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 Role Of Grassroots Action In Policy Debates

I've seen a lot of buzzing about this story from Harold Meyerson, about the faltering of Barack Obama's online army when it comes to health care:

Organizing for America (formerly Obama for America), which maintains that list within the confines of the Democratic National Committee, has asked those 13 million Obamaites to "create a conversation within their communities," in the words of one DNC official. Specifically, the DNC has asked them to collect health insurance horror stories and put them online, to support a set of broad health-care principles, and to go door-to-door among independent voters in their neighborhood and talk to them about those principles. On June 27, some activists participated in what the DNC termed a "day of service," working in blood banks, volunteering at health clinics, raising money for medical research.

All very commendable, and about as likely to affect the outcome of the health-care deliberations as the phases of the moon. "What made the presidential campaign so potent were clear goals and a strategy that made sense to people," says Marshall Ganz, one of liberal America's foremost organizing geniuses (who led training sessions for Obama campaign staffers and volunteers last year). Such goals and strategies are hard to discern today, and the participation of Obama volunteers has declined accordingly.

Even when the battle for health care finally comes down to a single bill, the plans to activate Obama supporters are conceptually modest. "We can't target individual members of Congress," says one DNC official. "To tell people to target certain Democrats puts the party in a weird position." Not even 13 million supporters, apparently, can instill party discipline into a political culture that scarcely knows the meaning of the term.

Meyerson thinks we need a mass movement strategy to win the day on health care. Well, that can never possibly come from inside the party machinery. In a 60-vote environment, Republicans have no part in the debate. It will rise or fall based on the actions of conservative Democrats. And a DNC-based organization, as the official says, won't go after Democrats, at least not in public.

Now, Organizing for America has built a large list of health care horror stories that activists can use. And their architecture of calling and canvassing tools is more than available to anyone to start their own independent push toward particular legislators. In fact, I know that some grassroots groups have already done so, whether OFA likes it or not. And they are really in a capacity-building phase right now, and there's going to be a learning curve. Things are happening that columnists in Washington might not see.

As for the efforts by outside groups to push recalcitrant lawmakers, Meyerson thinks they are pursuing a legislative strategy and not a movement-building strategy. Well, that's not entirely true. There are health care rallies at Congressional offices tomorrow. Health Care for America Now put 10,000 people in Washington for a rally. I don't really know what he wants. Meyerson hints that single-payer advocates are actually building a movement, one I believe will endure no matter what reform bill passes, but it currently lacks critical mass.

Even if we grant Meyerson these points, I'll say this. Health care is a maddeningly complex topic. Everyone's for fixing this broken system but they have about 100 different ways to do so. If Meyerson thinks that ordinary Americans can actually impact that debate at the granular level, I'd love to see his blueprint. When elements of reform - like single-payer, like a public insurance option - have been used to stand in for reform, it has moved a couple legislative mountains. I believe in movement politics, but on health care reform that movement, unlike with "civil rights now" (the 1960s) or "We're in a Depression" (the New Deal era) there's just no bumper sticker for health care reform that's going to turn it into a mass movement. You're seeing the best digital-age equivalent of it - online organizing, grassroots ads, etc. - but it doesn't throw people into the streets.

I don't totally disagree that OFA isn't a great model, it being situated inside a party infrastructure. But I really fail to see a vision of a million people on the Washington Mall shouting "national health insurance exchanges with subsidies up to 400% of the poverty level now!" And, activism circa 2009 is different than activism circa 1963.

The Hopeful Sadness On Cap And Trade Legislation

After a spirited tussle in the House, climate and energy legislation moves to the Senate, where the chances are frankly much less foreordained than even the House.

As Grist reported earlier this week, environmental groups are already working to secure improvements in the Senate.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, issued a statement congratulating House leaders for the landmark passage. Boxer has pledged to have her own climate bill, likely based on Waxman-Markey, passed out of committee in August [...]

Senate Democrats’ last attempt to pass a climate bill failed by a large margin in June 2008, and senators have already rejected an attempt to exempt the climate bill from being filibustered. It takes 60 votes to end debate on legislation in the Senate; Democrats hold 59 seats in the Senate (60 if you count Al Franken, of course). But a number of Midwestern and Southern Democrats have expressed concerns about passing the legislation, and few observers expect more than two or three GOP lawmakers to vote for a climate bill.

Meanwhile, the energy bill approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week was significantly weaker than provisions in Waxman-Markey. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said he wants every committee in the Senate to complete work on climate and energy legislation by mid-September, so there is still a good deal of time left to shape legislation before the Senate adjourns for the year in November or December.

The lack of outside grassroots energy for this already-weakened bill means that all the compromises move the bill to the right, and at some point, the fragile coalition supporting it will break when liberals finally say "Enough!" While where House members voted depended in large part on whether their district favored Obama, in the less accountable Senate that dynamic will not be nearly as widespread. Right now, this bill looks doomed to crash on the rocks in the stream accompanying Claire McCaskill's Twitter feed.

