, faced with that disfunction, seem so disengaged. “How has California changed in ways that limit civic participation?” he asks.

Which only goes to show that you can give a newspaper guy a book but you can’t count on him to read it.

Why might a typical Californian be cynical about the prospect of successful engagement in governing the state? Let’s consider what she faces if she were to get involved, say, in improving the state’s underfunded and underperforming public schools.

She might think to start in her own community and engage with the local school district and board. But she would quickly discover that the school board doesn’t have much to say about the big issues facing the school down the street. In fact, if she’s a young mother of school-age children, she would find that the biggest decisions about schools were made before she was even born or when she was still a child. Thirty-three years ago, Prop 13 took away the school board’s control over revenue and shifted all the power to the state Capitol. Ten years later, Prop 98 came along and put school funding on statewide auto-pilot. The school choices that matter most—funding levels, achievement standards, curriculum, testing, categorical uses of dollars—get made in Sacramento. School boards are for dividing up the scraps and transmitting the pain delivered from on high. Why would any smart young woman wanting to engage and improve the schools waste her time there?

Since the Legislature is now the School Board of the Whole, she might consider getting involved in legislative politics. But she would find few ways to effectively engage in that arena. There are few competitive election contests for the Assembly and Senate. Even where there is competition, the districts are so big (nearly a half million people in an Assembly district, nearly one million in a Senate district) that most campaigns are decided by money for media, not armies of involved citizens. Because of the success of “good-government” types like Leavenworth in weakening political party structures and ending party nominations for office in California, the normal channels by which Americans typically engaged in the past and people around the world continue to engage—through partisan political activity—barely exist here. Our young woman, desperately seeking engagement, would be well-advised to look elsewhere.

That leaves the initiative process. It was set up to 100 years ago to put citizens in charge, but it doesn’t offer many opportunities for engagement. It’s increasingly rare for groups of dedicated voters to band together to gather enough signatures to put measures on the ballot. In a state of nearly 38 million, money drives the process. The initiative is a world of paid signature gathers, high-priced political and media consultants, and million-dollar television ad buys. It’s no place for a nice young woman hoping to improve her children’s schools.

Leavenworth thinks Californians have checked out of politics because of our divisions and a lack of civic glue. But California’s history is a chronicle of division—Anglo vs. Chinese, labor vs. capital, Progressives vs. the railroad machine, Protestant vs. Catholic, white vs. black—often expressed in violence. As we tell in California Crackup, many of the big governing changes in the state’s past, from the 1878-79 constitutional convention to Prop 13, were products of those fights.

What’s changed is the way we try to govern ourselves. We’ve piled reform on reform, many of them directly aimed at keeping ordinary people from engaging in their own governance. The result is a strange and radical system, hostile to citizen involvement and too inflexible to be run by elites, the government version of the Winchester Mystery House.

There’s a good reason so few citizens want to engage with it. Having jobs to do and families to tend and lives to live, they can’t afford to waste their time on a system they know doesn’t work. And for making that rational choice, they get called “insular” and “cynical” by newspaper guys who get well paid to stroke their chins and blame their readers for California’s gridlock.

Is it any wonder that we’ve stopped reading newspapers too?

How California Can End Sports Extortion

The game is officially on. After weeks of playing playing footsie with Anaheim, the Maloof family, the owners of the Sacramento Kings, announced Monday that they’ll keep their woebegone basketball team in the capital city another year in hopes taxpayers will buy them an arena. The announcement is the opening whistle for the game of extortion that is at the heart of the National Basketball Association’s business model and that of other professional sports leagues.

The game works this way: The NBA creates an artificial scarcity by keeping the number of franchises low. That scarcity means there are always cities itching to have a team and foolish enough to be willing to lay out taxpayer money to subsidize an arena to attract one. Municipal foolishness sets up the opportunity for extortion. The NBA tells the city whose team has the least heavily subsidized or attractive arena that they must use tax dollars to build the team a new one, or risk losing the franchise to one of the eager wannabe towns. Build it, or we will go.

This extortion game is one driver of growing income inequality in America. It is a settled fact of economics that building a publicly financed sports facility creates no economic benefit to the community that pays for it. All of the tax dollars end up finally in the pockets of millionaire players and billionaire owners.

Unfortunately, sports subsidies are catnip to local politicians, who are boosters are heart and who love to live in the reflected glow of sports celebrity and enthusiasm. Local media rarely look critically at the flawed arguments offered for subsidizing sports franchises. From the sports page to the advertising and marketing departments, media have a big interest in keeping a sports team from moving. It provides prestige to those who report about it, what’s now called “content” to bring in readers and viewers, and more advertising dollars. When the extortion game begins, politicians and journalists alike find themselves powerless to resist playing.

