The Real Story On The Lakoff Initiative

You may have seen me live-tweeting the events last night at SEIU Local 721 in LA, where Professor George Lakoff and the folks behind CA Majority Rule met with around 200 activists, union members, elected officials, legislative candidates, representatives from Speaker Bass' office, and more, to talk about the just-released proposed November 2010 initiative on majority rule. If you read through both the live tweets and Dante Atkins' notes on the meeting, I think you get a picture of a potential split inside the California Democratic Party, one that could have major implications for all elections next year.

It should be noted that CDP Vice-Chair Eric Bauman was there to offer support. He gave a typical stump speech and said very plainly that "the reason you're here tonight is the solution" to the problems that grip the state, problems he laid out very carefully and completely. He was honest in saying that any Democrat who opposes this kind of measure will be told that "vertebra are available for installation... I think the chiropractor's lobby can help us with that." He made clear that we don't have a spending problem, "we have a common sense problem," and he pushed everyone in the room to work toward a real solution.

But Professor Lakoff's speech seemed to capture the dynamic between the grassroots and the establishment much better. Lakoff opened by talking about the origins of the initiative that he filed yesterday:

I got into this last spring when Lonnie Hancock invited me to speak to a group of State Senators. And I said, what's the problem, you're the majority! And they said they don't have any power. And they explained the whole 2/3rds rule, and how the leadership has to work with them because we want to lose as little as possible.

And I asked, why aren't you in every assembly district explaining this problem? It's about schools, healthcare, everything, and there's no answer. I went back and said that there's something really wrong. Its name is democracy [...] Which is more Democratic? Majority rule, or minority rule? You knew the answer from the 3rd grade on. Even Republicans know the answer but they don't like to. We know there will be a blowback if we try to change things, but the hardest blowback is coming from our side. The reason that Loni Hancock invited me was that there was a poll done by a progressive organization, and it asked the wrong question.

This is my business. Studying language and the framing behind language. If someone presented you with the poll question: would you rather have more taxes and higher services, or fewer taxes and less services. Obviously, it went with the latter. And the legislature concluded that they shouldn't put anything about taxes on the 2010 ballot. Why do they think that? Because they think that polls are objective, and that language just floats out there. They're wrong. Language is not neutral. There's a truth here that that language hides. It's the truth that we don't have Democracy in this state. We have minority rule.

In response, because nobody else would do so, Lakoff's initiative reads: "All Legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by majority vote." It's tweetable and it's fairly simple to understand. It's framed as a democratic action to return the state to democratic rule. And it appeals very much to those interested in preserving democracy.

Which is the consensus opinion inside the Democratic Party. We know this because, back in July, the state party passed a resolution calling for majority rule for budget and revenue. And it didn't pass with contentious debate - it passed unanimously. One of the very few people to speak out against it was the Party Chair, John Burton. But the rank and file supported it utterly.

It was something of a reversal for Burton, who when he was trying to get the votes of those rank and file supported a majority vote position. Now he's seen some polls and decided to take half a bite out of the apple. Lakoff described his exceedingly short meeting with Burton last night.

Burton wouldn't talk to me for more than a minute. He just said that he saw the polls, and it said 55% on budget and nothing on taxes. How many of you were at the state convention? You voted on a resolution about this. How did that resolution come before you? The resolutions committee. And that was the point. We got the resolutions committee to do it and got a standing ovation. The rank and file Democrats know it's the right thing to do and they have to tell their leaders. So how do you change this? You have to have a poll, but you have to have pressure. The major donors have to call Burton and say, if you want any money from me, you get behind this. And he has to hear that from donor after donor and organization after organization. We have to win in our own party first. I think John Burton is a good person, same with Bass and Steinberg. It's the good people that we have to win over first.

Later, a woman from AFSCME asserted that Willie Pelote was willing to give $1 million dollars to a majority vote campaign until Burton called him and told him to forget it.