I wouldn't call the 212 who voted against Waxman-Markey traitors, but political animals who don't see the politics well-aligned on cap and trade, and fear retribution at the polls. I think it's wrong for the President to use those calculations to absolve them of their votes, but the reality is that progressives haven't sealed the debate in the country to any real extent. I doubt that Republicans can make this an election issue like with the BTU tax in 1993, and the right-wing tea partiers trying to string up the 8 Republicans who voted for the bill are sure to fall flat. But the mandate for action is clearly not warming as quickly as the planet.

One of the favorite arguments of climate-change deniers is “but it was warmer in the late 90s.” In fact, the odds are good that I’ll get that argument from George Will on This Weak tomorrow. I basically know the answer: temperature is a noisy time series, so if you pick and choose your dates over a short time span you can usually make whatever case you want. That’s why you need to look at longer trends and do some statistical analysis. But I thought that it would be a good thing to look at the data myself.

So here’s average annual global temperature since 1880, shown as .01 degrees C deviation from the 1951-80 average.



What this tells me is that annual temperature is indeed noisy: there have been many large fluctuations, indeed much larger than the up-and-down in the last decade or so. But the direction of change is unmistakable if you take the longer view. The fitted line in the figure is a 3rd-degree polynomial, but any sort of smoothing would tell you that there is a massive upward trend.

I continue to maintain that, in the end, we will have to innovate and adapt our way out of the climate crisis rather than legislate our way out of it. That doesn't mean we forget about pushing for strong policies to save the planet, just an expression of reality.

Grassroots Progressive Action on Repairing California

It's taken the proposed destruction of practically the entire social safety net in California for progressives both inside and outside the political system to fight back. I'm actually more heartened by the work done outside it. I expect Lenny Goldberg to come up with a great alternative budget calling for tax fairness, and end to corporate welfare and a government for all the people instead of the rich. I expect Jean Ross to do the same, as well as AFSCME. They're all good proposals, but this is what they are paid to do. What I don't expect, and what I haven't seen, is a citizen's movement to rival the institutional and advocacy machinery. The Fix the California Budget Facebook page is really one of the first such grassroots pushes I've seen in recent memory.

Californians deserve real solutions to the budget deficit. Responding to our economic crisis with an all-cuts budget will only make the state's problems worse. Deep cuts to vital programs undermine our economic recovery and President Obama’s investment in economic stimulus, disproportionately harm the most vulnerable Californians, and go against our core values.

More than 70 percent of voters sat out the May 19 special election because it is the Governor and Legislature’s job to fix the budget. Polls show the defeat of the initiatives was neither an endorsement of an all-cuts approach nor a rejection of raising revenues.

Under Governor Schwarzenegger, we have suffered $23 billion in spending cuts in the current budget year alone. Additional drastic cuts will irrevocably change the state we love. Californians support and deserve a state that provides for the common good and the needs of our residents, and we need to pursue realistic revenue solutions that will protect our shared priorities. Cuts are not the only option!

Our state needs courageous leadership. We will support those who stand against an all-cuts budget, speak out for fair ways of raising revenue, and work to deliver a budget that invests in our future and protects all the people of our state. True leaders get their strength from the people they represent. We pledge to be that strength, and mobilize to support a sensible budget solution.

The specific action items are to call your lawmaker and provide that counter-weight to the internal pressure to support the all-cuts approach. They reference the majority-vote fee increase as a legitimate option that must be put before the Governor in place of the worst cuts. County Democratic Chairs and local activists are actually driving the pressure from below, rather than having solutions imposed upon them.

This represents an opportunity. It doesn't mean we win this fight - we're going to lose more than we win at first. And in a way, this is the corporate "reform" community's worst nightmare - the Bay Area Council and California Forward would rather drive the reform process themselves and keep it within their own particular boundaries. But we can build a movement of a newly-roused core group of activists committed to setting California on the right path by restoring democracy, eliminating the conservative veto and reforming the broken system. This is a first step.

SEIU Money Drops Into No on 1A

The SEIU donated $500,000 to the No on 1A campaign, the first truly major expenditure by any group against the ballot measures on May 19. The No on 1A campaign now hold about $1 million in their bank account. While this is dwarfed by the money dumped into the Yes campaign by, among other groups, the CTA, billionaires like Jerry Perenchio, and Chevron, given the attitudes of the electorate even a little money on the No side could be enough to stop the onslaught and tip these measures. Politicos understand this fairly well:

"It just got a lot harder," said Dan Schnur, director of the University of Southern California's Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics and a former Republican strategist.

"The biggest advantage the proponents have had all along is the lack of a well-funded opposition," Schnur said. "Historically, you don't need to outspend ballot measures to beat them, and in a low-turnout election this is a decent amount of money." [...]

"Right now there's a tremendous tendency to reject anything out of Sacramento," said Republican strategist Dave Gilliard.

Good for the SacBee, by the way, for pointing out that Prop. 1A "has a long-term impact and would not directly alter the budget until 2011."

I've been speaking at a lot of grassroots Democratic groups against these measures, purely on the public policy merits, and the overriding sentiment I'm seeing out there lines up with what Dave Gilliard says there. The disconnect between the establishment and the grassroots is truly striking. People don't feel like their concerns have been met, either this year or for the last thirty, really. They see another layer of budget dysfunction forced upon the voters that fails to get at the structural problems. And now, they're starting to see their voices manifested with action, as well as the mother's milk of California politics, money.

