Schwarzenegger

In California, Thomas Elias may be the most important voice you've never heard of. Elias, an independent journalist whose column in appears mostly in smaller papers over the state, was arguably the first person to circulate the notion of a recall of then Gov. Gray Davis just after his re-election in 2002. (Other folks took it and ran from there).

Elias reports and thinks deeply, and gets into the guts of the issue. Now, almost alone, he offers a column not about the politics of Gov. Schwarzeneggger and his reform efforts (the preoccupation of Sacramento) but about the substance of the governor's proposals. Today, Elias looks at budget reform, and he raises important points. His main problem is that Schwarzenegger's budget plans, which have only been loosely outlined, would give far too much power to the governor's office. Governors could make mid-year cuts, set aside money for reserves and in some cases, suspend laws all by themselves. Elias sees this as dictatorship. Having sat through legislative budget hearings, your blogger wonders if a little bit of dictatorship in making budget adjustments might not be such a bad idea. Whatever the case, Elias deserves credit for trying to spark a debate on the nuts and bolts of this. California voters, after all, may have vote on a "reform" plan of some kind this November--six months away.

In a radio interview with my former colleague from the LA Times, Patt Morrison, Gov. Schwarzenegger, who has used direct democracy more than any politician in American history, says the initiative process is being abused and it's time for both parties to look at how it should be changed. The quote is below, and full transcript is here.

Last month, I wrote in the Los Angeles Times about how Gov. Schwarzenegger's pursuit of education cuts as part of his budget proposal was undermining his efforts to achieve redistricting and budget reforms. A new poll from the Public Policy Institute of California offers more evidence. His stance on education is so unpopular -- only a quarter of Californians approve of his handling of education -- that it's dragging down his overall popularity (to 41 percent in the poll). Schwarzenegger is leading the way in offering reforms, but if he doesn't drop the education cuts -- and he has the opportunity to do just that with his revised budget proposal later this month, his low popularity will poison those reform ideas and end his last chance to make major changes in how the state governs itself.

Rick Claussen, consultant to the redistricting initiative in California, reports that the final count of sigs, after last night's turn-in, is just under 1.2 million. With those numbers -- nearly twice as many as the number of required valid signatures -- the initiative should have no trouble qualifying for the November ballot.

REPUBLICANS GO AFTER GOVERNOR: This story from the Redding paper is worth a read for those who follow California politics. Republican politicians in the far north of the state sharply criticized Schwarzenegger's handling of the budget, during a public meeting late last week and: Sam Aanestad, a state senator, sounds particularly angry. He says that Schwarzenegger is sending mixed signals (though that's hardly a new charge, and accurate given the incredible diversity of his administration and his management methods, which encourage internal arguments). But he goes even further by saying that Schwarzenegger does not have the state's best interests at heart. "He's much more interested in the governor's future than in Californians'. He's got two more years. He can slide through and become a senator," Aanestad said.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS: My post Friday on Gov. Schwarzenegger's personal spending on initiatives should have said that his latest donations to the redistricting initiative come from his political committee, not his own pocket. As the Sacramento Bee correctly points out today.

In retrospect, the California workers' compensation reform of 2004 represented the high-water mark for Gov. Schwarzenegger and his attempts to govern by initiative. Schwarzenegger and business allies -- especially the carrot producer Grimmway -- went through the process of drafting and collecting signatures for initiative -- with the governor promising to drop the initiative if the legislature gave him the reform he wanted. On the deadline day for turning in signatures, lawmakers gave Schwarzenegger much of what he wanted..

But workers' comp is not one of those things that gets "reformed" and stays "reformed." In California, reform is often a history of back and forth swings, as business and labor react to change the system when it either becomes too costly to business or does not produce enough in benefits for workers. In 2004, the pendulum had swung to the point that business was complaining, as California boasted the highest workers' comp costs for business of any U.S. state. But Schwarzengger's reform may be pushing the pendulum the other way. At the California Progress Report, Frank Russo has an interesting post on how benefits for the permanently disabled have declined. He is pushing legislation sponsored by Don Perata to boost such benefits.

NO REVOCATION IN FLORIDA: A Florida appeals court ruled that voters cannot revoke their signatures on ballot initiative petitions. The court struck down as unconstitutional a 2007 on signature revocation, saying that such revocation was not part of the state constitution and could "serve to burden" the initiative process. The context: Florida, more than any other state, has taken measures to restrict direct democracy and signature gathering--this ruling could undermine part of that move.

Governor Schwarzenegger has used ballot measures more often than any political figure in American history. He has spent more $25 million on his political career, most of that on ballot initiatives (and to the TV ads and signature gathering such campaigns require). He's kicked in more than $1 million into a new redistricting initiative which has little chance of passing. (CORRECTION: This $1.25 million donation comes not from personal funds--but from one of his political committees).This begs a question: is the blockbuster democracy industry taking advantage of the wealthy governor?

Friend of the blog John Myers of KQED (the Northern California NPR affiliate) has an excellent blog item reporting about the question of exactly when and how Gov. Schwarzenegger might put in writing the budget reform proposal he is talking so much about. Given the complexities of any budget reform, Californians will need as much time as possible to figure it out if they are to vote on a reform measure this fall.

Rick Claussen, the consultant and initiative expert who has been brought in to help qualify the current redistricting initiative in California, got in touch this week. Claussen, who works from the Sacramento suburbs, is one of the grown-ups in the direct democracy business and has one of its strongest records, particularly in winning "yes" campaigns, which are much more difficult than "no" campaigns. He worked on previous Schwarzenegger ballot campaigns in 2004 and 2005, and he expressed confidence by email that the redistricting measure will qualify in time for the November ballot.

Claussen says the initiative is on track to hit its target of 1.1 million signatures the first week of May; signatures will be submitted the week of May 12. That number of signatures is nearly twice the 694,354 legally required to make the ballot. But in the initiative business, it is standard operating procedure to submit hundreds of thousands more signatures than legally required -- in large part to speed up the qualification process. When more signatures than required are submitted, county elections officials -- who do the counting in California -- can count using "random sampling" techniques, rather than by going through every signature. If the random sample shows that the number of valid signatures is greater than 110 percent of the legally required number (and a validity rate of 70 percent is considered good in this business), then the initiative automatically qualifies for the ballot. This makes things much faster.