Capitol Ideas: California at the Polls
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell California at the Polls C alifornia illustrates the trend unintentionally set by campaign finance reform: More and more self-financed multimillionaires are running...
...22 May 1998 199 8 • The American Spectator...
...John Burton, a former San Francisco congressman and cocaine addict, and an unreconstructed liberal, was recently chosen as leader of the majority Democrats in the State Senate...
...Who are these people...
...28, Nurse "Even if I move before I get my degree, I won't lose credits or have to transfer...
...Liberty does not discriminate in the admission of students on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, religion, sex, age or physical disability...
...They are people just like you -- people busy with family and careers who understand the value of a college degree...
...But their leadership groups are liberal, and of course work closely with sympathetic media...
...Nonetheless, working Latinos know that bilingual education does not help their children learn English, which is what they want...
...These comments appear in his column in the always interesting California Political Review, which looks at California politics from a conservative perspective...
...Once, in a Senate hearing, she attacked Southern Pacific for its involvement in a chemical spill in which her husband was representing the alleged victims...
...He has been a backer of Rep...
...Union dues enable CTA to hit California's airwaves, and stay there, until they beat education reform into submission...
...Al Checchi (pronounced check-ee) is worth over $5oo million made in the corporate takeover business...
...By the end of March he had spent $18 million, was promising everything to everyone, and still he distresses the all-important coastal lefties...
...But you know what...
...I was 'right on' for bilingual ed...
...Unlike Republicans, Democrats don't mind playing hardball, and if put in charge of the statehouse they will redraw the congressional map to their liking...
...Dan Lungren is steering clear of the measure because it is opposed by the activist Hispanic groups (bilingual ed is their very own pork barrel...
...They couldn't speak English, and their Spanish was a mess...
...Politics, after all, is increasingly an exercise in redistributing not millions but tens of billions of dollars...
...25, Marine "The main thing for me was flexibility...
...I've marched in the street...
...In order to attract their support, Jane Harman has said she will back gay marriage and a restoration of racial preferences...
...Supreme Court...
...45, Mother of four "My husband is disabled...
...Term limits were first overturned, then reinstated, and finally let stand by the U.S...
...If lots of voters try for such bank shots, there may be some odd results...
...A recent Field poll gave it 70 percent support among voters, with 61 percent of Hispanics, 63 percent of blacks, and 75 percent of Asians in favor...
...A novelty this year is the open primary in June, in which voters can cross over and vote for candidates from another party...
...Term limits, enacted in a 1990 referendum, prevent Wilson from running for governor again...
...At the moment, the initiative is ahead z to 1, but watch for a $20 million Big Labor blitz to defeat it...
...The Hispanic vote is growing rapidly, the Census Bureau having estimated that by 2025 the Hispanic share of California's population will rise to 43 percent, from 30 percent today...
...Checchi has been criticized for giving campaign money to Robert Dole and Steve Forbes, not to mention failing to vote in the 1994 governor's race in which Pete Wilson beat Kathleen Brown...
...Prop...
...Wilson started out badly with a tax increase in 1991, in return getting nothing from Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (now mayor of San Francisco...
...This may produce some unusual voting...
...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell California at the Polls C alifornia illustrates the trend unintentionally set by campaign finance reform: More and more self-financed multimillionaires are running for office, because they can spend as much as they want on their own races...
...Wilson supports it, having contended for years with a California Teachers Association "that is a relentless political machine," as he put it...
...On regulation, on schools, on welfare, on the courts and even—for the most part—on taxes, Wilson since 1992 has been the most conservatively governing chief executive California has had in modern times...
...At that point, Issa (pronounced Ice-a) decided to reach for the senatorial ring himself...
...In October 1995, I wrote in this space: "Voting in California is a pure 'honor system.' To register, no identification whatever is needed...
...Thousands of them have earned undergraduate orgraduate degrees...
...After the census in the year 2000, there will be several more congressional seats in California, for a total of perhaps 56...
...Without Liberty I could never have gone to college...
...I'm from the left...
...These limits have vastly increased the turnover in Sacramento, but as Steven Hayward pointed out in Reason magazine, they have not yet altered the political culture in California or reduced the size of state government...
...Appeals court judges have been more sensible...
...The other day, a liberal judge overturned the referendum restricting welfare for illegals, and perhaps the appeals court will see fit to overrule again...
...In short, it would end bilingual education...
...Chris Cox, who earlier had considered but then decided against a run against Boxer...
...Boxer's husband is a worker's-comp and personal-injury lawyer...
...Thanks to Liberty's Distance Learning Program, now I do...
...The most important state-wide referenda approved by voters in recent years have initially been overturned by big-government activists who shop around for a friendly judge and always find one in the federal district court...
...Liberty helped me work around my schedule...
...Chris Cox is not so concerned, however, pointing out that the Orange County GOP chairman is Hispanic and that most Hispanics strongly support family values...
...The truth is that government-subsidized leadership groups, whether black or Hispanic, often do not have the best interest of their own rank and file at heart...
...Jane Harman from Los Angeles is the wife of a successful entrepreneur...
...The problem is that the GOP has gone along with ever more lax voting procedures...
...LIBERTY UNIVERSITY www.liberty.edu We're Changing Lives...
...Cox felt he could be more effective as the fourth-ranking elected leader in the House...
...It could be said that Wilson has retraced the path of his predecessor, George Deukmejian, who resisted fierce pressure for tax increases at the outset, but became less resolute in his second term...
...At the moment, Lungren is considered the favorite, but the next six months could be volatile...
...Then, when skewered by their own political naïveté, they look mean-spirited when they try to restore democracy by the civics book...
...A page-one New York Times headline in December read: "California G.O.P...
...Faces a Crisis As Hispanic Voters Turn Away...
...Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former GOP candidate for governor, funded the ballot-drive...
...No doubt he really was robbed...
...T his year, two important propositions will be on the California ballot...
...There's no requirement that you live in the state...
...His late brother, Philip Burton, was responsible for the brazen gerrymandering that aided Democrats in the 1980's...
...Wilson's increasingly pronounced rightward move in the past five years has taken the form of appointments and actions far too numerous and arcane to be remembered in the heat of a national political campaign," he writes...
...Loretta Sanchez, victor by 984 votes in 1996, may not have helped Republicans, even though House investigators did find "substantial" voter fraud...
...Feinstein made the decision—"a huge weight that came off my shoulders"—right in the middle of a phone call from Bill Clinton urging her to run...
...One Degree at a Time...
...In time, they might...
...Two and a half years later, despite Jane Harman's dubious 1994 victory, nothing has changed...
...Republican support of the illegal-alien proposition, allegations of Hispanic voter fraud, and the belief that Wilson favors the Wasp, are the main reasons...
...The perennial quote-circuit-rider Sherry Bebich Jeffe, a Claremont political scientist who is good at giving liberal journalists the quotes they are looking for, says that, in the gubernatorial race, pro-choice Jane Harman is "Dan Lungren's worst nightmare...
...However unjustly, resentment of the GOP has grown among Hispanic voters in recent years...
...In the Senate race, the chief opponent of Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer is Darrell E. Issa, another wealthy man...
...Their own financial and political interest comes first, and that is aided by making accusations and creating a mood of crisis...
...There are seventeen Hispanic Democrats in the legislature, only one Republican...
...The governor's race is the important one, because the winning party will control congressional redistricting in the state...
...Two of the three leading Democrats running are rich enough not to have to worry about fund-raising...
...I've seen kids in here who had been in bilingual education for four, five, six years...
...It didn't stop these people...
...A Democratic edge in absentee voting was unprecedented at the time, andit seems likely that fraud was involved...
...Her opponent, Susan Brooks, was comfortably ahead on election night, but a flood of absentee ballots from the beach town of Venice tipped the balance to Harman...
...209, ending racial preferences in higher education and state contracts, waslikewise ruled unconstitutional, then brought back to life...
...38, Sales Rep "Everyone thought I had my degree...
...Contact: John Kurzweil, Box 931, Camarillo, CA 93011...
...Therefore, it is said, he is running again...
...The chairman of the state Democratic Party is Hispanic, as is the Speaker of the Assembly—"another Willie Brown in the making," one observer said...
...They also bar members of the state Assembly from serving more than three terms, and state senators from serving more than two (four-year) terms...
...Meanwhile, conservative activists are worried that Dan Lungren might not be able to fire up grass-roots activists on the right...
...But Forbes West Coast bureau chief Tim Ferguson is not so sure...
...Actually, that was Senator Dianne Feinstein, until she decided in January not to run for governor after all...
...As Lungren knows, they are capable of representing it as one more anti-Hispanic move by Republicans...
...Governor Wilson moved to the right in his second term, and surprised many by continuing to do so after his 1996 bid for the presidency...
...Their homework was allin Spanish...
...Dornan will run again this year, and with ample funds...
...All of them did it without going back to school because school came to them...
...In California, 97 percent of union dues diverted for politics is spent to help Democrats, although at least one-third of union members vote Republican...
...Throughout the past thirteen years over twenty-five thousand men and women from all walks of life, have furthered their education through the Liberty University Distance Learning Program...
...In Washington, Gingrich the Timid daren't even bring up a comparable proposal for a vote...
...The second ballot measure, known as "English for the Children," would place immigrant students in one year of English immersion and then move them into regular classes...
...20 May 1998 • The American Spectator Why should your job or family prevent your completing a college degree...
...Prop...
...Checchi has said he may spend $30 million on his race—about what Michael Buffington spent running against Feinstein in 1994...
...Tom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a recent media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...A conservative friend of mine who would like to see Dan Lungren become the next governor says he will nonetheless vote for Gray Davis in the primary, because he is likely to be the weakest Democrat...
...Jane Harman won a congressional seat for the first time in 1994, with a margin of 812 votes...
...The thought of all those Checchi ads gave her second thoughts...
...With the state's population now 32 million, that is less than a dollar a head, and why that is thought excessive is not clear...
...At the moment, Democrats control both houses of the state legislature, the GOP having lost its Assembly majority in 1996, with 2,000 votes statewide making the difference...
...The third Democrat, Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis, and the certain GOP nominee, Attorney General Dan Lungren, have raised money the old-fashioned way...
...If she wins the governor's race this year, Dornan will enjoy a vindication of sorts...
...He is a pro-life, kitchen-table Catholic (Pete Wilson is pro-choice), but the crime issue with which Lungren has been associated seems Can the GOP survive honor-system voting...
...Checchi calls to mind other businessmen who have gone into politics without ever quite grasping that the incentive structure in the public sector is unlike that of the private sector...
...Liberty University is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award associate, bachelor, master's, and doctoral level degrees...
...226 requires that workers' give their permission in writing before unions and employers make paycheck deductions to be spent on political activity...
...A judge recently threw out highly restrictive state limits ($5oo a head) on campaign contributions, but while still in place they influenced decisions on entering this year's gubernatorial race...
...Conflict of interest...
...A "Teddy Kennedy liberal" Episcopal priestess who works in the barrios told the Washington Post: "Like most people, I assumed bilingual education made sense...
...Call 1-800-424-9595 for a FREE video and catalog of course offerings...
...to have waned...
...The top vote-getter of each party advances to the general election...
...Robert K. Doman's unavailing charges of voter-fraud against Rep...
Vol. 31 • May 1998 • No. 5