You can argue about what the most effective approach is to deal with California's budget dysfunction. We've been doing that all week. You could say that leaders must prepare the ground by tying things Californians want to revenue, and tell the story of Republicans thwarting the popular will. You can say that we need to throw out the Constitution and move straight to a convention. But what becomes incredibly clear is that there is a groundswell of support inside the party for a simple move to restore democracy to the state, and if the establishment in Sacramento rejects that, in particular John Burton, the subsequent outrage will have a major impact on grassroots support for all Democratic candidates next year. There's just no question about this. The grassroots already feels disrespected and abused by the leadership. They got Hillary Crosby into a statewide officer position based on just this kind of frustration. They feel that one of the richest economies in the world is run like a third-world country, and they know that they will never change that when procedural rules force Democrats into a defensive crouch, where they see their role as losing as little as possible. This split will grow and branch out into statewide officer races, legislative races, etc. The grassroots workhorses won't be very inclined to work so hard for a Party that disrespects them and fails to act in their stated interests. Not to mention the fact that everyone knows that, while we wait another Friedman Unit until the electorate figures out the problem on their own, people will suffer from budget cuts, people will go bankrupt, and people will die.

The CA Majority Rule team has a multi-pronged strategy. One, they are raising money for this poll, to try and prove that a properly framed set of questions will elicit the desired results. Two, they will put Speaker's Bureaus together in every district in California with people who can talk about majority rule and restoring democracy, complete with real-world examples of the fruit of the state's dysfunction. Three, they will seek to pass endorsements of the one-line majority rule initiative in every Democratic club and county committee in California. There's an executive board meeting coming up in November where this will probably come to a crescendo, too.

The real story of the Lakoff initiative is a story about rank and file Democrats wanting their leaders to follow their will. You can argue about tactics or strategy or approach, but that's what it boils down to. And the party leadership had better take heed.

The Friedman Unit Strategy For Perpetual Minority Rule

The deadline for filing an initiative that would make the November 2010 ballot is Friday. The initial measures to repeal the 2/3 ballot initiatives filed by Maurice Read failed at the end of July. There is currently an initiative to lower the threshold from 2/3 to 3/5 in circulation, but it does not have any backing.

And that's it. There is no pending initiative regarding any two-thirds rule, with the institutional support needed to get on the ballot, and the deadline is Friday.

As has been mentioned in a Contra Costa Times article, the political leadership in the CDP appears to be moving away from it.

A split between Democratic activists and the political pros who run the party may be growing over how to approach the issue that has bedeviled the party for years: the two-thirds vote required to pass taxes and budgets in the Legislature.

Most Democrats in the upper echelons of the party apparatus are convinced it's a fool's errand to try to persuade voters to hand the majority party unchecked power to raise taxes. Instead, they're gearing up for a campaign next year to lower the threshold — from two-thirds of both legislative bodies to a simple majority — on budget votes only, a path they believe voters can embrace.

But some grass roots liberals say they're frustrated with the caution of party leaders and believe, if sold right, voters would hand over both taxing and budgeting powers to the majority party.

"This is a doable thing, but it requires getting Democrats together and deciding to really do it," said George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has become a de facto leader of the cause and is preparing to submit by next week a ballot measure for the November 2010 election that would drop the two-thirds requirement on both taxes and budgets. "Either they want to give the state a future or they can let Republicans continue pushing it into disaster." [...]

But party leaders see him as quixotic, and dismiss his position as misplaced and uninformed.

"People are not ready to pass it," said John Burton, the Democratic party chairman and a former Senate leader. "He's got a theory. Good luck to him."

Mind you, that another guy had a theory before he entered the CDP Chairmanship: John Burton. At the time he committed himself to repealing the 2/3 majority for the budget and taxes, and listed it as a top priority. But I don't even know that the Burton fallback position is being considered; as of now, they have a little over 48 hours to file a 2/3 repeal on the budget. And of course, this would immediately put half of what a budget is - revenues - off-limits, while taking responsibility for bad budgets that cannot be fixed.

What I have heard now is that, with statewide offices being decided in 2010, party leaders don't want to put revenue on the ballot and increase GOP turnout against it, threatening their statewide officer candidates.

This is nothing more than a Friedman Unit strategy. We cannot put such a proposal on the ballot in 2010 because it might hurt candidates, so we move it to the next election. Which has candidates in it as well, so we have to just hold off past 2012. But our Governor's up for re-election/trying to defeat the Republican in 2014, so we have to hold off then, too. As a result, nothing proceeds.

