Why California Hates Politics

...How could the kindly ladies of the League hope to encourage people to vote, to participate, if the candidates and parties they would be voting for were routinely vilified as self-serving scum...

...A companion measure, Proposition 22, would have exempted the managers who do this investing from civil service restrictions...

...In Washington, President Reagan's personnel chief and designated bureaucrat-basher, Donald Devine, seems to be taking the same disingenuous approach...

...What they cannot do is what Peter Ueberroth did—actually run a large enterprise from top to bottom, from start to finish, and take the credit or blame for the results...

...Devine recently proposed that the federal government hire more short-term employees, who can be fired, and fewer permanent, tenured employees...

...Opens many new loopholes for the court and politicians to 'interpret' ") and a welfare-slashing initiative ("Politicians are spending billions of your tax dollars" vs...

...Watt was, in effect, fired...

...This could be a dramatic change that would allow an incoming president to bring into government thousands of activists committed to making a new administration work—while at the same time replacing a good many opponents who might drag their heels...

...They responded with the seemingly arcane argument that allowing former judges to draw district lines would mire the state's judiciary in—you guessed it—politics...

...The recent state and local elections constituted an orgy of pol-bashing extraordinary even by Mark Twain standards...

...Blessed with this firm guarantee of tenure, Los Angeles's top civil servants are free to violate the traditional image of quiet, apolitical bureaucrats efficiently carrying out the policies ordered up by leaders whom the voters have chosen...

...I envisioned legions of citizens ready to march out of the libraries (where they had been secretly reading copies of The Washington Monthly and The New Republic) and into the streets and voting booths...

...California traditionally has interesting referenda, and before every election California voters get a fat pamphlet from the secretary of state containing the arguments for and against the latest crop...

...Contempt for the politicians grows, and protecting the basic functions of government from "political interference" comes to seem all the more important...

...First, there are peculiar local factors that tend to enhance Californians' contempt for politics, the most important being a campaign-financing system that, even for modern-day America, is scandalously out of control...

...On the other side of the equation, Californians respect their state and local civil services at least in part because these bureaucracies don't appear to have reached the state of bloat and immobility achieved by the federal government, or by many local bureaucracies, such as New York's...

...Unlike any other major city, Los Angeles also has a system of citizen's commissions, appointed by the mayor, that in theory set policy for most of the 32 city departments...

...Political offices with little power attract politicians who can be trusted with little power...

...Department heads needed more "management training ." Explaining this MBA-style pitch, Mayor Bradley's deputy boasted, "Our side has an efficiency ring to it...

...The whole thing could have been drafted by the League of Women Voters as a civics lesson for a teenager who looked forward to exercising his franchise...

...They seized on a minor provision of the proposed law that would have provided limited matching funds for candidates opposed by wealthy individuals (whose spending on their own behalf may not be regulated, according to the Supreme Court...

...That subject is politics itself...

...Employee unions also fought the plan, and in a hotly contested election it was defeated by a margin of 53-47...

...Stop playing politics at our expense...

...The ballot argument characterized Proposition 39 as a "political brawl" started by "selfinterested politicians" that would lead to "more political shenanigans" and "secret backroom political deals ." "Enough is enough...

...I still think I was right—on many issues, like the need to overcome the pull of interest groups, to encourage entrepreneurship, to reform the military and to redirect unionism, what has been styled as "neoliberalism" now either is or is fast becoming the conventional wisdom...

...Disingenuous Devine The result is a vicious circle...

...But I was also wrong, because on at least one crucial subject what I had hoped was the new wisdom is not selling...

...Time to stop writing about such ideas and start helping put some of them into practice...

...It is "a simple management decision," he says, rebutting charges that it will politicize hiring and firing...

...And, as someone who pays taxes in both California and New York, I can attest that California still has a lot to learn when it comes to thinking up ways to make tax forms completely indecipherable...

