ANAHEIM — California’s unprecedented October 7 recall election
has led pundits on the opposite coast to trot out their usual
clichés about the state’s wacky ways and distasteful habit
of “direct democracy.” If you can get past their nasty elitist
streak, the commentaries generally offer the sound, reasonable
critique that voters had their opportunity to get rid of Gov. Gray
Davis just nine months ago and didn’t, so why are they demanding a
second chance now?
But what’s far less sound or reasonable is the way so many
national pundits essentially let Davis off the hook for his
resolute incompetence in five years running the Golden State.
Consider these examples from two columnists with sharply different
profiles:
According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Davis
is a scapegoat for matters’ beyond the veteran Democratic
politician’s control. “Thanks to the end of the tech boom and the
bursting of the tech bubble — with an assist from energy
price-gouging — California’s budget has plunged into deficit,” he
wrote last week.
Now Krugman’s shrill partisanship — and his practice of blaming
the Bush-Enron conspiracy for everything from the cork in Sammy
Sosa’s bat to his own receding hairline — may make this apologia
predictable. But it’s mostly different only in tone, not content,
from the
column last week by the Washington Post’s David
Broder, long the voice of inside-the-Beltway conventional
wisdom.
Broder noted that California, like “virtually all states,” faced
deficits after the dot-com bubble burst, but that Gov. Davis was
hamstrung in dealing with the red ink by partisanship and by voter
initiatives dictating state spending.
Now, the point about initiatives is valid to some degree;
Proposition 98, enacted by Davis’s teachers union allies in 1988,
includes a complex formula mandating education spending, for
example. But all governors deal with partisanship. And in the
specifics of its budget woes, California isn’t like virtually all
states. Yes, virtually all states suffered when capital-gains
revenues dwindled after the dot-com bust in spring 2000. But
California’s Democratic-controlled state legislature went on a
spending binge that lasted well after the dot-com boom ended; the
2000-01 budget approved in late summer 2000 increased spending 14
percent. This was not par for the course in America’s statehouses.
Davis went along with it even though he’d warned presciently in
1999 against expanding the size of state government when times were
good because of the deficits that would result when the boom was
over.
When the bills came due in 2001 and 2002, Davis endorsed
fig-leaf budgets built on accounting gimmicks (projecting program
savings that wouldn’t necessarily be realized; delaying paying
bills into the following fiscal year, etc.) and billions of dollars
in borrowing. They did nothing to address a structural deficit of
$1 billion a month.
Now the fiscal 2003-04 budget has just won Davis’s approval
after eight months of warnings about the state’s cumulative $38
billion in red ink. And despite all those warnings, spending in
California is going up by $2.5 billion over last year, the state’s
legislative auditor concluded last week after deconstructing the
budget’s various subterfuges.
No wonder a USA Today survey published in June of how
states dealt with the post-bubble fallout ranked California dead
last. No wonder credit-rating agencies rank California as the worst
credit risk of any state.
Would Davis have faced a difficult task in reining in spending
by his fellow Dems? Sure. But, eager to keep his party’s core
constituencies of public employees and social-services advocates
happy, he didn’t even try — even though his first year in office,
he triangulated quite adeptly in a Sacramento then as now split
between very liberal Democrats and deeply conservative Republicans.
This, remember, was one of the main theses of the Oct. 11, 1999
Time magazine story that declared Davis “America’s most
fearless governor.” (This article is probably now remembered as
fondly in Time’s corridors as the “Hitler’s diaries” cover
is remembered in Newsweek’s.)
Opposing the recall on grounds that voters had their shot at
Davis and didn’t take it is one thing. But opposing the recall on
grounds that Davis wasn’t even in the car when California was
driven into the ditch is ridiculous.