And it's worse than that. We hear constantly that the public is not ready for a conversation about changing the rule, but in the meantime nothing is being done to prepare the ground for that shift in public opinion. It's not that we have to give the war a few more months to succeed, as in the Friedman Unit; it's that we have to give NOTHING more time for voters to, I guess, come up with their own ideas about state government.

The inescapable conclusion you must come to is that everyone in the system actually likes the system as it is. For Democrats, they personally prosper by getting elected and re-elected, and they can always blame the 2/3 rule for whatever failures occur. It's accountability-free government complete with a scapegoat, and it rocks their world.

We can talk about how Democratic leaders tend to view the electorate as static and unchangeable, rather than the starting point from where opinion can be shaped. We can talk about how small-bore goals or a major crisis can provide the spark for the change the state so desperately needs. But this isn't a failure of imagination. It's a general contentment with the status quo.

Which is why change will have to be imposed upon the system from the outside. The most intriguing initiatives to date are the one pushed by Lenny Goldberg to repeal the $2 billion dollar a year corporate tax breaks, and the proposal for a Constitutional convention (though that has also not gone into circulation by the Bay Area Council, but only through an independent effort from Paul Currier). This obviously cannot be left to anyone in Sacramento - they will always find a convenient excuse for delay.

Burton Demands "No" Vote On Offshore Drilling In The Budget

This is a big deal. John Burton just sent out an action alert to CDP delegates and supporters urging them to vote AGAINST an element of the budget negotiated by the Democratic leadership. Specifically, he wants the offshore drilling at Tranquillon Ridge voted down.

As you may have heard, legislative leaders and the governor have reached a tentative budget deal that the Senate and Assembly could vote on as soon as tomorrow.

One part of the package is a Republican-written bill that would allow offshore drilling in state-controlled waters off California’s coast for the first time since the devastating 1969 oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast. This proposal is an affront to all Californians and we must urge lawmakers to vote it down.
This sweetheart deal for one oil company was negotiated behind closed doors, without any legislative hearings to allow public comment.

It strips the State Lands Commission – which has approved or rejected oil leases for the past 150 years – of this power and gives it to a commission controlled by the governor’s administration. This commission would have unlimited authority to rewrite the lease to benefit the oil company.

The offshore drilling plan does not solve either this year’s budget problems or systemic problems. That’s because its promises of future revenue are not actually written into law.

This Republican offshore drilling scheme endangers California’s environment. It would further pad the pockets of oil executives. And it does virtually nothing to solve the state’s current or future budget problems.

Ironically, the same Republican legislators who support this sweetheart deal are the ones who refused to vote for our Democratic leaders’ proposal for an oil-severance tax like the one levied in every other oil-producing state.

Please call your local lawmaker and urge him or her to say NO to new offshore drilling. Say NO to jeopardizing our coastline for minimal budget help this year or in the future.

At the end of the email, Burton reminds readers that these kind of backroom deals are part of why "it’s so important to have a majority-vote budget in California so Republicans cannot hijack the budget process to make bad policy changes that are extraneous to the state budget." A-men to that, but tell it to the Democratic leaders who helped negotiate this.

Karen Bass was asked today by reporters why the offshore drilling bill was included in the budget agreement, and she replied, "It comes down to $100 million dollars." Apparently you can put a price on despoiling the coastline and destroying the environment. Turns out it's 1/880th of total budgetary spending.

It's good to see the Chairman of the CDP picking up on a campaign by the Courage Campaign and amplifying it. The offshore drilling plan will be considered in a separate trailer bill. It can be defeated.

Burton Out-One-Lines The One-Liners

Arnold Schwarzenegger's Budget Reform Now group released their first TV ad yesterday, full of buzzwords and bullet points ("Hold the politicians accountable!") and admitting that the package includes a "spending limit," which is certainly further than the Democratic legislative leadership has been willing to go. But as one-line summations of the election goes, you can't get much better than future chair of the CDP John Burton, who took a pass on giving his specific voting choices for May 19, but who uttered this classic quip:

In any case, pressed on the question of whether his lifelong bleeding heart liberalism would allow him to back some of the permanent budget cuts that would result if Prop. 1A is passed, Mr. Almost Chairman responded with a classic Burtonism:

“I think when it’s all over, the ones getting fucked will be the poor people.”

