Before your blogger could read, his parents -- both native Californians, both journalists -- taught him this fact of life: you simply can't trust anything written about the state in East Coast publications.

So it is through those eyes that I just read a piece on California by the New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg in that magazine's "Talk of the Town" this week. The number of errors and misstatements are too many to catalogue here. (One wonders if fact-checkers refuse to cross the Sierra Nevada. Among the problems: a referendum is not the same thing as an initiative, Prop 13 -- while a source of real trouble -- is not at the root of all the state's problems, and our public services are not the worst in the country.) Here's a link (that seems to work even for non-subscribers).

But the piece is worth noting because it's positive--Hertzberg likes the constitutional convention process (he invests it with real possibility) and suggests it gives California a chance to be a laboratory of democracy again. (Here he introduces another whopper: that the New America Foundation "loves" the idea of a constitutional convention. Maybe a few of us do, but I have yet to hear any expression of love from a colleague. Others, including your blogger, decidedly do not love it). And the New Yorker's influence is such that this piece will spawn a new media narrative for the next few months--of California, trying to reform itself. Which is fine as far as it goes. But the convention is no panacea--in fact, it's far from clear that the convention idea can surmount formidable legal and political obstacles to its existence. A convention, if it happens, is more likely to fail than succeed. 

That said, there are reasons to be optimistic about California. Our geography and weather are enormous advantages. Our position on the Pacific Rim, combined with a trade-friendly business base (and a labor movement that is far more positive on trade than unions in the rest of the country), gives us a big economic edge. And our relatively diverse and young population provide us with an enormous advantage over other states -- if we can educate that population adequately. 

As it happens, some of those very same advantages -- particularly our geography and diversity -- make this a difficult state to govern, and to reform. The test of California is thus little different than the test the country faces: whether we can capitalize on our diversity, or be imprisoned by it.