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A year ago, California politicians decided to split the state's June primary elections and move its presidential contests to February 5. The goal, we were told, was to enhance the state's standing in national political circles and get the candidates to talk about issues that matter to Californians.
Coincidentally, the state legislature was able to get a ballot measure extending their term limits on the earlier ballot...(but that's a whole 'nother story, as the kids say). And with less than a week to go, I’ve heard nary a whisper about those so-called issues facing the state. In fact, some people are wondering whether California’s clout would have been greater had their primaries not been held on the crowded Super Tuesday ballot.
Many federal issues hit us here at home in California, and they bridge partisan divides, but no one is talking about them. So far I have seen one television ad with Sen. Hillary Clinton talking about the environment. It was so vague, it could have been an ad for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger except that he’s not on the ballot.
California Republicans recently surveyed indicated their top priorities as immigration and the War on Terror - not much different from GOP voters across the country so it's hard to justify how a discussion on these issues was worth the cost of adding a third electoral cycle for the Golden State.
So, I say if the presidential candidates want to appeal to Californians over the next week, let’s give them some things to talk about. Here's my list of questions. You voters - Democrats and Republicans - should feel free to try this at home as well.
How will California keep its economy growing if we cannot get enough water to where it is needed? Growth in Arizona and Nevada is taxing supplies of the Colorado River and federal environmental lawsuits are threatening the ability to transfer water from the San Joaquin Bay-Delta. What’s their plan to keep Southern California from shriveling up in a drought?
How do we pay for transportation improvements? More than half of the country’s international trade travels through the ports of Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach, and California’s freeways are among the nation’s most congested. Yet California sends more tax dollars to Washington than it gets back. How are we going to pay for freeway expansion, goods movement and improving public transit?
California has taken a leadership role on the environment and is serving as an incubator for green business of all different types. Yet the federal government has gotten in the way of the state’s ability to pass its own air quality rules. Should the federal government continue to force California to use ethanol, despite its dubious environmental benefits, and should the EPA continue to block California’s vehicle emission curbs?
Although California bans gay marriage just like the federal government, it mandates employers treat all employees equally when it comes to benefits like as health insurance. So domestic partners have to pay federal taxes on these benefits while married couples do not. Is that fair? And a bonus question to any candidate who like Mike Huckabee thinks sexuality is a choice: When - exactly - did you choose to be straight?
These are all issues that have no easy answers, and are neither Republican nor Democrat, they're truly Californian. None are likely to come up on the presidential campaign trail in Iowa or New Hampshire although a few might surface in New York or Illinois. Still, if California is going to get its money’s worth for switching its presidential primary date, I’d like to hear some answers.
The clock is ticking…
“Mac is Back,” the chanters declared, reminding me of those two years I spent as an awkward, nerdy kid at San Antonio Macarthur High School, deep in the heart of Texas. But it isn’t flashbacks of a 90’s suburban adolescence that make my stomach groan when I hear the phrase today. These days, I'm reminded about where “Mac” - Sen. John McCain - had been and why he should expect no less than a return ticket back to wherever he came back from this time around.
If you compare John McCain’s winning ways to his campaign of 2000, you’ll notice something. He’s not doing any better in 2008, in terms of getting votes, than he did when he ran unsuccessfully against President George W. Bush. In many states, he is doing worse. The difference is that, in the crowded Republican field of 2008, a small plurality of votes has given him the appearance of “winning,” compounded by the rekindling of a media love affair.
This feeling will not last once McCain has to attract Republican voters with only one or two alternatives instead of four or five candidates.
I have to admit that my newfound distaste for John McCain is recently acquired. After he won the New Hampshire primary, I started to think of him as a tolerable candidate who could make me break my “I’m voting for a New Yorker” pledge for the 2008 election. But after two weeks for McCain to wear thin on me as I remembered why I didn’t like him in 2000.
Watch the Senior Senator from Arizona closely on the TV. Look at his eyes. Am I the only one who thinks he blinks excessively? Al Gore did this, and when Al Gore blinked a lot, in flutters, I saw a man who was surely lying to me. John McCain’s mouth is saying something about the “straight talk express” but his eyes tell me he is lying.
