Left can’t possibly be right

If I thought, per his recent television ad, that Gov. Jerry Brown really would take on the government’s employee unions and trump their influence over the obsequious Democrats who control Sacramento — and actually restructure state government, including pension reform, I might vote for Jerry. So, how partisan am I?

And if Jerry Brown indeed wins, I hope, for the common good, that he repudiates his career path and leaves a real legacy, not the typical aftermath of a Democrat’s incumbency — more unfunded liabilities for future generations.

But, as governor last time, Brown started us down this path of government union control of both sides of the bargaining table. As a result, California state government, and counties, cities and school districts now face a bleak future where they will be unable to provide basic public services, as a progressively larger portion of government budgets go for salaries and benefits higher than in the private sector for comparable jobs, and for pensions larger than in the private sector — often for government workers who retire earlier. The very people for whom Democrats profess concern — those most in need of government services — will be hurt the most.

The reality is that unions — especially the fastest-growing segment of unionism, government workers — control the Democratic Party. Consider the proportion of delegates to a California Democratic Party convention or the Democratic National Convention who are union members voting in lockstep. A liberal filmmaker made the acclaimed “Waiting for Superman,” about the decline in public schools and the union resistance to change, yet the teachers’ unions continue to own the Democratic Party.

In contrast, for all the talk of “big business” controlling the Republican Party, the Republican state or national convention delegates are a rather undisciplined grass-roots group with little loyalty to big corporations. 

As for Meg Whitman, she is very bright and enormously capable. Her ability, skills and experience far exceed what we usually see in a governor. Given the way Democrats drew the legislative districts, their party will continue in legislative power, along with their allies — including the litigious trial lawyers guild and the teachers union hacks, and the urban Democrat legislators, especially, who promote a crude racial spoils system, to keep control of the State Legislature. Accordingly, how much could Gov. Meg Whitman really get done?

And if Meg Whitman continues to blunder, for example, as when she prolonged the soap opera starring her former “undocumented” housekeeper by offering to take a lie detector test, she may never get the chance to be governor. Even with her brains and money, she failed, last year, to deal preemptively with baggage, notably her failures to vote, which could have been neutralized in an early op-ed column. When you are rich and intend to spend a lot of money on your campaign, you should establish your character early on, not in October of the election year.

Last week I saw an absolutely superb Whitman spot in which she, finally, tries to make an emotional connection with voters. This is at least six months too late, perhaps reacting to the recent definitive Jerry Brown spot (“at this stage in my life”). Here she is, in 2010, running against Jerry, the geek before his time, and, somehow, she had conceded the people factor long ago. Hopefully it’s not too late for her.

But if Jerry wins, it will be at least in part because he is running as a fiscal conservative, not simply that Whitman did not connect emotionally with voters. Brown had to apologize for his campaign aide branding Whitman a “whore” for allegedly telling police union leaders she would exempt police from pension reform, in exchange for police union support. Meanwhile, Brown, in his commercials,  now is embracing the classic Republican position for reform of compensation and pensions for state government employees.

In Tuesday night’s debate, Whitman seemed a leader and stable, and Brown seemed insincere and erratic.  If this debate frames the rest of the campaign, Whitman wins.

As for Barbara Boxer: She is a weak incumbent who gets re-elected because she has been lucky, often facing under-funded or lackluster re-election opponents. I confess to a lack of objectivity. The state and the nation would be a better place if my old friend Bruce Herschensohn had defeated Boxer in her first Senate run in 1992, a tough year for Republicans. In Boxer, we find a caricature — the quintessential liberal detached from reality. When she was in Congress, she opposed the American military, at a time that Ronald Reagan’s military gambit helped bring about the end of the Soviet Union. And nothing changed when Boxer entered the U.S. Senate, or even after 9/11.

I am excited about the Carly Fiorina candidacy, but I confess that Boxer’s inaccurate attack spot (out-of-context quotations that unfairly suggest that Fiorina shipped jobs abroad so she could pay herself more money and perks) is taking its toll. Fiorina needs to hope that enough voters finally have concluded the empress-senator has no clothes; that is, when we now are at the economic crossroads, this liberal from central casting who, despite — or maybe because of — her background as a stockbroker, is clueless about entrepreneurial capitalism. But Boxer is not running as a liberal; if she wins, it will merely represent a triumph of negative and inaccurate campaigning against Fiorina.

In fact, both Whitman and Fiorina are high-tech, with-it visionaries. I’ve worked with Republicans and Democrats in government. These two women are way, way above the norm for politicians who typically celebrate their accomplishments by putting their names on large signs associated with costly public works projects.

Boxer just doesn’t get it.  She is still fighting the battles of a generation ago. At a time when, for example, more women than men are destined for law school, when the single most-powerful political bloc in California is Latino, when a “man of color” is an American president, she remains archaic. She suffers by comparison with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who at least knows the world has been changing. 

John F. Kennedy would be an anachronism in today’s Democratic Party. This is the American president who said we should “bear any burden, pay any price” to achieve freedom in the world. This is the guy whose signature economic policy was cutting taxes to stimulate economic growth. And he was a true believer in civil rights, that is to say, a color-blind society, not one in which government sanctioned race as a criterion for special treatment. Does JFK have anything in common with today’s race-focused Democratic leaders, say, Rep. Maxine Waters or Loretta Sanchez?

Or, for that matter, with President Barack Obama? Kennedy believed in American exceptionalism, that there is something special about the United States of America. In contrast, President Obama is notable for his apology tours abroad, in which he seems embarrassed by our country. And people back home are finally getting it. Sure, he has an appealing rhetorical flourish and a disarming, low-key, even reflective, style. Underneath it all, there is indeed the beef. And it’s not kosher.

