California, a microcosm of the US, is about to decide who is the ‘least worst’ candidate for governor after a ‘bloodbath’ of a campaign. It’s just one of Tuesday’s elections across the US when voters will give their verdict on the Obama presidency
AS GOVERNOR of California since 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger has learned a thing or two about politics. Speaking to the Women’s Conference in Long Beach this week, the terminator-turned-governator-turned-conciliator said he’d found trying to bring about reform and change “as ugly as sausage-making”. In their last face-to-face meeting before next Tuesday’s midterm election, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, rival candidates to replace Schwarzenegger as governor, sat on either side of the former weightlifter and movie actor in front of a predominantly female crowd of 14,000.
Schwarzenegger seemed more in tune with the public mood than either of his would-be successors. “People keep coming up to me and telling me they’re sick and tired of politicians attacking each other and calling each other names,” he said.
Brown, aged 72, a Democrat who served two terms as governor of California, from 1975 until 1983, and Whitman, the Republican billionaire and former chief executive of the online auctioneer eBay, looked like scolded children.
The two most publicised moments of the gubernatorial campaign occurred when an aide to Brown referred to Whitman as a whore and when Whitman’s former maid Nicky Diaz wept on television while recounting how Whitman exploited her for nine years, then fired her because she was in the country illegally.
“It’s been a brutal year. I mean, this campaign has been a bloodbath,” said Matt Lauer, the television journalist who moderated the governors’ discussion. “With one week left, would you be willing to make a pledge that you would end the negativity?”
The crowd cheered and jumped to their feet in a standing ovation. Schwarzenegger grinned and joined the applause. Brown and Whitman looked aghast at the mere thought of throwing away millions of dollars’ worth of ingeniously nasty commercials.
Voters in California "don't like anybody", says Darry Sragow, director of the University of Southern California/ Los Angeles Timespoll and a veteran Democrat political strategist in previous gubernatorial and senate campaigns. "All the candidates had higher unfavourable than favourable ratings, though Jerry Brown is breaking even now. People will choose the least rotten candidate."
At the Women’s Conference Brown lived up to his reputation for eccentricity, evoking, in the space of a few minutes, Moses in the bulrushes, Lot’s wife, his years in the “cocoon of religious fervour” at a Jesuit seminary, being in bed with his wife, order and chaos.
Despite the honours heaped on her by Harvard Business School and Fortunemagazine, which has repeatedly included her in its list of the five most powerful women in business, Whitman has found it difficult to shed her image as a tough rich woman who mistreats underlings. In addition to Diaz, the Los Angeles Timesquoted three former employees who have complained about or sued Whitman.
Whitman has spent $142 million (€102 million) of her own fortune – an all-time record – in an apparently doomed quest to succeed Schwarzenegger. Such profligate spending appears to have backfired, shocking voters at a time when 12.4 per cent of Californians are unemployed.
Whitman has a lot in common with Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, who is standing for one of California’s seats in the US senate. Both claim their business acumen will help them solve the state’s economic problems. Both promise to ease regulation to attract business and say that the private sector, not government, must generate jobs. But the argument does not appear to be working.
"Voters see former highly paid executives who remind them of people they are angry at," says David Lauter of the Los Angeles Times.
“Most of the messages Californians get are scripted, packaged,” says Sragow, the pollster. “Every once in a while something unscripted happens, and that gives voters a glimpse of the person.” When Nicky Diaz made her television appearance “voters went ‘aha, that’s who Meg Whitman is’, and they didn’t like her.”
At the Women’s Conference the invitation to end negativity was just such an unscripted moment. Jerry Brown stumbled momentarily. “Sometimes negativity is in the eye of the beholder,” he started out. But when the crowd booed the career politician immediately changed tack, saying: “If Meg takes her negative ads off the air, I’ll take mine off.” The crowd cheered.
“I’ll take down any ads that could be construed as a personal attack, but I don’t think we can take down ads that talk about where governor Brown stands on the issues,” Whitman said. The crowd booed. Whitman crossed her arms over her chest and looked flustered.
Brown delivered the knockout blow a few minutes later, with humour. “I have a great idea for an ad,” he said. “It starts with Meg Whitman saying: ‘I moved to California 30 years ago and it was such a great place, and who was governor? Jerry Brown!’ ”
Whitman kept digging the hole deeper. “Jerry Brown in many ways left this state in worse shape than when he inherited it,” she said, her voice drowned out by booing.