Now, I could give you the charts showing how spending will be forced down and payments to the reserve fund mandated even in bad budget years, or offer the example of TABOR's spending cap in Colorado, which was disastrous. And I could follow you through the contours of this bad public policy and how it does nothing to relieve the structural problems that can get California out of the ditch. But I cannot improve upon that line. I've been critical of Burton in the past, based on the need for forward-thinking strategies at the CDP, but I've never questioned his liberalism. And you have to give him the credit for this, er, bon mot.

Now who will have the guts to put it on a mailer?

Burton Watch Offers Revealing Critiques Of The Man Who Would Be CDP Chair

It's been distressing to see the race for CDP chair turn from an election into a coronation, with John Burton lining up institutional support, muscling out the grassroots and forcing his competition to the sidelines. Coming off an historic Presidential election, with the demographics squarely on the side of Democrats and a new generation of activists who have boundless ideas to bring a different organizing philosophy to California, the right chairman of the Party could really leverage the energy and activity into something special, to lay the groundwork for a re-imagining of the political structure. Sadly, the best can be said of Burton is that he's an old workhorse, but there are troubling signs that he is unaware of the changes in modern campaiging, unconcerned with reforming the broken institutions both inside and outside the party, and unable to use the new energy and excitement to any decent ends. It appears that the frenetic organizing outside the party structure may be the only hope for progressives in the near term.

But it could be even worse than that. The new site Burton Watch offers a substantive critique of the former State Senator, with information that every delegate and voting member of the Party ought to know before turning over the reins to this guy. The initial post surveys how Democrats could lose California under this version of leadership:

Because the public instinctively knows that when power and money compete with the public interest, we all suffer. If you’ve ever registered voters or walked precincts for a candidate, you’ve undoubtedly been greeted with this response: “I’m not going to vote because it doesn’t matter. All politicians are the same.” And as the cynicism grows, voter turnout declines and the Decline To State registration escalates -- now approximately 20% of all Californians are registered DTS. So how do we combat the innate distrust that drives a large segment of our population to disengage from political parties and even voting? Well, Obama showed us a part of the solution [...]

When previously disenfranchised voters, minorities, and the young are all flocking to the Democratic Party because we represent a new way, a vision of hope and change, why on earth would we want to take a giant step backwards to the bad old days? And yet that’s exactly what Democrats in California are poised to do this April. The California Democratic Party, instead of rising to meet the challenges of a new millennium with openness and inclusion, is set to reach back to one of the oldest and most entrenched political machines in California history for its leadership.

Enter John Burton, California’s much older version of Rod Blagojevich. There are so many reasons why John Burton is unfit for the role of Party Chair in California, that I’ll be doing a series of posts, each one dedicated to a disqualifying aspect of his background. All of the material I’ll be using has been obtained through basic use of the google, and the state’s Republicans could easily find and use it against California Democrats. And trust me, they will.

At the end of this series, I think you’ll agree that John Burton is the wrong person to lead the California Democratic Party in 2009.

The next installment recounts perhaps the most infamous episode in Burton's past - the very public sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a former staffer, with excerpts from the complaint filed by Kathleen Driscoll in San Francisco Superior Court:

During DRISCOLL’S employment, BURTON engaged in hostile, demeaning and sexually abusive conduct such that DRISCOLL’S working conditions were significantly altered. His conduct over the past year easily rises to the level of severe or pervasive conduct for a hostile work environment sexual harassment claim both in California and under federal law. The harassing acts started in approximately September 2006. They consisted of numerous events, which took place throughout DRISCOLL’S employment, including but not limited to:
Asking DRISCOLL over the phone, “What are you wearing?” on approximately 10 occasions;

On one occasion, DRISCOLL sent a temporary employee to deliver paperwork to BURTON. BURTON ordered DRISCOLL to never send someone on her behalf again by berating her, “When you drop stuff off, stop in will ya? I mean I’m not getting laid under the fuckin’ table.”

Singling DRISCOLL out for exorbitant demands and attention, included but not limited to excessive demands for immediate and frequent meetings to go over routine matters, including on weekends after the work week was over in contrast to her co-workers;

There's more at the link, and it's pretty graphic. It goes without saying that women make up an extremely large bloc of the Democratic base.

