Well, I think Schwarzenegger will win another term…and by a pretty large margin. His opponent, Phil Angelides, has run about as poor a campaign as you could without committing some public act of sexual depravity with a nun, plus getting caught robbing the collection box while you mock the troops. Arnold, who was pretty unpopular in this state two years ago, has made an incredible comeback, partly by embracing a lot of Liberal causes and partly by lowering expectations of his own performance and then not doing anything too foolish. I thought he was a terrible governor back then. Now, I'm not sure I have any real quarrel with anything he's done lately. I'm not even sure who I'm going to vote for in this race.
The ballot propositions in California and Los Angeles are rather maddening. An awful lot of them are the kind that seem like really good and/or necessary moves if you just hear a one sentence description. The devil, as they say, is in the details and I suggest you do a little research and not buy anyone's summary of anything. Proposition 90, for example, sounds like a move to prevent the government from seizing your land for anything other than a legitimate government-related purpose. I'd get behind that but the actual proposal (read it) would lay the groundwork for anyone whose property is impacted by any government action to sue for any theoretical loss…another one of those "goes too far" correctives. I'm voting against it but study up on it before you vote either way.
We have a lot of bond issues, most of which are proposals to spend money for education, spend money to clean up our water, spend money to fix levees so a Katrina-like disaster can't occur here, etc. In another time and state, these matters would be paid for out of the general fund with current dollars, rather than to float bond issues that will probably be covered with whopping tax hikes in the future. But that's how the game is played these days, isn't it? Elected officials don't want to curtail spending and they certainly don't want to get tarred as tax-raisers. So the answer is to manuever the tax increase so someone else will have to take the responsibility for it…and put bond proposals on the ballot that we, the voters, will feel we have to accept. I'm going to vote for some of them but I wish I didn't have to.
Everyone is saying the Democrats will take the House of Representatives so I'm assuming they will…by a narrow-enough margin that some Republicans will claim it as a moral victory for their side. The Senate? Who knows? I'm sick of pundits who pick and choose the poll that fits the story they want to tell…and I don't even think most of them are biased to one party or another. I think they're just looking to say something more than "Too close to call" about a lot of races that are too close to call. As Jack Germond once said of folks whose job involves making political projections, "We aren't paid to say, 'I don't know.'" Since no one's paying me, I'll say it: I don't know.
What I will predict is that we're going to hear a lot about vote fraud in any race decided by less than about three points. This is one of the many sad legacies of the 2000 presidential mess. We no longer trust any election that doesn't go our way…and in some cases, that distrust is probably warranted. (Most of my Democratic friends are hoping, of course, that their team wins big…but I have one who's hoping the Dems win control of the Senate by a couple of squeaker elections that are filled with irregularities. Just so he can tell Republicans, "Get over it!" The guy has a point. I don't think we'll ever clean up the process and arrive at a system everyone can trust until such time as someone is willing to entertain questions about an election that went their way. This will not happen in our lifetimes.)
But let's close with the important prediction. Tomorrow the new James Bond DVD sets go on sale so I'll predict that a lot of us who've already bought Goldfinger twenty times on home video will be stupid enough to go buy it again. I might, just so I can put this DVD on a shelf with my three other DVD versions, my Beta version, my two VHS copies, my regular Laserdisc, my reissue Laserdisc, my Criterion Laserdisc, et al. I'm leaving room for the Blu-ray version and the I-Pod download version, and I'm still hoping to go full circle and see it issued in a one-reel, silent 8mm Castle Film. Some day, I'll have to actually watch the movie and see if it's any good.