LACDP Doesn't Bow To Fear

The Los Angeles County Democratic Party held their endorsement meeting for the May 19 special election yesterday. The Yes side brought out all the big guns to talk up Prop. 1A: four State Senators, including President Pro Tem Steinberg, Attorney General candidate Ted Lieu, State Superintendent for Public Instruction candidate Gloria Romero and Lieutenant Governor candidate Dean Florez. The No side had two union members from the SEIU and the California Faculty Association and a 2008 Assembly candidate.

And the LACDP went neutral.

It's quite remarkable to see practically the entire establishment of the Democratic Party selling fear and so few people buying. My fear is that they will chalk up their failure to the typical right-wing anti-tax bias, when the real indictment here is a failure to lead, to articulate an actual solution instead of the same nonsense that does nothing to effect structural reform. The first ads for 1A and 1B only have one unequivocally true statement in them - that the budget is "A total mess, and we all know it." And yet the prescription for solving the mess is nothing more than making people afraid of some amorphously bigger mess, while neglecting the clear disaster that would arrive with the passage of a spending cap.

This is not about an aversion to two years' worth of sales taxes. It's about an aversion to more demonstrably awful solutions to layer onto an already dysfunctional system. Maybe instead of dictating to their constituents, the leadership in Sacramento could bother to listen to them.

Top-Down Grassroots Leaders Decide Unilaterally To Make Budget Reform More Impossible

Since it's Don't Curse Week here in LA County, I will be forced to be brief. Last night a group of grassroots activists, including remnants of the Obama organizers in California, various progressive advocacy groups, and Democratic Club leaders, discussed a potential citizen-led ballot initiative to reform the California budget process. Nobody disputes that something drastic must be done to permanently end the conservative veto and restore democracy to the process. If you ask 100 activists what needs to be done you will get 105 answers. Arriving at the conclusion that offers the best opportunity for success, both in being adopted as a reform by the voters and as a practical matter for the legislature, ought to be opened to a vigorous debate and a deliberative process.

That is the direct opposite of what happened yesterday, when a group of self-appointed leaders tried to dictate the form in which the reform will take, and sought to invite the remainder of the group to join their already-decided-upon course of action. So the fight to restore democracy has begun with an undemocratic edict, from the grassroots no less, that is based in the same kind of mushy, don't-make-waves approach that has devastated the state for decades upon decades. If it sounds topsy-turvy, you're not alone.

In short, the self-appointed leadership has decided to put up a website to "eliminate the two-thirds rule" and "restore majority rule" to the budget process. This is a very tightly controlled statement based on, essentially, the fiction that eliminating the two-thirds rule is what these folks are seeking to do. They are not. As you may know, there is a 2/3 rule for passing a budget, and a 2/3 rule for any changes in the tax code that involve increasing revenue. To the layman, this might seem like two discrete parts, but that's really not true. A budget includes taxes, spending, and a few other priorities. Changing one without the other does actually nothing to overcome the conservative veto. And yet this is what the self-appointed grassroots leadership's proposal would do, only covering the repeal of 2/3 for passing a budget and not for taxation.

This is really the final blow in what was a long slide away from progressive leadership at the grassroots level. I've heard a lot of justifications and rationales for not including fully half of the equation of settling a budget in the process of reforming the budget, most of them so twisted with pretzel logic as to be indecipherable. Some say that there's no way tax changes could pass in the current environment, so we should strive to make whatever progress we can. That's the kind of tissue-soft, gutless, out-of-touch-with-where-America-is-right-now statement that has made California a political basket case. Those who bow down to the keepers of the tax revolt are usually the same people that are saying a spending cap that includes tax increases is destined to pass, or the same people saying a constitutional convention will take care of the tax problem even though it, too, is subject to a vote of the people. It doesn't make any sense. There's an argument that the polling shows any tax issues are a loser. That's just not true. The latest PPIC poll shows very little difference between repealing two-thirds for the budget and for taxes - within the margin of error.

The other argument is that California lawmakers, given a majority vote on the budget, will have powerful leverage to bend the Yacht Party to their will on tax issues, or go directly to the people with tax solutions. These are the same people who spend every day of their lives lamenting the terrible negotiating skills of Democrats in the legislature, and laughing at those who claim the Yacht Party is surely just a little bit more pressure away from folding.

I've made my position on this well-known, and I'll repeat it here.

Changing the (repeal of 2/3 for the) budget but not taxes is TOM MCCLINTOCK'S view of things. It makes Democrats own a budget that can only be modified with expenditure cuts. In the event of a deficit, Democrats would have to either cave and cut services or hold out with the exact same dynamic that we saw this year. And it will not allow the legislature to tackle the structural revenue gap that comes from a tax system too closely tied to boom-and-bust budget cycles. This is perverse consultant-class thinking that is dangerously outdated, constantly compromising, and believes in political reality as static rather than lifting a finger to change that reality. Thinking that March 2004 and June 2010 are the same is just ridiculous, and thinking that no argument can be made to the public, after the longest and most self-evidently absurd budget process in decades, that the system is fundamentally broken and has to be changed to allow the majority to do their job, is in many ways why we're in this position to begin with.