I don't know what more Burton Watch will trot out, but here are some facts: Californians have little connection to their state government other than knowing that they don't like it. They hear things like how politicians are living high off campaign donations and it's both alienating and corrosive. The rules are already rigged in favor of a conservative wipeout of government and the last thing Democrats need as they seek to make structural changes is the spectre of an old-school pol with a lot of skeletons hanging over their collective heads. John Burton has the potential to take the state backwards and it's a chance that delegates should think long and hard about.

California's Crisis of The Status Quo - And the Only Woman Who Can Fix It

There's an interesting dynamic happening in California. At the national level, the state's power is growing. Californians hold the Speaker of the House and four key committee chairs, including the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and now the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have Californians at the helm. Any energy and environmental policies will have to go through the committees of Californians, and they'll have California allies inside the Administration, with the selection of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Dr. Steven Chu as Energy Secretary and Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Other Californians are up for possible Administration jobs, like CA-31's Xavier Becerra (US Trade Representative) and CA-36's Jane Harman (CIA Director). It's a good time to be a California politician in Washington.

It's a TERRIBLE time to be a California politician in California, as it dawns on everyone in Sacramento that the state is ungovernable and hurtling toward total chaos. The two parties are miles apart from a budget deal, and even their biggest and boldest efforts would only fill about half the budget gap. The peculiar mechanisms of state government, with its 2/3 rule for budget and tax provisions, and its artificial deadlines for bills to get through the legislature, which causes remarkable bottlenecks and "gut and amend" legislation changed wholesale in a matter of hours, and the failed experiment with direct democracy which has created unsustainable demands and mandates, make the state impossible to reform and even get working semi-coherently. The state's citizens hate their government and hate virtually everyone in it with almost equal fervor, yet find themselves helpless to actually change anything about it, and believe it or not, ACTUALLY THINK THEY'RE DOING A GOOD JOB setting policy through the initiative process, which is simply ignorant (though they paradoxically think that other voters aren't doing a good job on initiatives). The activist base does amazing grassroots work, very little of it in this state. We have a political trade deficit where money and volunteerism leaves the state and nothing returns. And the political media for a state of 38 million consists of a handful of reporters in Sacramento and a couple dudes with blogs.

Many of these problems have accumulated over a number of years and cannot be laid at the feet of anybody in particular. But in general, the reason that we've gotten to this crisis point, the reason that California is a failed state, is because by and large the dominant political parties WANT IT THAT WAY. I'm not saying that the state Democratic Party or its elected officials, for example, wants the state to be flung into the sea, metaphorically speaking, but there's certainly a tendency toward the closed loops of insiders that prefer a predictable and stable status quo, that naturally restricts reform and leads to corruption, gridlock and crisis. I'll give you an example. Last night I was on a conference call where Eric Bauman, Chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, announced that he would drop out of the race for state party Chair and run for Vice-Chair, because when 78 year-old former State Senator John Burton entered the race, all his labor, organizational and elected support dried up. Fitting that he didn't mention his grassroots support, because it clearly doesn't matter who they prefer.

There is little doubt in my mind that John Burton will run the party, or rather delegate it to whatever lieutenant will run the party, in the exact same way it has been run for the last decade or so, characterized by missed opportunities to expand majorities, a lost recall election for Governor, cave-in after cave-in on key budget priorities and a failure to capitalize on the progressive wave of the last two electoral cycles. These are not abstractions, and they have real-world effects, $41.8 billion of them at last count. And honestly, the Special Assistant to Gray Davis didn't represent all that much change, either.

We have an ossified party structure, and a phlegmatic legislative leadership that is unable to get its objectives met because the deck is essentially stacked against them. The times call for a completely new vision, one that can energize a grassroots base and use citizen action to leverage the necessary unraveling of this dysfunctional government to make it work again. The work on Prop. 8 since the election has been tremendous, but ultimately, if public schools are closing and unemployment is above 10% and the uninsured are rising and the pain felt in local communities is acute, then we have a much larger problem, one that requires a bigger movement allied with the civil rights movement to make change.

The key flashpoint is the 2010 Governor's race. There is currently no one in the field with the ability to break the lock that the status quo has on California and deliver a new majority empowered to bring the state back from the brink. In an article published last month, Randy Shaw put it best.

