The Nation's Pulse/Darkness in California
Wettergreen, John
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...Wilson polled about 150,000 votes more than Deukmejian, so it's hard to fault his strategy...
...Rather than blast the Medflies out of the trees with Malathion, Brown chose a new, ecologically sound bio-technology...
...All the controversy came after the election...
...California, then, is no political dreamland, teeming with murderous cultists, militant pederasts, and vegetarian hot-tubbers...
...The first, deficit was left to Ronald Reagan by Jerry's father...
...In Berkeley, the insane organized politically, and succeeded in banning electroshock therapy from the city limits...
...Brown read books, or at least he mentioned E.F...
...Deukmejian campaigned as a conservative Republican: no new taxes, application of the death penalty, budget cuts, agricultural and industrial development...
...During Brown's tenure, income taxes soared...
...Mervin Field, California's most respected pollster, was still picking Bradley the "certain winner" as late as one a.m...
...The Bradley-Deukmejian race was a colorless affair...
...Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered...
...Bradley supporters blamed these discrepancies on the electorate's secret racism, but both pollsters admitted to substantial sampling errors resulting from an unwarranted assumption that blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities of color would turn out in unprecedented numbers to vote for a black...
...Not until the last few days did Bradley make anything like an explicit racial appeal, but this was to Hispanics, who have a notoriously low turnout rate, not blacks...
...And of course, Brown fascinates Brown...
...He spoke in phrases which were, arguably, Zen koans...
...More votes were cast against Proposition i5, a handgun control measure, than for any candidate (4.7 million, 67 percent against...
...If the two are synonymous, perhaps racism was decisive...
...When Wilson finally began his campaign in earnest .ten days after Labor Day, the polls showed them even...
...Excepting the United States as a whole, no polity in the free world is more diverse...
...These were devastating reminders of just how close Brown had come to imperiling California's economy at its heart...
...Putatively sterile Medflies were released in large numbers, on the hypothesis that they would distract and dilute the breeding efforts of the fertile ones...
...When the Medflies began to cross over from the Silicon to the San Joaquin (at Livermore, the site of an important nuclear research and development center), Brown had no choice but to blast them...
...Given California's political geography, the Fly Wars were more than "a matter of hare-brained bungling...
...Wednesday, when all the networks had projected Deukmejian...
...Bill "Tradi, tional Education Works" Honig beat the incumbent Superintendent of Schools...
...Strange things do happen here, of course...
...Deukmejian managed the racial issue even more delicately, if only THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 23 because some local polls showed substantially more prejudice against Armenians than against blacks...
...While Sierra Clubbers, consumer advocates, and assorted paranoids applauded, everyone else lay back and waited for Brown's new idea to interrelate and impact...
...On election eve, Bradley's own pollster had him up 11 percent...
...Even Democrats, notably the neoliberals, concede this analysis whenthey fret about the virtual monopoly of Republicans, especially the conservative ones, on "new ideas" for national domestic policies...
...The nuclear-weapons freeze did win 52 percent, with the help of a large war-chest and no organized opposition...
...In his concession speech, he wondered what he'd do next...
...On the run, the Governor shot back that Wilson would be "even more mediocre...
...At that point, Brown attacked directly, claiming that Wilson favored nuclear annihilation and the abolition of Social Security...
...A fervent advocate of women's rights, Boom Boom believes the Equal Rights Amendment Would pass instantly if men too were forced to wear spike heels, and zippers up ads admitted to being "politically naive...
...When the Mediterranean Fruit Fly attacked the backyard orchards of electronics executives, Brown had his first and last chance to Think Small...
...Indeed, there was no abandonment...
...Vote Brown...
...the universities were unionized and further politicized...
...At the same time, they have been losihg a war of attrition for theHouse, as well as state and local offices...
...However this might be, the differences between Deukmejian and Bradley were clearer than those between Wilson and Brown...
...Nevertheless, however beneficent it may be privately, no Democrat is yet prepared to defend bureaucracy as such as the public interest...
...Whichever party succeeds in articulating prithe back...
...As the Wall Street Journal's political reporter, Albert Hunt, remarked, "the Senate surely will be a more interesting place next year i f . . . winners i n c l u d e . . . Jerry Brown...
...Brown won five of fifty-eight counties, and ran behind every Democrat...
...Cute little kids getting nuked: "Vote Your Life...
...the budget more than tripled...
...Bradley responded by portraying himself as a "colorblind" beneficiary of equal opportunity, only to endorse affirmative action explicitly a few daysbefore the election, apparently as part of his effort to encourage minority voting...
...in San Diego, Republican vate and parochial interests as parts RonPackard was elected to Congress of a national interest will hold with nearly 70,000 write-in votes, hegemony for the next generaagainst an opponent who in his TV tion...
...And now, one week after the election, it has been reported that, for the second time this century, the state is running in the red...
...But the factremains that only one statewide candidate, besides Deukmejian, was willing to articulate a distinctly conservative appeal...
...Naturally, Pete Wilson turned the by John Wettergreen election into "a referendum on Jerry Brown...
...So the fact that BroWn had twice outdone his Republican opponents( one was a professor of political science and the other took a vacation in Hawaii in the middle of the campaign) by promising small government and smaller taxes was "interesting," in that these promises did not imply any abandonment of the liberal agenda...