And this is where the self-appointed grassroots leadership will take us. This was carried out through perhaps a deliberative internal process ("Several hours!" we were told), but with no input from the broader grassroots. The website set up has no ability for public comment, no discussion of why the position was taken, and, most crucially, no explanation that "restoring majority rule" as conceived by the proposed ballot initiative does not restore majority rule. You can call that a lot of things, but the most accurate would be "a lie." It is a lie to suggest that this proposal would repeal 2/3. It does not. And it is being carried out in a top-down process that reminds one of the worst aspects of the Sacramento consultocracy rather than progressive leadership in the grassroots.

The working theory is that everything is on the table and this effort is initially to gauge support in the process. That it is being done through misleading means really doesn't inspire confidence in how open the process will be. They can go down that road, and I actually support signing on to the site as a show of support. But caveat emptor. And if you do sign, maybe contact the leaders and ask them why they aren't being truthful about their intentions or transparent about the decision-making process.

Grassroots Success On Coal Plants

The Capitol has a power plant that heats and cools all federal buildings in Washington. And it is a carbon-spewing, dirty-energy, coal-fired power plant. On Monday, there will be a mass civil disobedience action in Washington, with over 2,500 protesters descending on the Capitol Power Plant for a nonviolent sit-in. Prior to that, the top two Congressional leaders called for a 100% shift to natural gas at the power plant by the end of the year.

Today, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid released a letter asking the Capitol Architect to switch the Capitol Power Plant from coal to 100 percent natural gas by the end of 2009. Pelosi and Reid’s call comes just three days before more than 2,500 people from across the country are coming to converge at the power plant for the biggest civil disobedience on climate issues in U.S. history. Prior to the announcement of the Capitol Climate Action, pro-coal legislators had been able to prevent the switch from coal to natural gas.

“Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid’s dramatic action shows that Congress can act quickly on global warming when the public demands it,” said Greenpeace Deputy Campaigns Director Carroll Muffett. “This move demonstrates that they recognize the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for a switch to cleaner energy sources.”

In other words, Congressional leaders were pushed by a grassroots action to call for sweeping change.

Coal makes people sick and this country can't afford more coal burned into the atmosphere, from an environmental and a public health standpoint. Oscar-winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen have released a new satirical video aimed at the coal industry's deceptions on "clean coal."



Pass it around and maybe before long, your local or federal representatives will start calling on switching power plants near you away from coal. Industry and their PR spinners will never stop trying to keep the old, dirty energy structures in place. We can't stop either.

Budget Hell - Grassroots Reinforcements

You don't have to constantly refresh or check your RSS feeds for the next couple days - budget talks have been called off for Christmas. There is a meeeting between the Big Three tentatively scheduled for Friday.

In my view, just that we're talking about a Big Three instead of a Big Five is progress, suggesting that the Gov will go along with the work-around budget if he can save face on a few "stimulus" items (like, you know, taking people's overtime and meal breaks away. They can eat while working!). The Governor never appeared in a movie about schizophrenia, but that's how he's been acting the past few days, holding press events at key sites where infrastructure improvements are being shuttered (a levee in Sacramento, the 405 Freeway in Karen Bass' district in LA) blasting the legislature, while at the same time claiming that progress is being made toward a budget solution.

During a press conference along Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, the Republican governor said he and Democratic leaders made "some great progress" Sunday and that it may only take two more meetings of the same sort to reach a compromise this week. Schwarzenegger had been calling for a solution by Christmas, though he acknowledged Monday that a legislative vote would not take place until next week at the earliest.

"It could easily be that before Christmas Eve or Christmas Day that we have an agreement, that the legislators can be brought back between Christmas and New Year's to vote on it," Schwarzenegger said.

(UPDATE: Kevin Yamamura reports that the negotiations have come down to three issues: "rollback of environmental review for construction projects, greater use of private investment and contractors, and deeper spending cuts, including those affecting the state work force." These have almost no impact on the budget as a whole - you're talking about cutting two state worker holidays - and are designed only to reward private business interests. Arnold has always been in the pocket of the Chamber of Commerce.)

You'll notice that none of these press events are being held in front of any state employee offices. That's because, in general terms, people don't look kindly on mass layoffs and cutbacks right before Christmas. It gives them the impression that the person making those layoffs is kind of a Scrooge. Of course, the immediate halt to all public works projects, at a time when we should be encouraging stimulus projects of this type, also have an impact on jobs. Not only does every contractor working on those projects get fired, but vendors get stiffed for work that they've already completed, leaving the state open to lawsuits. The Governor should kind of be ashamed to stand in front of any backdrop with cancelled projects behind him, considering his epic mismanagement is partly to blame. This is particularly true when considering that the voter-approved infrastructure work is vital to public safety and the state would undoubtedly be liable in the event of catastrophe.

Communities nationwide have repaired fewer than half of the 122 levees identified by the government almost two years ago as too poorly maintained to be reliable in major floods, according to Army Corps of Engineers data.

