We have an election in California next Tuesday. A small portion of the electorate, I'm guessing, will trudge to their polling places and punch chads on eight propositions.
Earlier this evening, I spent some time with my sample ballot and read some online articles, and I decided to vote for Propositions 79 and 80 and to vote against the others. I began composing a post to put up here explaining why when I suddenly received an e-mail from Dawna Kaufmann directing me to the L.A. Weekly ballot recommendations. Dawna, of course, suggests that I vote accordingly. I don't often agree with that newspaper but I went over to read their views to see if they changed my mind about anything…and they did. They changed my mind about writing my own post. Instead, I'm linking to theirs because their critiques of the propostions mirror my own.
The only one that was a close call for me was 77, which sets up a panel of retired judges to redraw districts in (theoretically) a non-partisan manner. If it just did that, I'd probably go for it as the gerrymandering is pretty stark and not conducive to democracy. But the proposition would open up the process with no guarantee that politics wouldn't enter into it a hundred different ways and it could easily make things worse instead of better. Right problem, wrong solution.
Governor Schwarzenegger, whose popularity is plunging towards that of the man he replaced, is behind four of the propositions — 74, 75, 76 and 77. The pollsters, who don't have the greatest track record in this state, are saying that of these, only 74 (which seeks to roll back teacher tenure) is close, while the other three are running between 11 and 22 points behind. I have the awful feeling that when they fail, and they could all fail, Arnold will give a speech, promise to try again and announce, "I'll be back." I don't know what kind of advisors the man has but surely there's someone in Sacramento who can tell him that Californians are really tired of hearing him recycle his old movie lines and work some conjugation of "to terminate" into every other sentence. It was cute when he first did it but the quotes are starting to sound like replacements for actual policies. Even Ronald Reagan knew enough to limit the Gipper dialogue.