As I left the convention centre several women told me Whitman had just lost their vote.
While Whitman and Brown were duelling over negative advertising the senate candidate Carly Fiorina was hospitalised for an infection that her staff said was related to reconstructive surgery following Fiorina’s battle with breast cancer in 2009. When she launched her campaign Fiorina said that Barbara Boxer, the three-term Democratic senator whose seat she is seeking, was not nearly as frightening as chemotherapy.
Fiorina was an adviser to Senator John McCain in his failed bid for the US presidency in 2008. She is criticised by Boxer for having outsourced tens of thousands of jobs at Hewlett-Packard. In a rally at the Stephen S Wise synagogue in Los Angeles this week, I heard Fiorina accuse Boxer of hypocrisy, saying that taxes and regulations she’d voted for drove business and jobs out of California. “In the 21st century any job can go anywhere,” Fiorina said.
The solution, she implied, was to slash salaries, benefits and regulation to make California more competitive.
If elected, Fiorina would be the first anti-abortion Republican to reach high office in California. She is behind Boxer in the polls, but Robert Stern, president of the Centre for Governmental Studies, believes Fiorina still stands a chance because “it’s a referendum on Barbara Boxer, and people don’t like Barbara Boxer. She’s considered too liberal. She has a Brooklyn accent, and she’s not a conciliator”.
THE CALIFORNIA ANDWashington state senate races are of crucial importance to President Obama because they may determine whether Democrats retain a majority in the upper house. "We're waiting to see if the Republican wave stops at the Colorado River or whether it will reach the Pacific," says Lauter of the Los Angeles Times.
California remains staunchly “blue” or Democratic. President Obama continues to enjoy a two-thirds approval rating here, while the Tea Party icon Sarah Palin is less respected than anywhere else in the country.
But in many other ways California is a microcosm of the US, for better and worse, and an indicator of the future. With Hawaii it is the only state where Caucasians are already a minority, albeit the largest. They will be surpassed in coming years by Hispanics. Caucasians will be a minority throughout the US by 2050.
California has the strictest anti-pollution laws in the US, and its automobile and green building standards have been adopted as norms across the country. In 2006 the state adopted Assembly Bill 32 to begin phasing out fossil fuels and to foster renewable sources of energy. Governor Schwarzenegger considers “AB 32” his greatest achievement, calling it “the most comprehensive climate-change Bill in the world”. He has spent recent weeks fighting a doomed ballot initiative, backed by oil companies and the Tea Party, to suspend it.
The most populous state, California was struck harder than most by the economic crisis. Some 2.3 million people are unemployed, many of them construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed. The state runs a chronic $20 billion (€14.4 billion) deficit and may resort to issuing IOUs in lieu of payment again next month. "Two-thirds of expenditure is predetermined by ballot initiatives and federal mandates," says Sragow. "Even if you cut every non-mandated expenditure you stillcannot balance the budget. The system doesn't work."
“California was built on a series of economic booms,” says Lauter. “We had the 1849 gold rush, then the oil boom. After the second World War it was defence spending, then the technology and internet boom. All along there has been a population boom. So the state’s tax structure was built around generating money from recurring booms. When the economy goes into recession, the system works really badly.”
To set the Californian and US economies right, there is only one solution, says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at the University of Southern California. “You have to raise taxes and cut entitlements. The Republicans will not raise taxes and the Democrats will not cut entitlements.”
In 44 years as a scholar of Californian politics Bebitch Jeffe says she has never felt so discouraged. “I haven’t heard any of the four main candidates talk seriously about the fiscal, environmental and polarisation problems of the state,” she says. “There is no political courage or leadership.”
“The biggest problem we have here, and in Washington, is that you cannot govern with a majority. You have to govern with a super-majority,” says Robert Stern.
Yet, despite everything, Stern remains optimistic. "In 1990 Timemagazine published a cover story, 'The Dream is Dead'," he recalls. "I think California will come back. People don't move to Iowa or Nebraska for the weather. People come here to live the dream. Lots of ideas come here . . . Everyone is waiting for the economy to improve. Then California will be roaring back and once again leading the nation."