State and local governments were given a year to fix levees cited by the corps for "unacceptable" maintenance deficiencies in a February 2007 review that was part of a post-Hurricane Katrina crackdown. Only 45 have had necessary repairs, according to data provided in response to a USA TODAY request. The remaining unrepaired levees are spread across 18 states and Puerto Rico — most in California and Washington.

The Governor is cleverly casting this as a problem of "the legislature" hoping nobody will notice that he performed the veto, he blocked the very plan that could get these projects restarted.

Fortunately, grassroots Californians are noticing, and you can see the contours of a coalition forming, perhaps resembling the 2005 special election coalition only with more staying power. Groups like Courage Campaign and the local blogosphere have the reach to engaged communities starving for information. The California Budget Project provides the statistical heft. Labor and environmental groups have the ear of the legislature. And there's a new member of the coalition - former Obama organizers in California who are moving with unusual speed to support a sane budget solution and slam the Governor for his intransigence. At Schwarzenegger's 405 Freeway presser, you can hear a small band of protesters in the background noise. That was organized by Obama volunteers through their new Facebook-like application, CommunityOrganize.com. Pam Coukos distributed a letter-writing tool urging a budget solution. California for Obama has done the same in an email blast, asking it to be distributed to the various volunteer teams. And there is already talk about veterans of the Obama movement running for state and local office.

This is pretty new and early. But you can see how this network of committed organizers can gradually become a state political force, especially if the coalitions are built and networks made between the groups mentioned above. I have long said that what is missing in California is a popular grassroots movement that can go around the media filter and whip up support for progressive values through direct action. It is said that California is too big for such a movement to catch fire, but in political terms, we all know that the state is very small, and a committed movement can make an outsized difference. This won't happen overnight, but we're moving in the right direction. Now we just need a gubernatorial candidate to ride the grassroots wave...

Echoes Of Failure: The 2008 California Election Roundup

Back in 2006, I and a lot of other grassroots progressives were angered that California showed little to no movement in its Congressional and legislative seats despite a wave election. You can see some articles about that here and here, when I explained why I was running as a delegate to the state Party. And frankly, I could rerun the entire article today, but instead I'll excerpt.

I've lived in California for the last eight years. I'm a fairly active and engaged citizen, one who has attended plenty of Democratic Club meetings, who has lived in the most heavily Democratic areas of the state in both the North and South, who has volunteered and aided the CDP and Democratic candidates from California during election time, who (you would think) would be the most likely candidate for outreach from that party to help them in their efforts to build a lasting majority. But in actuality, the California Democratic Party means absolutely nothing to me. Neither do its endorsements. The amount of people who aren't online and aren't in grassroots meetings everyday who share this feeling, I'd peg at about 95% of the electorate.

I mean, I'm a part of both those worlds, and I have no connection to the state party. I should be someone that the CDP is reaching out to get involved. They don't. The only time I ever know that the CDP exists is three weeks before the election when they pay for a bunch of ads. The other 23 months of the year they are a nonentity to the vast majority of the populace [...]

Only two Democrats in the entire state of California were able to defeat incumbents last November: Debra Bowen and Jerry McNerney. Both of them harnessed the power of the grassroots and used it to carry them to victory. They also stuck to their principles and created a real contrast with their opponents on core issues. The only way that the California Democratic Party can retain some relevance in the state, and not remain a secretive, cloistered money factory that enriches its elected officials with lobbyist money and does nothing to build the Democratic brand, is by building from the bottom up and not the top down. By becoming more responsive to the grassroots and more effective in its strategy, we can ensure that California stays blue, which is not a given. This is a long-term process that is in its third year, and will not happen overnight. But it's crucial that we continue and keep the pressure on.

In 2008, we experiences that most anomalous of events, a SECOND wave election in a row. Barack Obama won the biggest victory at the top of the ticket in California since WWII. And yet, the efforts of downticket Democrats yielded only minimal success. This is despite a decided improvement in the party in terms of online outreach and voter registration. So something is deeply, deeply wrong with how they're conducting campaigns.

I'm going to lay out the good, the bad and the ugly and make some suggestions as to what we must do to improve this for the future.

The Good

This wasn't a wipeout at the downballot level. The voters agreed with the Calitics endorsements on 8 of 11 ballot measures, with 1, Prop. 11, still too close to call. We did manage, at this hour, a net gain of two Assembly seats, which could expand to three if Alyson Huber in AD-10 has some luck, and a gain of one Senate seat if Hannah-Beth Jackson holds off Tony Strickland in SD-19. It is true that those numbers, 50 in the Assembly and 26 in the Senate, would be high-water marks for this decade. And we came close in a few other seats that we can hopfully capture in the future. In the Congress, we have thus far gained no ground, but a couple seats, CA-44 and CA-03, look well-positioned for the future, and with Bill Durston set to run for a third time, his increased name ID and the closeness of partisan affiliation in that district should make it a targeted seat at the national level.

Voter registration was the driving factor here. In red areas, Democrats did the leg work of registering thousands upon thousands of voters and making uncompetitive seats suddenly competitive.

The Bad

They forgot to turn those new voters out.

