. . . And I'll Cry if I Want to
Ferguson, Tim W.
". . . And I'll Cry if I Want to" Tim W. Ferguson . . . And I'll Cry if I Want to California leads the way down. Los Angeles conservatives in most parts of America come off the 1992 election disappointed but fatalistic....
...Instead, he blamed only himself...
...Money from public-employee unions poured into several of the races when polling discovered that redistricting¡ªthe presumed Republican salvation¡ªhad served primarily to reduce name recognition by putting the party's incumbents in unfamiliar territory...
...McClintock also was effectively separated from much of his party base by negative ads that began in his hotly contested primary and were carried through effectively by Beilenson, an old pro from the Democratic wards of Los Angeles's westside...
...He claims the California returns are indicative of a conservative electorate, especially if you add six percentage points to the Republican line to compensate for the drag at the top of the ticket...
...A voucher initiative would have appeared on this bal lot but for some apparent signature tricks by the opposition, and Cox says it would have passed if 1992 had been a normal political year...
...The public-school establishment has found "no tax money for religious schools" to be an effective refrain...
...Trial lawyers in some districts lent their offices for use as Democratic phone banks...
...In California, however, it's more like clinical depression...
...Keating-Edh had a $500,000 war chest and was expected to win...
...This is unlikely, given that Willie's wrecking crew and the state party, under its crafty chairman Phil Angelides, are just gaining speed...
...Wilson's right flank, he met Rep...
...Christopher Cox of Orange County, re-elected with 65 percent...
...This, a social conservative¡ªeven one who wasn't preachy about it¡ªought never to do...
...Minor parties generally draw 5 to 10 percent of the vote in California races...
...Neither course helped the Republicans this time around...
...Further, says Cox, the vote on most of the thirteen propositions reflected fiscal conservatism...
...Many of their parents, or their elder siblings, had seen their home values fall 20 percent in the California recession, which helped put them in a surly mood, too...
...Wilson's ability to draw campaign cash out of a business sector beset by bitter recession is not to be underestimated, and he can be expected to share some of it with his legislative sympathizers...
...Nevertheless, his sincerity was appealing enough to have brought him and his economic libertarianism (exception: military spending) to evensteven on the virtual eve of the election...
...Nearly all the ammo has been spent, and Kathleen Brown, the state treasurer and heir to a dynasty that has bedeviled the GOP, is poised to waltz into the governorship...
...His out is to say that a school-choice voucher would alleviate this concern and end the ability of teacher unions and administrator groups to hold the learning of youngsters hostage in lobbying for ever more funding...
...Although he had staked out his independence from the governor on the tax increases of 1991, McClintock regards himself as partly the victim of Bush and Wilson on that score: "The voters simply wanted to shoot every Republican in sight...
...She won, as did many others, because she was a Woman and a Democrat...
...Turnout in her district was 81 percent, compared to a predicted 65 percent...
...And he thinks the well is poisoned through 1994, no matter whether Wilson himself runs or not...
...Those voters wouldn't even okay cuts in welfare...
...And organized labor, particularly teachers and nurses, was hell-bent for Democrats...
...It sounded like a sure winner, but instead became the lightning rod for massive registration and get-out-the-vote efforts of every interest group that perceived Wilson as an enemy...
...Those who want him to do neither¡ªand apparently this includes the majority of voters¡ªhave nothing to suggest if vouchers aren't going to be approved...
...Because California's budget plight remains desperate, especially if some of the long-run cuts achieved this year are overturned, taxpayers can only cringe...
...Herschensohn was the more substantive of the two on nearly any topic, which is one reason Boxer dodged debating with him nearly to the end...
...Without it, the governor lacks strong alternatives to cutting school budgets or raising taxes...
...Result: more feuding and frustration through 1994 and, if this year is ,any indication, more blame placed on Wilson and the Republicans...
...He was outspent and trounced, 56 percent to 39, caught up in "the undertow as the [USS] George Bush went down," as he puts it...
...It was the sad-eyed visage of Senate hopeful Bruce Herschensohn that brought the most tears to the right on the morning after...