What makes the game different this year is that it is being played mostly in California. Look around pro sports and you’ll notice that many of the big extortion plays are aimed at California taxpayers. There’s Anaheim vs Sacramento in basketball. Santa Clara is trying to move the football 49ers from San Francisco. The baseball A’s are looking to move out of Oakland toward Silicon Valley. Los Angeles is fighting over building an NFL football stadium, perhaps to lure the Chargers out of San Diego. And that concentration creates an opportunity to suspend the extortion game. If the Legislature were to step on the hose of dollars, the extortionists would be out of luck.

At a time when local governments are slashing budgets for police, fire protection, libraries, parks, recreation, and schools, it is insane for them to give tax dollars as subsidies to billionaire sports owners. As we point out in California Crackup, one of the defects of California’s current system of governance is the post-Prop 13 operating system that has centralized power in Sacramento. But here is a moment when the Great Centralization can be a benefit in providing one-stop stopping of the sports extortion game.

All that is required is for a majority of lawmakers to add control language to the budget denying any of the appropriated funds to communities that provide any taxpayer funds to subsidize stadiums or arenas. And how hard can it be to collect that majority? Republicans oppose tax increases. Democrats oppose cuts to public services. The goal of the extortion game is to benefit billionaires and millionaires by forcing what both Republicans and Democrats oppose. Surely both parties can agree that now is the moment to shut the game down.

The Economist Reads California Crackup→

California gets the full Economist treatment this week and it’s all California Crackup, all the way through.

You write a book hoping that others will come to see the story the way you do. But I have to admit it’s a little disconcerting when another publication finds your work so worthy that it uses many of the same arguments and same narratives. Joe Mathews and I set out to challenge the conventional wisdom about California’s troubles. Now it turns out that California Crackup is the conventional wisdom, at least in London.

For readers who have come here from The Economist to learn more about the book, you can purchase it by following the links elsewhere on this page. You’ll find, I think, that it’s much funnier in the original English.

Obsessing about taxes is bad for the future→

Over at Zócalo Public Square, I explain what makes the governor's wife scream.

Boom launches

The Oakland Museum of California is hosting a launch party today, March 11, at 6:00 p.m., for the new University of California Press publication, Boom: A Journal of California.

Joe Mathews and I have an article in the first issue, and we will talking about California's future at the event. Details and RSVP are here.

Waiting for the top-two revolution

If you are holding your breath, waiting for the top-two primary to work the revolution the New York Times proclaimed last June after the passage of Prop 14, it’s probably a good moment to inhale. As the Assembly District 4 election showed the other day, the revolution isn’t coming.

Assembly District 4 is exactly where the jungle primary is supposed to do its magic of electing more moderate lawmakers to the Legislature. Centered on the upscale Placer and El Dorado suburbs of Sacramento, it is one of the most Republican districts in the state. According to the theory of jungle primary boosters, Democrats and independents, understanding that a Republican is sure to win in such districts, will sniff out which of the GOP candidates is the more moderate. They will give the moderate Republican their votes instead of “wasting” them on a candidate who more closely shares their views but has no hope of eventually prevailing.

There are two problems with the theory.

First, if voters from the minority party are to sniff out the “moderate” in the race, there has to be one. In District 4, there wasn’t. In the current budget crisis, a Republican “moderate” might be defined as someone willing to vote for Governor Brown’s draconian budget cuts and accompanying extension of temporary taxes in return for pensions reforms and relaxation of business regulations. As far as I can tell, not a single GOP candidate in the field was prepared to vote for Brown’s budget, and certainly not the two well-funded frontrunners, John Allard and Beth Gaines, who vied to prove they were the most conservative.

Second, even if there were a moderate majority-party candidate to vote for, it’s not clear that many minority-party voters are willing to put aside their partisan views to vote for a second-best candidate. Without running a campaignThe Democratic candidate in the District 4 election won a plurality of votes in the March 8 election, his vote percentage almost exactly matching Democratic registration. He will likely get almost the same vote share in the May runoff, when Gaines, the second-place finisher, will take the seat.

“I will join the Taxpayer Caucus on my first day in the Assembly and look forward to working with them to protect California’s taxpayers from tax increases and extensions,” Gaines, wife of state Sen. Ted Gaines, wrote on FlashReport the day after the election.

Yes, that jungle primary is a real game-changer.