...There were other propositions on the California ballot—Proposition 40, for example, a measure to limit campaign contributions...

...Jerry Brown was banished from office in part because he botched California's reaction to the "Medfly" infestation...

...But does it mean elected leaders are so untrustworthy that they must be surrounded by a solid phalanx of unfireables...

...I'll put my faith in the people...

...Watts and Yortys will happen...

...The voters of California-53 percent of them, anyway— don't want any truck with politicians, and this loathing is strong enough to doom any attempt to restore a measure of political control over the day-to-day workings of the government...

...well, it failed again, by a margin of 53-47...

...Gates's police department, despite certain proto-fascist tendencies, is also generally honest and competent...

...Americans may have grown so used to being ruled by unelected leaders—by Gerald Ford, by the Supreme Court, by the Paul Volckers and Felix Rohatyns and the Daryl Gateses—that they have forgotten what democracy is...

...This is the prospect of a politician or political appointee so incompetent or dangerous to the public health and safety that a tenured bureaucracy—even, or perhaps, especially, a clogged, foot-dragging bureaucracy—seems a vital safeguard...

...But this time the advocates of political accountability had a few scandals to work with...

...Do you want YOUR TAX DOLLARS to be spent to PROTECT THE JOBS OF INCUMBENT POLITICIANS...

...The actual managers of the departments are paid like private sector executives— several earn in six figures—but they must be appointed from those scoring highest on civil service exams (with enough bonus points given for seniority to virtually eliminate the possibility of bringing in someone from outside...

...Unfortunately, California voters seem quite capable of passing F. Scott Fitzgerald's test of intelligence by hating politicians and bureaucrats simultaneously...

...And what if voters make the right choice, electing an honest politician who sincerely wants to accomplish something worthwhile...

...The TV spots accompanying this campaign showed a slick, obviously well-pampered politician putting golf balls on his office carpet and wondering out loud to an unctuous crony what else he could get the public to pay for...

...The theory behind the move, as I tried unsuccessfuly to articulate it to my friends, had to do with politics...

...Civic marsupials Another definition of "politician," of course, might be "public official who is accountable to the people...

...Ask any Washington reporter and he will confirm that congressional staffs—which are 100 percent political, 100 percent fireable—are usually more competent and dedicated than their civil service counterparts...

...City government is a big business," the pro-reform ballot argument began...

...Hey, everybody, the whole point of changing the civil service is to politicize the government...

...Even so, the "politicians" decided not to wage an active campaign...

...The price of California campaigning has escalated faster than California real estate—it now costs an average of more than $300,000 to win a contested seat in the 80-member lower house of the state legislature, and Tom Hayden spent $2 million winning his...

...No wonder Gates scored points by attacking politicians who want to "keep themselves in office for life...

...Nice work if you can get it...

...The police department was exempted—but that didn't stop Gates from campaigning against the proposal (on his "own time," of course) by describing it as "a giant step backward into the dark age of Chicago-style patronage...

...In what is surely one of the great achievements of modern political advertising, the backroom Democratic politicos who had gerrymandered the state succeeded in seizing the anti-politician high ground, defeating Proposition 39 by ten percentage points...

...The resulting legalized money-grubbing would be enough to make Adam Clayton Powell blush (although it doesn't seem to faze Willie Brown, the flamboyant state assembly speaker who is the conduit for much of the money and the focus of much of the antipolitician sentiment...

...But even where it's broke, there are undeniable reasons why sane citizens tend to sympathize with the civil service in its ongoing war with politics...

...As successor to Richard Daley as Chicago's mayor and "boss," Bilandic may have entertained crude fantasies about his power—but then it snowed...

...The city-run utility is efficient...

...No wonder the city council is regarded by the voters as little more than a circus of grandstanding clowns...

...That, however, is the choice: to be governed by the experts or by the people...

...Only a handful of the department managers may be fired by the mayor without extensive administrative and judicial hearings—the equivalent of the president not being able to fire his cabinet...

