PoliZeros pleads temporary insanity on recall
Here I’d thought a California recall race with 145 candidates might result in actual serious discussion of the issues instead of the usual attack politics, since candidates can’t play the binary game of “the other candidate is worse than me”. How naive of me to believe such a thing possible..
Gray Davis now has Bill Clinton in his corner, Arnold has Warren Buffett. The media soon shall be regaling us with much talk of strategy, tactics, as well as the obligatory tsk-tsk’ing at the viciousness of the campaign. But as for any discussion of how California can get out of the financial hole it is in, well, none of the major candidates nor media are interested – it’s just not “sexy”, y’know?
California Democratic Party spokesperson Bob Mulholland, who can be relied upon for a nasty one-sentence quote on most any topic, said Schwarzenegger will face “real bullets” in the campaign. This statement, even for Mulholland, is swimming in the sewers while claiming the opposition are turds.
Then’s there’s Peter Camejo, a serious candidate, who finally got major media attention yesterday when he delivered a policy paper of depth and import. HA, fooled you! Of course that’s not what happened. Camejo got the attention because someone threw a pie in Ralph Nader’s face while he was endorsing Camejo. Our media sure does know what’s important, uh-huh.
So, this campaign may be amusing at times, it will certainly be stomach-turning too often. It will not, however, provide any genuine answers to anything. California will still be a mess.
California needs:
- Campaign finance reform laws with teeth so whores like Gray Davis don’t get elected by taking fat cat money and giving them financial goodies in return (as witness the prison guards union).
- An independent outside audit of State of California finances to discover why billions of dollars in surplus vanished.
- A plan for dealing with the crumbling infrastructure of bridges, freeways, sewers, etc. – all the stuff that is slowly falling apart that never gets fixed.
- With 15% of the U.S. population (and always more coming), California is approaching gridlock in the big cities and has an inadequate plan for managing water, our most precious commodity. We needs some clues here. Lots of them.
- Public schools are becoming laughably bad, with serious systemic problems. Everyone says Help the Children, yet the schools get more dysfunctional every year. Why?
But none of the major candidates will talk about these issues in any meaningful way because they’ll be concentrating on media campaigns to destroy their opponents instead.