None of the current field appears likely to galvanize a grassroots base, or to be willing to take on the “third rails” of California politics: massive prison spending, Prop 13 funding restrictions, or the need for major new education funding. Dianne Feinstein? She’ll be 77 years old on Election Day 2010, and she has long resisted, rather than supported, progressive change.

Jerry Brown just finished campaigning to defeat Proposition 5, which would have saved billions of unnecessary spending on the state’s prison industrial complex. This follows Brown’s television ads for the 2004 election, which helped narrowly defeat a reform of the draconian and extremely expensive “three strikes” law. Brown’s consistent coddling up to the prison guards union is the smoking gun showing that he is not a candidate for change.

Gavin Newsom came out against Prop 5 on the eve of the election, undermining his own “break from the past” image. He also spent another local election cycle opposing the very constituencies who an Obama-style grassroots campaign would need to attract.

With her Senate Intel. Committee post, it is unlikely that Feinstein will run. He forgets John Garamendi, who supported Prop. 2 (!) because of his fealty to farming interests and who first ran for governor in 1982.

Shaw mentions that the state is ready for a Latina governor, and mentions the Sanchez sisters. He's right in part, but has the wrong individual in mind. I am more convinced than ever that the only person with the strength, talent, grassroots appeal and forward-thinking progressive mindset to fundamentally change the electorate and work toward reform is Congresswoman Hilda Solis. She authored the green jobs bill that Barack Obama is using as a national model. She is a national leader on the issue of environmental justice and has the connections to working Californians that can inspire a new set of voters. She beat an 18-year Democratic incumbent, Matthew Martinez, by 38 points to win her first Congressional primary. She has worked tirelessly for progressive candidates across the state and the country. In a state whose demographics are rapidly changing, she could be a powerful symbol of progress that could grab a mandate to finally overhaul this rot at the heart of California's politial system once and for all. This is not about one woman as a magic bullet that can change the system; this is about a woman at the heart of a movement. A movement for justice and equality and dignity and respect. A movement for boldness and progressive principles and inclusiveness and openness. A movement that can spark across the state.

I know that Solis is interested in the Vice Chair of the Democratic caucus if Becerra takes the job in the Obama Administration. Congresswoman, your state needs you desperately. Please consider running for Governor and leaving a legacy of progress in California.

The Status Quo, Corruption, And Crisis

When Josh Richman, the fine reporter for the Oakland Tribune, called me for comment yesterday on the breaking news that Don Perata transferred $1.5 million dollars the day after the election from an IE account intended to elect Democrats to the State Senate and wage initiative campaigns into his personal legal defense fund, my initial reaction was "I'm not surprised." My slightly longer reaction is captured in the article:

David Dayen, an elected Democratic State Central Committee member from Santa Monica, blogged angrily this summer about his party's contribution to Perata's legal defense fund, contending the money would've been better spent on legislative races. The same goes for Leadership California's money, he said Wednesday; despite a Democratic presidential candidate carrying California by the largest margin since 1936, Democrats netted only three more Assembly seats and none in the state Senate.

"Every time I asked the California Democratic Party about getting more active and involved in local elections, they said the state Senate and the Assembly control those races "... and we don't have a lot of flexibility. So Perata, at that time, and Nunez or Bass had the authority to run those elections," Dayen said. "Now we see what happens when you vest power in these closed loops — suddenly self-interest becomes more important than the good of the party."

He believes this is why Perata didn't step aside as Pro Tem earlier, as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez relinquished his post to Karen Bass in May: "Darrell Steinberg was sitting there ready to go "... and we were all like, 'What the hell is going on?'

"We speculated it had to be that he still needed the leverage to make the calls to raise money for himself."

I want to expand on that. The behavior of Don Perata can be directly tied to the continuance of a status quo that has failed and is failing California families. At no time is the way elections are run - without transparency, without accountability, without meaningful checks on the potential for corruption - questioned by the powers that be. It is enabled through a shrug of the shoulders and the words "that's the way things are." What Perata did was perfectly legal, although that is subject to change, as the state Fair Political Practices Commission votes today on making such transfers illegal. But as Michael Kinsley famously said, "The scandal isn't what's illegal; it's what's legal." The bigger scandal is that there's no desire or even interest at the top to see that change. And why not - it suits them just fine.