But what bothers me the most about John McCain is that he is disingenuous whenever he talks about his “Straight Talk Express”. From taxes to social policy to foreign policy, listen closely to McCain’s “maverick” positions and the dualism of his positions will make you think that his policy is coming out the backside of a horse - maverick or otherwise.
Take the War in Iraq. When Nebraska Senator Chuck Hegel started getting attention from the bookers at Meet the Press and the other Sunday talk shows for being the lone Republican to stand up to George Bush, John McCain was a little too quick to follow, criticizing the Bush Administration for its war policy. Now trying to appeal for Republican votes, McCain is claiming that he was an architect of “The Surge” policy currently being implemented—quite successfully—by the Bush Administration. I can guarantee you that if the presence of more American soldiers in Iraq had corresponded to an increase in casualties, McCain would be criticizing the Administration for not getting them there soon enough!
McCain appeared the maverick in 2004 when he stood up to the President on a major issue of that campaign - gay marriage. McCain opposed amending the United States Constitution to ban gay marriage, calling it "un-Republican" - but it wasn’t because he believes that all Americans deserve equal rights and protections under the law. Out of the national scrutiny, McCain lent his support to a ballot measure banning gay marriage in Arizona. Like John Kerry that year, he told one audience that the matter should be left to the states, then he told another what he thought the states should do. So he was against banning gay marriage before he was for it!
Today, McCain is embracing George Bush’s tax cuts, joining calls to make them permanent. That, I like, because, well, you’re going to see major economic and social disruptions if the tax cuts are all let to expire in 2011. But back in 2001, John McCain was one of the most vocal opponents of the tax cuts and is partially responsible for why they had to have an “expiration date” before they were passed.
Although McCain is one of the most vocal critics of earmarks, these special congressional appropriations still have found their way to Arizona - which is among the top half of states for getting pork out of the recent Health and Human Services budget.
Sounds more like the "Double-talk Express" if you ask me!
When the Republican field gets narrowed down to a choice between Mitt Romney and John McCain, Mike Huckabee and John McCain or Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, well, getting 36% of the vote - his largest total yet - won’t get Senator McCain as far as it has gotten him to date.
Maybe his colleagues in Capitol Hill can console him with a chant of “Mac is Back” in the hallways of the Hart Senate Office Building.
As America familiarizes itself with this year’s large crop of presidential candidates, it seems easier to compare the people running to office to politicians we’re more familiar with than to get to know them ourselves. Indulging in this parlor game a few weeks ago, I compared Republican Mike Huckabee to the Bill Clinton of 1992—but one without the demons of gluttony and adultery. Today, it's Sen. Barack Obama's turn.
And as with Huckabee, the best comparison for the Democratic presidential contender is a someone from across the political aisle.
The Obama campaign has embraced a monosyllabic message: change. Obama wants to spread hope through change to unify the country, much to the chagrin of those who point out that not all Americans may desire unifying around Obama’s specific version of change.
Here in California the tone of Obama’s message is familiar. It sounds much like that of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's why Obama may have trouble selling his fairy tale to Californians on February 5th. We’ve voted for a politician who promises the sizzle without the fat.
The defining moment of the Obama candidacy came not with his win in Iowa, but in a Las Vegas debate in mid-November. When asked what he would do about sending nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain - an unpopular idea in the state - the Illinois Senator skipped the pandering and started with the dreaming.
“I don't think it's fair to send it to Nevada... because we're producing it.” Obama said, before continuing, “so what have to do is we've got to develop the storage capacity based on sound science. Now, laboratories like Argonne in my own home state are trying to develop ways to safely store nuclear waste without having to ship it across the country and put it in somebody else's backward.”
Moderator Wolf Blitzer wasn’t buying it, so he pressed on, asking, “until there's some new technological breakthrough, as you would hope and all of us would hope, where do you send the waste?”
After criticizing Blitzer for trying to find out what Obama’s practical solution to a real and urgent problem was, Obama rejected the question entirely: “But -- but -- but I'm running for president because I think we can do it. I reject... I reject the notion that we can't meet our energy challenges.”
Then he finished with a flurry: “We can, if we've got bold leadership in the White House that is saying we are going to do something about climate change, we are going to develop renewable energy sources. That's what I intend to do as president. And we shouldn't, you know, be pessimistic about the future of America.”