...McClintock, who's been consistently right about the fiscal prospects, sees a $10 billion gap to be filled in 1993, bigger than this year's...
...One reason: the budget battle will resume next year, with either the 1991 result (tax increases) or the 1992 one (a long, painful standoff...
...As it is, the voucher measure will be on the June 1994 ballot, when Cox may be seeking the nomination to oppose Sen...
...Even Joan Milke Flores, a pro-life but otherwise nondescript politician who'd done the Free World the favor of knocking off...
...Even those won't be enough to square the California deficit, so the governor came up with Proposition 165 to slash welfare benefits, give his office more authority to curb and control the budget, and cut off pay to both the executive and legislative sides if they gridlocked again...
...won only twenty-two of fifty-two congressional races, when suburbanization and racial gerrymandering were supposed to give them a majority of the delegation...
...lost one seat in the state Assembly in a year when redistricting threatened the hold of Democratic speaker Willie Brown...
...Dianne Feinstein, so time may tell...
...Herschensohn refused to blame George Bush for his loss, as of course he was perfectly entitled to do...
...Wilson won some cuts and the promise of more reductions in subsequent years...
...The late push, including effective "hit" mailers, helped bring easy wins for some left-liberal (lady) Democrats...
...165 and the Republican legislative slate...
...Boxer kept replying that sure, she favored a sound banking system...
...Blacks and Jews, as usual, voted big-time against the GOP...
...Adding six points, you get Herschensohn in, and close to a 26-26 split of the congressional delegation...
...W ith all this gloom, who on the right could be upbeat...
...He had waged as intellectual a seri ous campaign as it is possible to run for major elective office, against Barbara Boxer, whose voice, manner, and votes in the House of Representatives are as pleas ing as listening to her mani cured fingernails streak across the proverbial chalk board...
...They summoned an awful, unspoken fear not felt since the Goldwater aftermath of 1964: that perhaps the majority of the electorate, on the cutting issues, really is liberal-socialist after all...
...Actually, two GOP candidates for the legislature won in parts of the congressional district he sought to represent...
...An Assembly member who's been the biggest thorn in Gov...
...President Bush's abandonment of California may have hurt voter follow-up efforts, although in districts such as the South Bay's, Republicans went to the polls and opted for Democrats...
...Pete Wilson ultimately humbled the Democrats after pushing the schools and the hospitals and the rest of the "social service" world to what they kept telling us was the edge...
...Tim W. Ferguson is the Los Angeles-based "Business World" columnist for the Wall Street Journal...
...Maureen Reagan in the GOP primary, lost her congressional race to a woman lawyer who'd worked for Jimmy Carter...
...It even showed itself among the supposedly rugged "hill people" on the Sierras side of the district, leaving her to lament the pervasiveness of the modern dole...
...And in California, the alimony payments are steep...
...Senate in a head-on fight with a beatable left-wing opponent...
...It didn't help that no jobs were created for them under Bush...
...To Barbara Keating-Edh, one "scary" aspect of the 1992 vote was the strong support for protecting welfare benefits that are nearly the highest in the country...
...The California Organization of Police and Sheriffs, which wants votes for pay increases, sent out a telegram-like mailer warning that the Consumer Alert organization she headed, a market-oriented group with industry support, was engaged in "fraud...
...What of the failure of Prop...
...The aging cheerleader won the race 48 percent to ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡43...
...But in Wilson's defense, it must be said he tried being tough and the voters seemed to hold it against him...
...Yet his answers were consistent and not canned...
...A vote against Wilson, largely out of fear he would cut the schools more, Cox says...
...But as George Bush learned this year, it is hard to resist a clamor for divorce from a miserable electorate if you have no more roses to offer...
...Ralph Nader spoke against her at nearby Stanislaus State University, and the McClatchy newspaper chain hammered her as a religious fundamentalist, though her platform was economic...
...Public-employee and trade unions financed Keating Edh's defeat...
...And she doubts too many other quality candidates will come forward unless the "incredibly libelous" mailers of the Democrats' alliance are curbed...
...and crashed and burned on a referendum to control spending...
...Conservatives lost their most articulate of all candidates for the U.S...
