Kill the Golden Bear, Once and for All

Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner are slugging it out in California with fistfuls of cash and platoons of campaign consultants.

At stake is the GOP nomination for the Governorship of a state that is reeling under the weight of a $19 billion budget shortfall – and zero new ideas for how to close that stifling gap. All the Schwarzenegger administration can muster is a plan to slash health care services for children and shut-ins, and continue to fund public education at a level where it can only produce Mississippi-type mediocrity – ideas that are sure to be stymied by the Democrats.

Meaning the state budget will be held hostage as it usually is, with much posturing, lies, fabrications, wild speeches and threats of IOU’s and shuttered parks, all through the hot summer and probably into the early Fall.

While that goes on, Whitman the political neophyte and Poizner the nerdy wannabe, argue about who will be tougher on illegal immigrants, who will tame the evil “unions” that pull the Democrats’ strings, and who will create thousands of new, green, good paying jobs. Both candidates harp on their experience in the private sector – as if the for-profit arena is the Holy Grail. The logic goes something like this: “If I can run a company like E-Bay then I can surely run the State of California, and I promise you I will run it like a business.”

Business, you see, is always efficient, cost-effective, fair, just, color blind, mindful of the environment and focused on delivering the products and services people want at a price they can afford.

Government, in contrast, is slow, wasteful, inefficient, unfair, bloated and populated with slackers who can’t cut it in the free market.

That logic is fatally flawed, of course, but truth is elusive on the campaign trail, and in a 30 second TV ad almost anything goes. So Poizner claims that Whitman supports Obama’s immigration policies (which are, what, exactly?) and Whitman claims that Poizner is really a closet liberal who once voted for – hold on here – Al Gore!

Every time I think politics can’t get any dumber up pops some Tea Party spokesperson yammering about taking our country back. I still don’t know whose iron grip the Tea Party folks want to break. I think they mean Barack Obama, but that’s so nonsensical given the Obama Administration’s limp policies that it can’t possibly be true.

But back to California, the steadily expiring Golden Bear. Republicans will fall on their swords before supporting tax increases of any kind. Democrats, on the other hand, face ostracism if they dare support cuts to social services. Talk about stalemate. The state’s structural deficit will never be addressed, Proposition 13 will remain the most sacred of sacred cows, and the oil industry will continue to extract oil from California without paying a dime in severance taxes. The more the state flounders, the more desperate voters become, with the end result being that wing-nut politicians, professional or novice, begin to look attractive, even reasonable.

The Golden Bear is blind in one eye, minus a hind paw, and lame in its front leg; it can barely shuffle along let alone run as it once did from the high sierras to the coast, from the redwoods to the desert. Nobody messed with the Golden Bear back in the day, but that day ended a long time ago.