As I see it, neither ‘hope’ nor ‘change’ will make the nation’s very real nuclear waste go away, but Senator Obama wasn’t having any of it, acting as if the President could wish away the nation’s problems. Barack Obama isn’t running a fairy tale campaign, as Bill Clinton suggested, he’s running for President of Fantasyland.
When he ran for Governor back in 2003, Schwarzenegger promised change. He said he would “blow up the boxes” of bureaucracy in Sacramento, address the budget crisis, pension reform and other pressing needs. When his actual proposals were put on the ballot two years later, voters rejected them.
With a booming economy, the State’s finances and the Governor’s public image improved - until this month. In his State of the State address, Schwarzenegger sounded like a visionary uniter of men, expressing his faith in government to address monumental crises, as it had in response to the Southern California wildfires last fall. The budget, he suggested, was in just such a crisis, and he entrusted the legislature to rise up to the moment and dream big about what can be done to improve education and provide universal healthcare in the face of a $14 billion fiscal hole.
The good will did not last long, however. Once the TV cameras were turned off and Schwarzenegger actually had to “govern”—releasing his budget blueprint which slashed school funding and closed public parks and beaches - Californians realized that you cannot have sizzle without the fat.
So far, the Obama message is all about the sizzle. We should be optimists about America and have faith that if we can dream a solution we can achieve it. Those are worthy goals indeed, but more often than not, those who hold them are forced to face the dirty reality of governing. Having bought the Schwarzenegger sizzle twice, Californians may be reluctant to think that a third time might work when Obama comes around to charm us.
Even before New Hampshire voters went to the polls, Democratic presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton was reduced to tears by her faltering campaign. Once considered inevitable, the Clinton campaign suffered early setbacks shifting the discussion from when she'll lock up the nomination to when she'll shutter the campaign offices.
Perennial presidential campaign advisor, the losing Bob Shrum thinks that Hillary's mistake was to focus on being "ready" when what the voters apparently wanted was "change" - the two competing themes in the monosyllabic Democratic presidential primary. But perhaps Clinton's greatest mistake was even showing up for the early contests instead of focusing her resources on the states where she had a lead. And her early campaign troubles highlight the possible wisdom of Rudy Giuliani's approach of sitting out the early contests.
It's a simple philosophy: "If you don't compete, you cannot lose." Recognizing that his lead in the national polls did not translate to support among Iowa's religious conservative caucus-goers or New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" primary voters - both of which have been known to be unfriendly to campaign front-runners - the former New York Mayor decided to sit out the early contests. Picking up third place in either state, let alone any delegates, would have been a victory for Giuliani as he focused his attention on Florida, New York, Illinois and California where his more moderate approach to governing holds greater appeal and the delegate rewards are larger.
The risk for Giuliani with this untested approach is that he appears irrelevant in the media horse-race coverage that's dominated the beginning of the primaries. For the last two weeks, the media has focused on former governors Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney and on Sen. John McCain, with nary a mention of the man who has led national polls among GOP voters for the past year. News media wake-up call: If Giuliani can maintain his lead in the national polls and win in these big, centrist states, it will be Iowa and New Hampshire - not Rudy - that will be rendered irrelevant.
Before New Hampshire, Clinton enjoyed the same campaign advantages as Giuliani, a big national lead and a strong fundraising operation. Like Giuliani, her support in these early-voting states was not as strong as it was across the rest of the country. Unlike Giuliani, Clinton opted against a major change in campaign strategy, and instead went for the old model, running for president based on her experience, letting her rivals challenge her almost face-to-face. No wonder the results were mixed.
Had Clinton lost the New Hampshire primary - and it was very real possibility - it would have dealt a nearly-fatal blow to her campaign. By competing in Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton opened the door for rival Sen. Barack Obama to seize the media spotlight and make a race of the campaign before the more delegate-rich states which favor Clinton voted in February. She may, in the end, have given momentum - which translates to fundraising power - to Obama and drained resources needed to compete in the expensive media markets of New York, Chicago, Florida and California.
By sitting on the sidelines, Rudy Giuliani has kept the GOP contest in suspense, at least until February 5th, and kept enough money in the bank to wage a heavy television campaign these key states. While the wisdom of Rudy Giuliani's decision to treat the Presidential primaries as a sprint - not a marathon - remains to be seen, the reviews of Clinton's gambit in Iowa and New Hampshire are in - and they nearly brought the whole Clinton team to tears.
