It’s 2010, an election year, and last week, the California primary ended one stage of the electoral season and ushered in another. As you may know, we were treated for months to the spectacle of Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, and a host of others who decided government wasn’t so evil after all. By the end of the day, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman won their respective primaries. Brown got 300,000+ votes over Whitman; he spent approximately $200,000, while Whitman spent more than $80 million, of which $71 million was her own money (Mrs. Sandman opined that Whitman might have gotten more votes, and more goodwill, if she had instead donated that cash directly to the State of California to assist with the deficit. Can you imagine the press she would have gotten? The goodwill, and how long that goodwill just might have lingered?). Per vote, Brown definitely got more bang for his buck. We had to suffer through months of advertising with no foundation or essence. Whitman, Poizner, Fiorina, and others just created lovely glossy ads with no real substance, while Brown has decided to say absolutely nothing about what his vision, if any, is for the state. Now we’re going to have to suffer through months of ads from Whitman and Brown. Personally I think you’d have to be a lunatic to run for California governor these days, which is probably why the best potential candidates sat this one out. Instead we have power-hungry egotistic megalomaniacs on the Republican side, and mostly re-treads on the Democratic side. I really wish there was an option on the ballot to vote “none of the above,” because I really don’t want any of these people. God help us, because I highly doubt they will.

It wasn’t the most exciting election in terms of the races for state and federal offices, but it was important in terms of the propositions on the ballot. Propositions 14, 15, 16, and 17 threatened in their own ways to alter the political and civic landscape of the state. Lots of the pundits droned on about how this was reform, how people wanted change. I agree people want change, but I’m not sure that this is how to achieve it.

Propositions 16 and 17 were essentially corporations vs. the rest of us, and highlighted the abuses of the initiative system. Luckily, enough people saw through the flim-flam, and voted no on these two corporate-friendly legislative sleight-of-hands. However, I’m willing to bet this isn’t the last time some CEO and his cronies decide to try to manipulate the system and bypass the legislature. It’s part of a larger trend in the shift from a government at least somewhat run by the people to a government nominally run by the people, and controlled by corporate interests. While the initiative system originated by Hiram Johnson was a good idea at the time, I’m thinking the system’s abuse over the last 30 or so years indicates it may be time to end this experiment in “direct democracy.”

Prop 14 is the most immediate of the four to change things, since it passed. Proposition 14 proposes to put all candidates on the ballot in the primary, rather than having a traditional party primary system. While it was touted as a way to weed out the extremists in the state legislature, I’m not so sure it will have this effect. At present, we have a primary in June, and then the general election in November. What will now happen is we will have a general election in June, and then a run-off in November. The names will remain the same (Primary and General), but the actual effect will be that all candidates will be on the ballot in the “primary”, then the top two-vote getters battle it out in the fall.

If we look at this election, we had token Democratic opposition for Brown, and multi-millionaires duking it out on the Republican side. I can’t imagine that the outcome would have been much different, what with Democrats and others on the left ensuring Brown survived, while Whitman’s seemingly endless bank account determining her triumph over her competitors on the right. What it does mean is that in the fall in years to come, no other candidates will be on the ballot: none. Just the top two. I don’t think it’s going to produce moderation, but just concentrate political power further into the hands of the ultra-rich.  It’s also going to lengthen the electoral season, since everyone will want to get an earlier start, now that the “general election” is in June, not November. *sigh*

Proposition 15 pointed the way to a possible partial solution to all this, by establishing a temporary public financing of the Secretary of State election. If this had passed, and it succeeded, public financing might have been endorsed for other races. Unfortunately, it went down to defeat. This is part of what I see is going to have to happen for genuine change to occur: the banning of corporate influence and other special interest funding of elections; the public financing of elections; and increased inclusion of all interested parties, not just “the top two.” However, with the Supreme Court expanding rights for corporations, unions, and other outside groups to financially influence elections, and the refusal of the public to vote for or push for real reform, it’s increasingly strictly limited to the plutocracy. This dovetails nicely with expanded corporate influence. I won’t be surprised someday if corporations bypass the game-playing, and just directly nominate someone from within their company. At present, the only distinction is the candidate quits the company first, waits a couple years, then runs for office as a “private citizen.”