What shortsighted CYA masters like Steve Maviglio and Jason Kinney fail to understand, apparently, is the concept of opportunity cost. When you have Barack Obama on the top of the ticket winning 61% of the vote, it is simply inexcusable to have gains that are this modest. Maviglio doesn't tell you that AD-78 and AD-80 were gerrymandered to be Democratic seats, so essentially we got back what was expected in the Assembly, and with a 106-vote lead, who knows what's in store with SD-19. The concept of a wave election is that such energy at the top of the ticket will necessarily trickle down. And that's what I based my initial projections on, that Obama would make "out-of-reach" seats suddenly competitive. But he didn't. And there are two reasons for that: ticket-splitting and voters that stopped at the top, causing a significant undervote. I don't have numbers for Obama at the district level, so it's hard to be sure about ticket dropping, but the ballot measures are generating about 600,000-800,000 less votes than the Presidential race or Prop. 8.

If you want a further analysis, djardin did a great analysis comparing Barbara Boxer's share of the vote in 2004 in Assembly districts, when John Kerry was on top of the ballot, against the vote share from the Assemblymembers who were built for the district in 2008, with Obama. The numbers are astonishing.

District Candidate Boxer Vote 2008 AD Vote
*78 Marty Block 57.9% 55.0%
*80 Manny Perez 57.5% 52.9%
*15 Joan Buchanan 52.6% 52.9%
30 Fran Florez 49.8% 48.3%
26 John Eisenhut 48.6% 48.3%
10 Alyson Huber 48.1% 46.2%
*pickup

In most of these races, the AD candidates are slightly underperforming the 2004 Boxer vote. The exception is Joan Buchanan in Assembly District 15. Buchanan may have been helped by demographic changes in the district.

It's simply ridiculous that any district candidate would underperform the Boxer vote, after four years of incredible registration gains and a 61% performer at the top of the ticket. It's inexcusable, and nobody inside the party should be feeling good about missing out on the second wave election in a row. These moments don't happen often. And these failures are what lead Yacht Party leaders like Mike Villines to crow about how "Republicans will still be empowered to protect Californians from higher taxes." He knows that he keeps dodging bullets and doesn't have to worry about a backlash for his party's irresponsibility.

These expectations are not unrealistic and this is NOT about gerrymandering, regardless of what fossils like George Skelton say. Alyson Huber, Linda Jones and John Eisenhut had virtual parity in terms of registration in their districts. Fran Florez had a much higher Democratic share. Obama should have carried them to victory. Thanks to him, Democrats took multiple state houses and made gains all over the country, in far more difficult circumstances. There are systematic barriers to a progressive wave here right now.

So what is to account for this? It's important to note that the problems we saw with the No on 8 campaign should not be viewed in isolation. They are a symptom of the poor performance of the consultant class here in this state. No ground game? Check. Maviglio is crowing about the fact that they had a lot of volunteers on ELECTION DAY. That's too late. Based on what I've heard, the CDP dumped all their door-hangers on the local parties, who had no volunteers to hand them out and instead relied on the Democratic clubs to do it. That's dysfunctional and disorganized. Furthermore, that makes clear that no money was put into field - door knocking, phone banking, etc. Instead, the consultocracy again relied on slate mailers and a modicum of TV ads, hoping the IE campaigns, which spent over $10 million, would take up the slack. There was a low-dollar donor program, and it netted something like $200,000, which doesn't pay for two days' worth of spots, and it didn't start until 8 weeks out.

There's no sense of urgency, no notion of the permanent campaign. Did ANY CDP messaging mention the yacht tax loophole? Did they exploit the Republican budget, which was unnecessarily cruel? Was the drive for 2/3 used as a banner across campaigns to frame a narrative on the election? Were any issues put to use? No.

Part of this is what I call our political trade deficit. We export money and volunteers and get nothing in return. The energy and effort put into the Obama campaign locally was impressive, but it didn't translate into anything locally.

California is a state that was expected to vote heavily for Obama. California donors accounted for perhaps 20% of his record-setting $640 million-plus. In the final days of the election campaign, Californians provided even more for the Democratic nominee: They volunteered.

Even though California was not a swing state, Californians still mattered. Some took leaves from work to knock on doors and traveled to the battleground states of Virginia, Colorado, Ohio and others. They even have a name, "bluebirds," people from blue states who flock to Republican strongholds and swing states to help Obama's campaign.

Jack Gribbon, California political director for Unite Here, the unions that include hotel and restaurant workers, oversaw an independent campaign focused on the swing area of Washoe County in the battleground state of Nevada. Knowing that Las Vegas and Clark County, in which the city is located, would probably vote for Obama, Gribbon sought to help swing the more conservative Reno-Sparks area toward the Democrat.

Using multiple voter lists, Gribbon targeted 16,000 voters, most of them with Spanish surnames, many of them Democrats and some of them newly registered.

It's incredible that Californians can be so easily motivated to contribute to a national effort, which requires a lot of work on their behalf, picking up and moving across the country, but they cannot be tapped for a local ground game.