...Indeed, Watt himself may be expected to live on at the Interior Department in the form of his employees and sympathizers who will obtain civil service tenure before the end of Reagan's second term, becoming a permanent impediment to any pro-environment president who might get elected in 1988...

...As I drove around Los Angeles for two months while being bombarded with anti-politician radio ads, I thought of how horrified old-fashioned civic groups like the League of Women Voters must be at this depiction of the electoral process...

...Mayor Bradley supported the measure, but not very loudly...

...Because civil service laws prevented the mayor from disciplining him, he had been allowed to set his own punishment (a six-week unpaid vacation...

...Often they stop voting...

...It read, in part, as follows (emphasis not added): "You see, the Legislature is supposed to draw district lines—the process known as reapportionment— so that citizens are fairly and equally represented in the State Legislature and Congress...

...Grandstanding is about all Los Angeles councilmen can do...

...An archaeologist of the future, coming upon the dusty microfilms of the 1984 California election, might conclude that these "politicians" must have been some alien race that had invaded the West Coast to exploit and oppress the indigenous human species...

...In November, Los Angeles voters considered a far more thoroughgoing challenge to the city's civil service—a system that, like marsupials in Australia, has evolved into a rather peculiar animal...

...Much of the relative health of California's bureaucracy may be due simply t9 its youth (after all, New York's civil service was once a great argument for socialism, before its arteries hardened), but that doesn't negate the if-it-ain't broke argument...

...In essence, politics is to government what capitalism is to the economy: the crude but effective engine of accountability...

...The current chief, Daryl Gates, makes $106,968 a year, plus fringes, rides in a free chauffeured car, exercises more power than any city councilman, and yet (unlike those politicians) bears virtually no risk of losing his job...

...In Los Angeles, Gates has a public profile only slightly lower than Eddie Murphy's...

...When publicity and perks rather than real accomplishment are what an office offers, it naturally tends to attract people who are interested in publicity and perks rather than real accomplishment...

...In equally uncontrolled Los Angeles, elected officials have taken to amassing huge war chests to scare off challengers and finance their own campaigns for higher office...

...SIMPLY STATED, the politicians are placing their own interests—their own job security—far above their duty to the Constitution and, most importantly, their duty to us...

...When I was growing up, this pamphlet was a showcase of responsible democracy, with calm, cogent essays explaining the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana, or building more schools, or calling for negotiations in Vietnam...

...After the recent elections in California, I understand why Donald Devine might not want to mention this...

...The first broadened the range of investments available to pension fund managers—basically, allowing them to make riskier investments in order to earn a higher return...

...Indeed, the courts have been so solicitous of civil servants' rights that mere "incompetence" and "insubordination" have explicitly been held insufficient to justify a dismissal...

...Perhaps democracy really is a silly way of governing, as brooding mandarins from Walter Lippman to Herbert Marcuse have contended...

...Instead, THE POLITICIANS have willfully corrupted the process to advance THEIR OWN PERSONAL AMBITIONS to remain in office or seek higher office...

...When Chief Gates calls Los Angeles "the bestrun city in the United States" his words ring true for many people, especially refugees from the decaying cities of the Northeast...

...Citizens in Southern California do not face interminable hassles obtaining drivers' licenses...

...More ominously, when it comes down to a choice, they seem to prefer the bureaucrats...

...It seemed as if there was a generic ad, used by both sides of every issue, and its message was "Don't let the politicians get away with it...

...The reformers denied vigorously that their changes would do anything as nefarious as inject politics into government...

...In essence, politics is to government what capitalism is to the economy: the crude but effective engine of accountability...

...It's probably better not to say much," one of Bradley's deputies told the Los Angeles Times...

...Yet of the nine measures on the June ballot (including one to cut the staffs of the politicians in the legislature) the only one to fail was Proposition 22's innocuous-looking civil service exemption, which lost by a margin of 53-47...