...School choice lost by 2-1 this time out in Colorado, just as it did in Oregon in 1990...
...There was truth to that only in that he wasn't what he never promised to be: a fund-raiser, a glad-hander, a pork-promiser...
...She lost 51 percent to 49 in an Assembly district in the northern San Joaquin Valley, reaching over to Yosemite National Park...
...They watched a bad marriage bust up and are hoping it doesn't cost them too dearly...
...But the killer was the welfare vote rallied to oppose Prop...
...D ays afterward, Wilson was talking about cooperation with the legislature again, just as he had in his first year, when together they raised taxes more than $7 billion...
...Then he stepped in some excrement that Boxer's running dogs had left in his path: evidence of his patronizing a nudie place or two in his hometown of Hollywood...
...The public-employee onslaught was masterfully orchestrated by Willie Brown and his consultants, but what triggered it was the great Sacramento budget standoff of last summer, when Gov...
...A big turnout by the young drove home the message that, whatever magic Ronald Reagan might have spun with this group, the years of influence by MTV and public-school teachers have succeeded in molding another Kennedy generation...
...T he same headlong tendency of the stockinged set was evident in district races...
...he agreed with the industry's objections to several specific controls but wouldn't go along with its wish to saddle competitors (credit unions, for instance) with similar baggage in order to "level the playing field...
...Los Angeles onservatives in most c parts of America come off the 1992 election disappointed but fatalistic...
...Neither camp's fortunes look too promising...
...Boxer also brought in a late half million bucks from somewhere to hit him with ads about colorful comments he'd made along the line, such as the crime-suppressing value of honest citizens armed with Uzis...
...CI...
...A former official of the Conservative party in New York State, Keating-Edh was another casualty of the Willie Brown operation...
...The South Bay area of Los Angeles county, long a Republican redoubt, rejected almost all the GOP candidates, conservative or otherwise...
...She said she got more votes than she expected¡ªthe Christian right proved a force¡ªbut her opponent, a school board member whose husband and children all work in the schools, simply overwhelmed her...
...But here the case for GOP optimism is stretched...
...The right bought into his act in 1990 and will in one way or another be the prisoner of it in 1994...
...He was a television commentator and documentary producer who loved ideas and the Constitution, but not politics...
...Ultimately, the gov ernor's fiscal disciplinary device went down in flames with his party, his Senate candidate (Seymour), and the Bush campaign that he chaired...
...The dangerousness of the issue is a reason Pete Wilson hasn't touched it...
...Hersch ensohn's numbers consis tently tracked and exceeded those of John Seymour, the nonideological nominee for the other Senate seat, through nearly every demo graphic group...
...An even gloomier assess ment comes from Tom McClintock, the premier idea man among the GOP congressional hopefuls...
...Beyond that, voters in affluent districts like Cox's are afraid choice will mean lots of poor, minority kids in the better neighborhoods' schools...
...Meanwhile, the need to defeat a soak-the-rich tax plan that the left qualified for the ballot drew mil lions of business bucks away from both Wilson's Prop...
...Only after he started hammering at her 143 bounced checks and carving away at her early lead did she engage...
...He stiffened his spine, as conservatives demanded that he do, and got his block knocked off for it...
...Working women voted 70 percent against both...
...Tim W. Ferguson . . . And I'llCry if I Want to California leads the way¡ªdown...
...Like many suburban Republicans, Cox is caught on this issue¡ªhis voters want more money for their children's classrooms...
...If the female force was the big reason for the Republican debacle, it had help...
...The party has been lower¡ªit had twenty-three assembly seats after Watergate versus thirty-two now¡ªbut it has rarely had less to look forward to...
...Tony Beilenson in what was considered a toss-up coastal district linking Los Angeles and Ventura counties...
...The gravitas gap was evident in every forum: One trade newsletter printed their responses to questions on banking regulation, surely a subject no dearer to him than her...
...Those setbacks wiped out years of planning and dreams, and even worse, undermined the idea that a combative, ideological stance is effective in countering the "statist quo...
...She said she won't try again because she could never raise such support from cowed business lobbies against an incumbent...
Vol. 26 • January 1993 • No. 1