But I don't blame Obama on this. He's trying to win an election. It's not his fault that he's more charismatic or more of a volunteer magnet than the California Democratic Party. The point is that the party has to supplement this, by working in off-years and early in the year to build a grassroots base. And there's a blueprint for this. It comes from Howard Dean. This was part of his memo after the election:

Governor Dean's first step was to assess our Party's strengths and weaknesses and put in place a strategy to address those issues. Dean developed a business plan to rebuild the Democratic Party, modernize our operations and expand the electoral map. The emphasis was on lessons learned and best practices, and it included the following key components:

· Rebuild the Infrastructure of the Party – After assessing the needs on the ground, we hired full-time permanent staff in all 50 states, trained staff and activists, introduced new measures of accountability, and developed a unified technology platform. Over the past four years we've held 140 trainings for candidates, campaign staff, organizers, Party leaders and activists in all 50 states.

· Upgrade and Improve the Party's Technology/Modernize the Way We Do Grassroots Organizing - Over the past four years the DNC has made significant investments in technology, creating a truly national voter file, improved micro-targeting models and developed 21st century campaign tools that merged traditional organizing with new technology.

· Diversify the Donor Base – Shifting the emphasis of Party fundraising to include both small donors and large donors, the DNC brought in more than 1.1 million new donors and raised more than $330 million from '05 – '08. The average contribution over the last three years was $63.88.

· Amplify Democratic Message and Improved Outreach – Created a national communications infrastructure to amplify the Democratic message and reach out to groups we haven't always talked to and expand the map to regions where Democrats have not traditionally been competitive – including the South and the West.

· Professionalize Voter Protection Efforts – Created a year-round national, state and local effort to ensure that every eligible voter has the opportunity to vote.

Those are the bullet points, but the details are important. Training and deploying full-time staffers throughout the state is very desperately needed. They could implement a version of the Neighbor-to-Neighbor program that proved so successful nationwide. The DNC voter file is an amazing tool that I have had the opportunity to use. California, a leader in technology, ought to have the most comprehensive online database of its voters in the country, which we can use for micro-targeting and outreach to distinct communities. And finally, this is about PERSONAL CONTACT AT THE STREET LEVEL. Two years after I campaigned for delegate on a platform of making the party present in people's lives year-round, not just at election time, that is still not a part of the picture. This is why everybody walks away to go volunteer and donate elsewhere. They have no connection to the state party, no interest in the state's issues, and are in many ways contemptuous of the efforts of state politicians. They haven't been drilled on why the government is unmanageable thanks to the 2/3 rule, and they haven't internalized the urgency of why that must be dealt with.

The silver lining is that these thousands of California-based volunteers, who learned organizing on the Obama campaign, could actually be channeled and put to use by the CDP if they chose to do so. The role of the next state party chair in this effort is crucial.

Quite simply, what has been tried isn't working. In two election cycles with massive gains at the national level, in California we have crumbs. Something is deeply wrong. Something is broken. And that must be fixed.

Imagine A Fox-Less Presidency

Obama's holding a grudge:

These are chilly days on Capitol Hill ... and on the campaign trail for Fox News journalists -- at least when they're anywhere near Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Sources tell The Sleuth that the Obama camp has "frozen out" Fox News reporters and producers in the wake of the network's major screw-up in running with the erroneous Obama-the-jihadist story reported by Insight magazine.

"I'm still in the freezer," one Fox journalist said, noting that the people at Fox "suffering the most did nothing wrong." (It was "Fox and Friends" host Steve Doocy who aired the Insight magazine piece, which reported that operatives connected to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) found out that Obama, as a child, was educated at a Muslim madrassah in Indonesia.)

Since the madrassah incident, Obama has given interviews to ABC, CNN, CBS and NBC -- pretty much every other network except Fox. Sources close to Obama acknowledged that they're not thrilled to play ball with Fox journalists, but they stopped short of saying they are freezing the network out.

I believe they call this "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

This will not hurt Obama in a run for the White House in any way. And if it provokes this result, then it's a major coup

So maybe there was no written apology, but at least John Moody, vice president for news at Fox, issued this missive to staff in his daily editorial note on Jan. 23: "For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC. The urgent queue is our way of communicating information that is air-worthy. Please adhere to this."

It's amazing that a "professional" journalism outfit has to send this as a bulletin, but then again I've been in enough newsrooms to know that "pull it off the Internet" is the default tactic to get through the day. Something had to be done about Fox' behavior, and the Obama silent treatment might be a start.

I'm really starting to warm to Obama over the last few days, and less over this or his Iraq resolution than a piece by Mark Schmitt at TAPPED, which chronicles his career as a community organizer, and how it shaped the way he views the world today. I'd be proud to have a President who thinks about stuff like this:

"The political debate is now so skewed, so limited, so distorted," said Obama. "People are hungry for community; they miss it. They are hungry for change.

"What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer," he wondered, "as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.

The pessimist in me would call this mushy-middle stuff, but actually it is concerned with changing the political structure and opening it up. That's a noble goal.

The Historical Importance of the California Grassroots

I am honored to be serving as a delegate to the CDP along with Ellis Perlman, a Professor Emeritus in political science from the University of Michigan-Flint. He has been a keen observer of grassroots politics as it relates to this state for the past 100 years, and I asked him to put together some information on it, to serve as a historical perspective for those of us who don't quite remember the days of Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren. There's some very good information here, and it all speaks to the fact that this "people-powered" movement is nothing new, it's just being adapted for the 21st century.