...Let's not play politics with the elderly...

...The announcer began: "Every day, politicians tend to run our government into the ground...

...When city snow plows failed to clear the streets quickly, Bilandic was quickly dismissed by the voters...

...In trying to figure out how my fellow voters have come to hold such self-defeating opinions, several explanations loom large...

...The last two police chiefs have used their celebrity to run for public office...

...This cycle has been going on for so long that even the sworn enemies of the civil service now seem unable to stand up and actually defend politics...

...The city planning director had been caught promoting his own "non-profit" tourism business out of his office...

...This point was driven home with a television ad showing a silver-haired judge in a swivel chair literally being dragged off the bench and into a smoke-filled backroom where he is surrounded by fat, sweaty, pinkie-ring types and forced to promise, "Don't worry...

...The solution to this problem—the way to give citizens more power over their destinies—is to give more discretion to politicians, who (unlike civil servants) may be chosen, and un-chosen, by the people...

...Overall, the California ballot pamphlet featured no less than 69 unanimously pejorative references to "politics" and "politicians ." There are only a handful of favorable references to elected officials ("legislators...

...Then one of the League's new state-of-the-art get-outthevote spots came on my radio...

...Foremost among these is the James Watt Argument (or what, in Los Angeles, we would call the Sam Yorty Argument...

...boys, when the time comes I'll take care of our political party...

...The maverick Republican who sponsored the initiative argued that "the politicians won't change a system which is run for their benefit ." Fair enough...

...But the opponents of Proposition 40—who included most of the state's politicians—were not to be outdone...

...Proposition 40 lost big...

...His face lights up as he has a revelation: "Why shouldn't their taxes pay for our campaigns, too...

...In a civil service state, politicians get to sit in large leather chairs, enjoying the publicity and perks of office while issuing orders that may or may not be carried out with any degree of fidelity or alacrity...

...The same fate has yet to befall the bureaucrats in the Los Angeles police department who allowed illegal spying—or the federal civil servants at the Army Corps of Engineers who built useless dams, the marketing geniuses at the Treasury Department who gave us the Susan B. Anthony dollar, or the GS-15s in the Pentagon who bought us a $14-billion armored personnel carrier that tends to incinerate soldiers seated inside...

...It's time to send a message to the politicians of both parties...

...Last November the council was back with a similar reform, an "Executive Service" that would include the police chief...

...Politicians would resort to such hysterical selfdamnation for a single reason: they think it works...

...Mickey Kaus is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...But I discovered that in trendsetting California the public seems to regard politicians, whose ranks I aspired to join, with a suspicion normally reserved for proprietors of day care centers...

...A good example of the new fashion in ballot arguments was the one for Proposition 39, an initiative sponsored by the Republican governor, George Deukmejian, to set up a commission of retired judges to redraw the district lines established by the Democrats earlier in the decade...

...Rather than rouse Gates and the unions they opted for a "sleeper" strategy, counting on a high presidential election turnout and a bland-sounding ballot argument to sneak reform through...

...This year's pamphlet was different...

...Adding politics is how we will make the government accountable again...

...The means was to be a new "Management Service," composed of most department heads, who would be appointed by the mayor from a larger list of candidates and who could be dismissed by the mayor and a majority of the council (or by two-thirds of the council acting alone...

...Gates did not wage much of a campaign either, although he did sign the ballot argument opposing the measure, after warning that it would bring to the city "bossism" of the sort practiced by "the infamous aldermen of the East" In this very different environment the reform measure...

...Well, then the same civil service obstacles that may prevent a Watt from doing too much damage will likely prevent someone else from doing too much good...

...The police department was caught collecting information on innocent citizens and, more important, resisted criticism from residents of poor neighborhoods who claimed that too few cops were deployed in their areas...

...The more debate there is the more political charges are made...