California has 63% majorities in both chambers of the legislature, has just seen a 61% share of the vote for a Democratic Presidential candidate - and yet this state is completely, inescapably and hopelessly beholden to right-wing interests, as a function of a backwards set of governing rules that have climbed the budget hole over $40 billion dollars, without any reasonable hope of getting out of it. It's been beyond clear for several years now that the ultimate solution will come at the ballot box, and yet the state party has entrusted the most crucial elections, the ones that could net a working 2/3 majority in the Senate, to someone more concerned with saving his political hide. And so Hannah-Beth Jackson, who came within 1,200 votes of flipping a Republican seat, reads a story like this in shock and anger. And the citizens in SD-12, promised a recall of Jeff Denham; and those in SD-15, expecting a candidate in their majority-Democratic district to take on Abel Maldonado; they are similarly angry. Money they had every right to expect would go to help them now goes to help one man.

(By the way, the alibi from the defenders of Perata on this doesn't scan at all. First of all, nobody begrudges him from raising money in his own defense - the problem lies in taking that money from an account intended for campaign work. And second, if this is a "political witch hunt," as they say, why would he need this lump sum of money 75 days from the time when a Democratic Administration with no inclination to prosecute Democrats on allegedly bogus charges is about to be installed? It's either a witch hunt about to end or a going concern. The alibi is pathetic.)

But the larger point is that the status quo, the closed systems at the top of the Democratic leadership, the lack of transparency and accountability, create the crises we see in our state, or at least disable anyone from reacting to them. And this is not likely to change. John Burton is going to be the next state CDP Chair. He's been in politics for 205 years, and he's basically muscled out the competition for the job. Does anyone think that a lifelong pol, with a long history of backroom deals, the guy who was Arnold Schwarzenegger's cigar-smoking buddy (that seems like a good profile for the opposition party chair), gives a damn about urgently needed reform? He's making sweet little noises about turning red areas blue, but there's absolutely no hope that he will provide any change from the insular, chummy, mutual backscratching society that exists in Sacramento. Grassroots activists should be furious that, in the wake of seeing countless opportunities wasted and crises lengthened, we're boldly taking off into the future with a Party Chair who was first elected in 1965.

The future of California is a mystery right now, because there is a crisis of leadership and an unwillingness to reform. At the very least, activists should look to electing Hillary Crosby as State Party Controller so that someone in the room will have a reform message that can spark a modicum of change. But until the fundamentals are altered, we will lurch from one disaster to the next.

Nothing New From California's Yacht Party

On the first day of the legislative session there was an irrational burst of optimism that the roadblocks put forward by the Yacht Party on the budget and taxation would somehow be hurdled. It's true that Democrats have three more seats in the Assembly (though currently one less in the Senate, pending the filling of Mark Ridley-Thomas' vacant seat), lowering the amount of Yacht Party members they'd have to bring aboard for any solution. But the idea that these new Republicans represent any kind of fresh thinking or newfound moderation is a fantasy.

Though Democrats picked up an aggregate of three seats in the Assembly, Niello said, they still need at least three Republicans to cross over and vote for any legislation that requires a two-thirds vote, such as a state budget.

Because the GOP caucus is united around opposition to any new taxes and wanting to see reforms such as a state spending cap and improving the state's regulatory environment on businesses, Niello said, Democrats will have to give to get any of those crossover votes.

"We're still solid, still firm on the things that are priorities," Niello said.

Newly sworn-in Assemblyman Dan Logue (R-Linda) sounded a similar note.

"We've got to create wealth, and we've got to grow our way out of trouble, not tax our way out of trouble," Logue said. "Raising taxes will drive more jobs to Nevada."

Some of this could be bravado, and there are a couple legislators who were in close races - Steve Knight in AD-36, Bill Berryhill in AD-36, Tony Strickland in SD-19 - who would, in theory, do well to part ways with ideology and compromise to enhance their chances in the next election. But this would contradict the Iron Law of Institutions - "the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself." Republicans who give in on the budget will be primaried and feel far more fear from that internal challenge than from the opposition.

