Leon Panetta

Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters draws a picture Sunday of the reform landscape in California. He puts Leon Panetta's California Forward as the incrementalist side of the reform movement and the Bay Area Council (which wants a constitutional convention) and the New America Foundation (your blogger's employer, which has been talking about changing the make-up of the legislature) as the big-thinking, "aggressive" side. More on this subject later--after I go out and aggressively hunt big game for dinner.

A tight travel schedule and a misbehaving laptop make this report two days late. But in a speech Thursday night in San Francisco, former Congressman Leon Panetta, a wise man of California politics and leader of the new reform group California Forward, gave something of an endorsement to the idea of  a state constitutional convention.

Panetta was the keynote speaker at a dinner put on by the Bay Area Council, the business-backed policy group that has been pushing the idea of such a convention. JIm Wunderman of the council, in his remarks, made a full-throated case (though he was drowned out by clinking glasses and dinner conversation) that such a convention is needed and called California Forward "a strong, strong partner." He also pooh poohed concerns that interest groups would dominate a convention or that the process would be open to mischief.

Politicker has the following account of a panel sponsored by California Forward, the new reform group led by former Congressman and Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. Speakers, including the state senate's incoming top Democrat, Darrell Steinberg, predicted that voters next year will be asked to reverse the two-thirds requirement to pass a budget. Unions also may sponsor an initiative to raise taxes. Such a move would make some sense because raising taxes requires two-thirds in the legislature but a simple majority of voters when a tax hike is offered by ballot initiative.

Capitol Weekly has a good piece on the Schwarzenegger redistricting initiative as a test of a new non-profit reform group, California Forward, led by former Congressman and Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. Panetta is one of the best strategic thinkers in the state, but fighting dysfunction in the Clinton White House is nothing compared to fighting dysfunction in California state government.