...In particular, Los Angeles has had a series of outspoken police chiefs who have freely intervened in local politics, publicly telling off the city council, flaunting their independence in a way that Paul Volcker, who must at least pay lip service to the wishes of elected officials, could only envy...

...Remember him...

...The state of the art has come down to what politician can best attack politicians as a class," says one veteran Democratic campaign manager...

...I naively saw politics as the democratic means by which the changes on all the other subjects are supposed to come about...

...Maybe reapportionment isn't a good example—it is probably inevitable that a campaign about gerrymandering will include talk of backroom deals...

...But Devine has billed his plan only as "cost-efficient," because temporary workers are cheaper...

...Voters were asked to "imagine how much harder it will be to keep political candidates from spending more public money on the most important thing in their lives: getting elected and reelected...

...Zev Yaroslaysky, the city councilman who sponsored civil service reform, has more than $900,000 in the bank...

...The beauty of politicians, after all, is that when they are revealed as fools or crooks—or even when they just screw up—they can at least be quickly removed...

...Ask Michael Bilandic...

...The theme of the pro-39 campaign was "Fairness not Politics ." Needless to say, the anti-39 Democrats were not going to let this grievous charge go unanswered...

...It is the solvent of bureaucracy...

...Polls showed the public was ripe for an alternative to conventional liberalism...

...There was no organized opposition to this exemption—it was even endorsed by the state employee unions, who, when it came to handling their own pension money, wanted someone who could be fired...

...Even political bosses from the "dark age of Chicago-style patronage" had to worry about delivering government services...

...It is not the Ueberroths of the world who seek elective office in Los Angeles when it is the civil service that actually runs the city and sees that the garbage is picked up...

...That's accountability, and, where politicians get to hire their own staffs, the message tends to be communicated rather forcefully down through the ranks...

...Remember—PROPOSITION 40 WAS DRAFTED BY AN INCUMBENT POLITICIAN TO KEEP INCUMBENT POLITICIANS IN OFFICE," their ballot argument charged...

...I liked politics (and politicians) and I wanted to "get involved" in political affairs in my hometown...

...At the same time, there are virtually no controls on campaign contributions from either PACs or individual lobbyists...

...In 1983, the city council tried to inject some accountability into this entrenched officialdom...

...Like many other cities, Los Angeles has an elected mayor and city council...

...That's a good reason to keep at least some civil servants in place at all levels of government to serve as watchdogs and whistleblowers...

...Voters, realizing that whomever they elect can't do much good or evil anyway, lose the sense of responsibility that would cause them to choose their leaders more carefully...

...Politics, in this sense, is democracy— the mechanism by which, as the League would put it, "your vote counts:' Votes have been counting less and less over the past half-century as decisions that were formerly made by elected politicians have been taken over by courts and bureaucrats...

...The Bilandic factor The conclusion seems unavoidable...

...Anti-politician rhetoric was used by both sides of each of the other three major initiatives, including Howard Jarvis's latest tax-cutting crusade ("HIGH-TAXING POLITICIANS" vs...

...He openly scorns Mayor Tom Bradley, although after boasting how much he would "enjoy challenging" Bradley in this year's election he decided against running when he concluded he might have to give up his tenured position to do so...

...In June of last year, for example, the voters passed judgment on another slew of propositions, including two related proposals designed to increase the rate of return the state earns on its pension fund assets...

...Perhaps school children should be required to chant quietly for an hour every morning, like a mantra, "Politics is Democracy...

...Yorty was defeated...

...After he has filled these commissions, however, the mayor has relatively few powers left...

...But it would help if 53 percent of them weren't on the other side...

...The hottest battles in California last year were not campaigns for office but ballot initiatives...

...It was no accident that the sponsors of Los Angeles's "Executive Service" plan presented it as a bland management improvement...

...The only ballot argument against the idea was written by a Sacramento attorney and gadfly who makes it his business to supply opposing arguments to measures when no one else can be found to do it...