The only way to counteract this is to make the challenge from without more vital than the challenge from within, and to make the power inside the institution line up with the power of the institution. It means getting 2/3 and making anyone who rejects the will of the people pay. SEIU has the right idea with their new ad campaign about the budget, playing off of Obama's popularity in the state, and John Burton's curt response to Yacht Party efforts to roll back labor and environmental regulations as payment for a budget solution - "The Republicans are full of crap" - ought to be said a bit more often, maybe in less colorful language, to make clear who is causing this crisis.

I'm not sure any of it will be enough, though. The Yacht Party is still the Yacht Party.

CDP E-Board Notes

I was only able to attend the Saturday session of this weekend's e-board meeting, under the strange and foreboding Anaheim skies - the fire in Chino Hills nearby blotted out the sun during the midday, you could actually stare right into it - but there were some interesting happenings:

• The Progressive Caucus meeting featured a debate between two candidates for party controller, Eric Bradley (the incumbent) and progressive challenger Hillary Crosby. It was good of both of them to come to the caucus and express their views, but Bradley's contentions (some would call them alibis) for why the party didn't do quite as well in downballot races this year were kind of preposterous. First, he claimed that money moved into some races late because nobody knew Barack Obama would do as well as he did. This is insulting on a variety of levels. First of all, Obama was leading by as much as 28 points in some polls as far back as June, and was never seriously threatened in any polling. Second of all, I don't see how it matters, in terms of who you spend money on, how a race that is out of your control is faring. The next thing that Bradley said, echoing something I hear a lot at these CDP meetings, is that we cannot disclose information to the membership of the party on financing because "we cannot let the Republicans know what we're doing." We might as well let them know, considering that hiding the information hasn't brought us much good. Also, the entirety of the information that Crosby and progressives like her are seeking is a) already readily available in FPPC and FEC reports and b) sought AFTER THE FACT so we can make intelligent decisions about what worked and what didn't. There is a bias toward secrecy there that is quite disconcerting.

• In the general session, there was a continued set of numbers given to prove that the CDP did everything it could to win downballot races. Art Torres mentioned 1 million live GOTV calls and $12.5 million spent. These are all nice numbers (although Obama's California campaign made 1 million calls a day in the week leading up to the election), but if the results are essentially nothing, recapturing seats that were gerrymandered to benefit Democrats to begin with, then the question of effectiveness must be asked. We had a very good session about that with a group of committed activists who ran phonebank operations and local headquarters and state campaigns, and the information was very illuminating. First of all, we have got to end the practice of being one of the only two states in the country not using the DNC Voter File and VAN software. The data is supposedly better in the current set we use, but that can be bought out and integrated into the VAN. I heard about numerous problems with the statewide Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool that made it essentially useless.

Second, there needs to be more empowerment at the local level. The stories I heard from the organizers at DP-SFV (the Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley) on how they funded their headquarters and made the best use of volunteer time, for example, was great. In the last week, however, the folks running the campaigns from Sacramento got very top-down in their approach and made all kinds of mistakes that the locals had to fix. It discouraged volunteers and organizers at the local level.

Finally, there has to be off-cycle organizing so that prospective volunteers are brought up with a culture of impacting their own communities instead of driving off to Nevada every four years. This includes finding and capturing the local groups who worked so tirelessly for Obama this year. They need to have it explained and drilled into them why staying local and effecting change inside California is so important. And organizers need to be paid year-round to help bring that about. Finally, they need to be in EVERY county, not just the populous ones or the most contested ones, to impact those statewide races for 2010. For his part, Chairman Torres said he is committed to finding organizers and capitalizing on all the energy we see now, and I think we need to hold him to that.

• The above steps make a good criteria for the next party chair, and that race was the buzz of the session. Right now we have three candidates: Eric Bauman, chair of the LA County Democratic Party; Alex Rooker, current first Vice-Chair; and the legendary John Burton, former State Senate leader and Congressman. At first I figured that Burton would have locked up so many endorsements from legislators who he's known forever that this might not be much of a race; however, Rooker won the endorsement of the CDP Labor Caucus, which is very significant (if not totally surprising, as Rooker has longstanding ties to labor). I don't know if you're aware of who pays for campaigns in California, but the labor community could have a lot to say about who's the next state party chair. In addition, a tough three-way fight with two candidates from the North and one from the South could give the Southern California candidate an advantage.

I'm inviting all of the candidates to visit us at Calitics and offer their vision of where they want to take the party.