Grass Roots and Political Change in California Jan. 21, 2007

Progressivism, building on earlier populist movements, has spurred a variety of grass roots movements during the past hundred years in California. The state’s political history is encouraging. It demonstrates that progressive grass roots movements can achieve power and influence public policy. The examples below illustrate such achievements and influence.

Two factors should be noted. One is that the movements typically have been rooted in the middle and upper middle class. The second is that conservatives have had similar successes, especially in the 1960 and beyond. -Ellis Perlman January 24, 2007

The Progressive movement in California was founded by Chester Rowell and Edward Dickson, two journalists who had become disgusted with the Southern Pacific Railroad’s control of the state legislature. Their efforts ultimately led to formation of the Lincoln-Roosevelt Republican League, with clubs forming throughout the state. This was a grass roots movement, largely from within the Republican Party, to clean up California government, and make it more responsive to Progressive ideals.
Source: Joseph P. Harris, California Politics (Chandler: 1967), pp. 1-13

Another form of grass roots action and accomplishment in California involved the response of women when they first gained the right to vote. Women’s suffrage was opposed by the elite in Los Angeles, and especially by the Los Angeles Times. It was approved by 2000 votes in Los Angeles, and by 3587 votes statewide in a special election on October 10, 1911. By December, more than 82,000 women had registered in Los Angeles, and more than 90% voted in the mayoral election. Ironically, the Times, having opposed the women’s vote, congratulated women for their “intelligent voting” in defeating the Socialist mayoral candidate, John Harriman.
Source: Jane Apostal, “Why Women Should Not Have the Vote: Anti-Suffrage Views in the Southland in 1911,” Southern California Quarterly 70:29-42 (Spring, 1988)

A group of Republicans, mainly liberals, met in August, 1923, to organize a campaign to secure a liberal state legislature, and to oppose Friend W. Richardson, the conservative Republican governor. They created the Progressive Voters League to contest the 1924 and 1926 elections. The very conservative Richardson followed two progressive governors, Hiram Johnson and William Stephens. The Democratic Party was weak, commonly winning no more than a third of the gubernatorial vote. When Richardson was elected in 1922, conservative Republicans had a majority in the Assembly, and almost a majority in the Senate. The Voters League was instrumental in electing a Progressive, Clement Young, as Governor. The League then disbanded, and Conservative James Rolfe was elected governor in 1930. As with most revolts against dominant political authority in 20th century California, grass roots organization played a major role, and the revolt came from within the Republican Party.

Source: Russell Posner, “The Progressive Voters League, 1923-1926,” California Historical Society Quarterly 36:251-261 (September, 1957)

Progressivism is generally considered to have faded as a force in California and nationally by the 1920s-1930s period. Rosanne M. Barker demonstrated that Progressivism continued as an active movement during this period, sustained by women’s organizations, particularly in small towns. She highlights the activity of Pearl Chase and other women activists in Santa Barbara, and notes that progressive women activists were achieving success in other towns, as well. The types of activities and accomplishments described by Barker did not draw much attention, at the time or later. It represented, however, substantial grass roots effort and achievement of progressive goals.
Source: Rosanne M. Barker, “Small Town Progressivism: Pearl Chase and Female Activism in Santa Barbara,” Southern California Quarterly 79:47-100 (Spring, 1997)

The California Republican Assembly was organized in 1934 as a response to Republican losses in 1932. Clubs were formed throughout the state. By 1938, Earl Warren had become the key figure in bringing moderate/progressive Republican leadership to power, to control the state for the next twenty years. Subsequent grass root movements, beginning with United Republicans of California and the John Birch Society regained conservative control of the Republican Party by the 1960s.
Source: Richard Harvey, Dynamics of California Government and Politics (Wadsworth, 1970) ch. 2

The California Democratic Council, with chapters throughout the state and a peak membership of 66,000, grew out of Adlai Stevenson’s unsuccessful 1952 campaign for President. The political leader most associated with the CDC was Alan Cranston, State Controller and later U. S. Senator. The CDC was a grass roots movement, one generated from within the Democratic Party. Its membership tended to be middle class and suburban, as were the several Republican grass roots movements that fostered progressive reform.
Source: Clyde E. Jacobs and John F. Gallagher, California Government: One Among Fifty (Macmillan, 1966), pp. 102-106

I hope you all enjoyed that as much as I did (or perhaps not; I'm a history nerd). It's interesting that grassroots movements in this state have traditionally started in the middle and upper-middle classes; not surprising, certainly on the basis of leisure time. I think our challenge in the netroots is to ensure a multiplicity of voices, to understand and hear from the concerns of the poor and those typically not present in the larger political debate.

The other factor is that our opposition is just as equipped to pull this off, so we must be smarter, and grow larger, and continue to innovate to maintain any kind of advantage. We also must keep an eye on our legislators in Sacramento, as the "clean up government" mantra has bounced back and forth between the parties over the years.