...Only when Deukmejian won very narrowly (by 50,000 out of 7.5 million)did the Bradleyites discover that racism was decisive...
...He remade the infamous TV ad that Johnson used against Goldwater...
...For Brown's partisans were sometimes willing to concede that he is incompetent, empty.headed, mercurial, but never that he is just another politicia n . This view achieved national curi'ency...
...I-] 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983...
...Gone was even the pretense of new ideas for saving liberalism...
...Calii~ornia is a conservative state, even though it is twotoone Democratic in registration...
...So did a plan, cleverly concealed in legal jargon, to place the investment policy of the $30 billion public employees retirement fund under the direction of the state legislature...
...Well aware he was the issue, Brown opened his campaign (he calls them "learning experiences") with the plea "Give Jerry Brown a Second Look...
...If such events are typical of California, it is only because they are bound to occur in any place so large and populous, and free...
...He was a liberal Democrat who managed to succeed Ronald Reagan...
...He had no idea, except that it would be ,'interesting...
...All through the summer of 1981, nightly flights of helicopters sprayed the infested area with the very stuff environmental activists had pronounced carcinogenic and mutagenic...
...whose technologically enhanced rut proved to be amazingly productive...
...Republicans have competed well for the only national office, the Presidency, and more-recently, for the broadly representative Senate...
...Only one thing made Jerry Brown interesting...
...Thus, professional Democrats, including followers of Fonda/Hayden, have criticized Brown and Bradley for Republican-style campaigns, i.e., for relying too heavily on public appeals and the mass media and not heavily enough on grassroots appeals like those solid reminders of dependency on bureaucracy in Mineta's campaign...
...In short, the Republicans have succeeded in articulating the national interest, while the Democrats have claimed, ever more successfully, to satisfy more parochial interests...
...InSan Francisco, Sister Boom Boom, a male transvestite, polled 27,000 for county supervisor, and almost Won...
...Everyone, that is, but the voracious flies, John Wettergreen teaches political science at San Jose State University...
...Today, parochial or private interests are administered in the main by a Democrat-dominated, highly centralized bureaucracy...
...He advertised himself with personal testimonials from private citizens and local officials of both parties, all of whom claimed to be in awe of his ability to overcome bureaucratic arbitrariness and cut red tape for their benefit...
...Republicans won the top offices, but lost at every lower level...
...Such an incumbent's political responsibility for creating and sustaining this very meddlesome bureaucracy is seldom a matter of public contention, although most incumbents are Democrats...
...Still, over the past decade or more, statewide candidates willing to make an appeal like The Duke's, including Jerry Brown, have almost always been successful...
...the courts were filled with "judicial activists" in the name of affirmative action...
...Brown promoted this interest, by claiming to have the new ideas for which the left wing of the Democracy has been clamoring since 1968...
...From that point on, it was clear to me that Brown had to lose...
...In the hi-tech center of California, Brown's new ideas were thus revealed as definitely lo-tech (which would have been obvious to anyone who had read Schumacher's book...
...As Martyn Smith of the Sacramento Bee observed, it proved hard to distinguish antiblack from anti-affirmative action sentiment...
...In my opinion, that is the only new idea of which the Democracy is capable and the one toward which it is tending...
...And Tom Hayden had to spend $I.3 million (almost a million was given or "loaned" to him by h i s w i f e ) i n an otherwise bullet-proof Democratic district--all to persuade the voters that he could ':work within thesystem...
...Ever since the Fly Wars of the Santa Clara Valley, Californians have been chortling at the mere mention of the Governor's name...
...Two" great urban, industrial centers (the Bay Area, including Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles) are linked by California's agricultural heartland, the 500-mile-long, irrigated, and fabulously wealthy San Joaquin Valley...
...Proposition 13, centralized bureaucratic control of the state's water system, lost big (65 percent...
...He charged that Bradley, like Brown (whose devotion to affirmative action is notorious), would make poor appointments to courts and commissions...
...Some ridiculed Deukmejian's constant use of his nickname--The Duke~by reminding voters that John Wayne is dead...
...oo g g o D l @ o @ o , o @ o o o @ . @ o @ o g o o l i o o @o o o 6 @ . o Q @ o o @ @ o o o o t @r ~ ~ - - ~ . ii ~[ ~ ~ @6@@@0 l e . . o @ * * o o @ . l @ @ a l o D m 0 0 @ @ o @ @ @ l @ . o @ o @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , o N<ATION'S PULS~ DARKNESS IN CALIFORNIA At an impromptu news conference two weeks-before the election, a reporter pressed Jerry Brown for a reply to Pete Wilson's charge that, just as he had been a mediocre governor, so he would be a mediocre senator...
...Wilson kept his distance from Reagan's policies, and from most conservative issues, content to leave Jerry Brown the issue...
...Bradley's campaign was calculated to do nothing to arouse antiblack sentiment, while at the same time encouraging "minorities" to go to the polls...
...Accordingly, a typical Democratic campaign resembles that of my congressman, Norm Miaeta...
...The Santa Clara Valley, which once raised most of the world's prunes, is now the Silicon Valley...
...Indeed, the election results here paralleled those for the nation...
...Nationally, this pattern has persisted for at least a decade...
Vol. 16 • January 1983 • No. 1