The last time we had a Democrat muddle the Mideast, it was when Bill Clinton resurrected Yasser Arafat, who had been abandoned by the Saudis and other Arabs, after Arafat imprudently bet on Saddam in the first Gulf War. The bad guys in the Middle East were in disarray when Clinton arrived. It was the time to move diplomatically. The much-pilloried Richard Nixon (who saved Israel with the airlift during the 1973 Yom Kippur war) would have closed the deal. Instead, Clinton, enabled by his bumbling Secretary of State Warren Christopher, cost the real peace process at least a decade.

Almost as if inspired by Clinton’s past miscalculation, and perhaps influenced by Jimmy Carter, plausibly and perennially hostile to Israel, Obama let pass the contemporary opportunity to unite many worried Arabs against the feared threat of a nuclear Iran.  Instead, Obama obsessed about “settlements” and raised expectations that Israel would yield on Jerusalem — basically, taking an even harder line than Mahmoud Abbas expected.

President Obama’s gratuitous humiliation of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu telegraphed to American allies throughout the world that this administration is an unreliable friend.  President Obama is right to reach out to Muslims and the Arab world, but he is wrong to rewrite history about a nonexistent Muslim role in America’s origins. Some of our nation’s Christian Founding Fathers, involved in a revolution funded by a Jew, Hyam Salomon, devoutly studied the Bible in Hebrew (not Arabic). President George Washington wrote a letter to the Jewish congregation in Rhode Island, not to congregants in a nonexistent colonial mosque.

But since most Jews are liberal and secular (the two attributes tend to correlate), they are less concerned about Israel (whose survival, they think, is never really in doubt) and about Western civilization and Judaic-Christian values (which they trivialize) than about an array of litmus issues to certify liberals, such as, for example, supporting “choice” in abortions and opposing “choice” in public schools.

And yet, many Jewish voters who are moving toward the middle are troubled, particularly by the silliness of the Obama economic policies. They cannot believe that Obama has put the country, and future generations, into massive debt to fund bailouts for well-connected, crony capitalists and Wall Street screw-ups, or simply to pay off Obama’s political supporters, notably the United Auto Workers Union, or the maze of government unions.

Which brings us to why this may be a Republican year. The electorate is not for Republicans, but against Democrats. Sure, the Bush administration mishandled Katrina. But look how detached Obama was about the gulf oil spill.  On big-picture policy, I was not happy with George W. Bush’s economic policies. Too much like the Democrats — more spending, more programs. And President Bush should have told the mortgage crisis architects, mainly Democrats — particularly Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank — to get lost.  Instead, the feds continued promoting the easy credit policies (promulgated, first, by the Clinton administration) that put people in homes they could not possibly afford and set the stage for the credit and economic meltdown.

But Obama is ignorant about basic economics, which is to say, he does not understand how the world works. Worse, from his past statements, and knowing his mentors, we can infer he is a Marxist at heart. It is not simply that he raised naïve, political expectations unrealistically, but that he really believed his stupid economic policies would reduce unemployment. We know this because, at the outset, he said so. In sum, the Democrats will do poorly this year, at least nationally, not because unemployment is high; but, because President Obama and his team told us the federal government must borrow massively to spend staggering amounts … precisely to prevent unemployment from rising to 10 percent. Then, he rammed his program through a compliant Democratic-controlled Congress, and it only made things worse; indeed, unemployment now, in California, is above 10 percent, and that does not account for the people under-employed, or those who have given up.

Republicans may well regain control of the House, even the Senate. But, this time, to keep power, they must draw a sharp contrast with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, et al and truly become the party of Main Street, not Wall Street. That means Republicans, who have been far from blameless when in power, must repudiate the expanding public sector that is sapping the energy of America and also repudiate the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and business-as-usual, and stop the bipartisan shell game, made far worse by President Obama, of putting future generations in debt.

In politics, the Democrats have going for them: 1) continuously redefining the electorate by registering large numbers of young, Latino and black voters, and also requiring them to join unions to have jobs, consequently diverting union dues to electing Democrats; 2) using wedge issues, like gay marriage, to engage young voters, amnesty to engage Latino voters, and the race card for African American voters. And, most importantly, 3) persevering in policies that lead to more Americans exempted from income taxes, while being provided with more public benefits — this entitlement class then allied with the enabling government class — public-sector drones who know which side of the proverbial bread their butter is on. 

But the energy and enthusiasm so far in 2010 is with the Republicans, and even the independents are angry, because they believed Obama to be pragmatic, when he is, in fact, an ideologue.

Against the continued liberal dominance of major universities, the large foundations and mainstream media, the voters are exposed to alternative views on the Internet,  talk radio and Fox News. True civil libertarians are offended by the initial, unsuccessful assaults by the Democrats, who wanted to use the antiquated, misnamed “Fairness Doctrine” to limit, for example, the First Amendment rights of talk radio. This would be the real assault on the Constitution, hardly atypical as this president reaches for unprecedented executive power, with unelected, powerful “czars” outside the constitutional checks and balances of Senate confirmation.

This year, it’s payback time against the know-it-all, omnipotent president.

Arnold Steinberg, a strategist and analyst, is the author of two classic graduate textbooks on politics and media. This semester, he teaches a graduate seminar at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. He has created major political campaigns and advised hundreds of candidates. He is a court-recognized expert on political campaigns, especially polling and advertising.