California Recall: Reality Threatens to Intrude

Any time I hear people walking along the street or sitting in restaurants talking seriously about public issues of the day, I figure that can't be entirely bad. And I've been hearing that lately. Just this morning, I heard a couple of guys in the cafe waiting for their coffee and bagels discussing the proper balance between direct democracy and constitutional limits.

So, there, I've now said something nice about the 2003 recall. I don't expect to do it again. Because the disconnect among power, responsibility, taxing authority and voter expectations in California has become so severe that reality is starting to intrude in a serious way. For example, one political analyst observed this past weekend:

But someone will be chosen as governor, and he or she must then do the unenviable -- govern a government and pacify an electorate heady with its own clout and impatient for results. The Public Policy Institute survey found expectations already unrealistic: 70 percent of Californians think the state could cut spending without reducing services, and 28 percent think the state could cut its budget more than 20 percent without reducing services.

A Boston transplant says of California politics:

Californians seek the simple life but with every election choose to clutter the state Constitution with mathematical formulas and unfunded mandates. Californians are fervent environmentalists. If not, they would have stayed in Boston, Brooklyn, Cleveland or Atlanta. They seek low taxes and high services with the same ardor with which they demand clean air and SUVs. Politics and politicians may change, but the special destiny of self- contradiction that defines California will not, at least not soon.

Despite the perspective of "postmodern" academic theories and certain psychiatric conditions, there is a reality out there that exists independently of our perceptions of it. In a democracy, people can reshape their political reality. But the kind of disconnect of expectations from fiscal and structural realities that we see in California now is just unsustainable.

Or, in California-speak, it represents a severe karmic imbalance that must correct itself.

Tags: california politics, recall election