Who do we want to run?  Who would actually make a GOOD Governor?  Who could actually fix the mess???

The fact that the energy companies farked the California electricity supply never made it deeply into the collective awareness.  The info was there but it was buried in the noise.

Secondly, for all that I voted for him twice, Davis was simultaneously aloof, arrogant, and voracious about campaign fundraising at the expense of virtually all other issues.  His support was two miles wide and half an inch deep...relatively few voters actually liked the guy, which is not a good thing in times of trouble.

Ahnold was the man on a white horse and the public loves a man on a white horse for at least a while.  I told several people that Ahnold wouldn't been able to make it work at the time he was elected and I was told that I was just being sour grapes.  He who laughs last.  Etc.  Actually, I think the metaphor I used was that the voters felt like times were bad and that the answer was to sacrifice a victim in a volcano or something until the next time things got bad.

Ahnold also did the populist 2/3 reduction of the license renewal fee, aka the "car tax"...it sounds so much worse when you put it that way...while the point that it would open up an additional $400 million hole in the state budget was papered over and ignored.

Phil Angelides is a competent but uninspiring pol with the charisma of warm cottage cheese but both he and Westly have a chance to emerge from the swamp.  My reservations about Warren Beatty and Rob Reiner are the same as about Ahnold...wtf does being a celebrity have to do with knowledge about how to govern?   Both have been around the political world but as celebrity and fundraising magnets and Beatty, at least, is vulnerable to solving problems by sloganeering.

Of Ahnold's three issues, the one about having redistricting done by an independent panel should pass.   The institutional triad that makes California dysfunctionable and ungovernable is Prop 13, which has led to horrible inequities of tax collection in the name of "reform"; a 2/3 requirement in the legislature for passing a budget, which means the most rabid ideological cases on either side can tie it up for months; and the mutually backscratching gerrymandering of Congressional and legistlative districts that leave 90+ percent of all seats either solidly Democratic or solidly Republican, with the contestants for those seats more worried about challenges from the activist flanks of their parties than having to ultimately answer to voters as a whole.

It's an issue that's driven me nuts and I've excoriated the Democratic Party in this state for being so gutless...if they were willing to take risks with "fair" redistricting, there would be a lot more swing districts but given the general demographics of the state, we could easily have another 5-7 seats in the House right now...nicely off-setting the mid-census power grab the the GOP in Texas.

I predict that the initiative to increase the time for teacher tenure from 2 years to 5 years will pass.  It's bad legislation and doesn't address the underlying problem of the system's structural weaknesses where incompetent teachers and principals simply get passed from one school to another because it's extremely difficult to fire anyone unless you have authentic photos of them conducting sexual relations with diseased livestock.   But people will vote for it on the grounds that they will feel like they're "Doing Something" about education.

But it's the Budget Initiative, which gives the governor virtually dicatatorial powers, that's the real stinker of the lot.  There will be a lot of FUD campaigning in its favor and I suspect it will be uncomfortably close but I think we should be able to defeat it...right now, I'd guess a margin of 53-47.