SANTA MONICA, Calif.
California's campaigns introduce candidates not only to thestate's voters but to its immensity. In Bakersfield, Meg Whitman,52, the former CEO of eBay who is campaigning for the 2010Republican gubernatorial nomination, learned about carrots.
In 1968, the Grimm brothers were selling vegetables at a roadsidestand in Anaheim. They moved to Bakersfield and today Grimmway Farmsand one rival provide 80 percent of the nation's carrots, partlybecause the brothers figured out how to make the vegetablespleasingly uniform in shape.
Who knew? Whitman didn't, and the story, which she tellsenthusiastically and at length, delights her because it confirms herconviction that California "was built by intellectual capital," andnot just the Hollywood and Silicon Valley sort.
California's cascading crises prefigure America's future unlessWashington reverses the growth of government subservient toorganized labor. The state cannot pay its bills, poorly educates itsyoung and its taxation punishes whatever success that itssuffocating regulatory regime does not prevent.
Whitman, a Roman candle of facts and ideas, insists, "We do nothave a revenue problem; we have a spending problem of epicproportions." Twenty-five percent of California's revenues come fromincome taxes paid by the 144,000 richest taxpayers, so "if one ofthem leaves, it's a really bad thing." Lots have left. Some neverreally arrive. Pierre Omidyar, after founding eBay in San Jose,resided in Nevada, which has no income tax.
Whitman says 50 percent of California's spending on education,grades K through 12, goes into overhead, not classrooms, comparedwith 20 percent in, for example, Connecticut. The public educationlobby likes it that way. But because California elementary schoolstudents rank 46th among the states in math, 48th in reading, 49thin science, it is, Whitman says tersely, hard for defenders of thestatus quo to "hide behind the results."
She endorses a convention to revise California's Constitution,which was written in 1879 and has been amended 518 times. She wouldreduce the number of state Assembly districts (there are 80) becausethe Legislature is cumbersome, and would modify the initiative andreferendum process.
Voters have discombobulated budgeting by mandating spendingwithout providing revenues, other than promiscuous borrowing.Whitman favors making it harder -- requiring more signatures -- toget measures on ballots, limiting the number on ballots inparticular elections and requiring the ballot language to specifythe costs of measures being voted on.
She emphatically opposes a change that many proponents of a newConstitution favor -- eliminating the requirement of a two-thirdsvote of both houses of the Legislature to pass a budget or raisetaxes. Without those provisions, "taxes would be so high we mightnot have a state left." Today's most pressing problem -- governmentin the grip of public employees unions -- is, she thinks, ripe forimprovement: 85 percent of the state's unionized employees areworking without contracts.
To change Sacramento -- which Los Angeles, San Francisco and SanDiego television stations barely cover -- she must find new ways tocommunicate with a disconnected public. Because California is secondamong the states only to Wisconsin in Internet connectivity, shehopes to directly arouse the state for challenges such asmodernizing the water storage and delivery system that was designedfor a California with half today's population.
"There is," she says, "plenty of water in California -- we can'tget it from where it is to where it is needed." The result, partlybecause of aggressive environmentalism, is "a slow-motion Katrina"in some Central Valley towns where unemployment is above 40 percent.
Whitman, like her rivals for the nomination (state InsuranceCommissioner Steve Poizner, another Silicon Valley success, andformer Rep. Tom Campbell), is pro-choice. That normally is a problemwith a significant portion of the Republican nominating electorate.But the collapse of California's once-characteristic confidence hasconcentrated minds on other things.
Because legislators feel validated by volume, the Legislature is,she says, a "bill machine." She vows to wield the veto power asvigorously as did Republican Govs. Pete Wilson and GeorgeDeukmejian, who cast 1,890 and 2,298 vetoes, respectively. Thecurrent calamitous governor wanted, as movie stars do, to be loved,but Whitman says tersely: "Getting elected is a popularity contest.Governing is the opposite."
Although California is a blue state, it has had Republicangovernors for 30 of the last 43 years. The Republican revivalnationally might begin here next year.
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