HNN Poll: What Does Arnold's Victory Mean?
Our question this week: What does his victory mean for American democracy?
Food for Thought
Mark Z. Barabak, writing in the Los Angeles Times (Oct. 6, 2003):
We've been here before, even though this has been a campaign unlike any other.
From time to time, California erupts with a spasm of anger, a voter revolt that shudders the landscape like the inevitable, if unpredictable, earthquakes that are part of life on the continent's edge.
The effort to oust Gov. Gray Davis, less than a year after he won a second term, is part of a continuum that reaches back to Ronald Reagan's first election in 1966, amid the upheaval of the civil rights movement and campus unrest over Vietnam.
Antecedents include the revolutionary tax-slashing Proposition 13, the bench-clearing recall of state Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird and her liberal allies, the imposition of term limits and other moves over the last decade to straitjacket Sacramento and give voters a larger say over the day-to-day actions of their representatives.
Whatever happens on Tuesday -- and suddenly that seems less certain -- there is no doubting the underlying message: People are fed up.
"It's been painful and embarrassing, but necessary," said Kevin Starr, the state librarian and a professor of California history at USC.
Whether the recall race proves beneficial is unclear. "If it results in reform, it's been healthy," he said. "If it results in continued impasse, it's been a waste of time."...
The implications beyond state borders are equally uncertain. One of the great conceits of California is the state's role as trendsetter for the nation, in everything from lifestyle and the workplace to political fashion.
[Hiram] Johnson, Earl Warren, Richard M. Nixon and, of course, Reagan, all rose to national prominence, the latter fueled by the anti-tax sentiments kindled by Proposition 13.
Many doubt Gov. Schwarzenegger -- a liberal by national Republican standards -- would travel as well outside his adopted home state. But the notion of firing an unpopular incumbent without waiting until the next election might catch on at a time when convention is fighting a strong anti-establishment tide.
"We are in a disquieting period in American history," said Larry Gerston, a political scientist at San Jose State, "a period when people feel less connected than ever with those the few of them elected. A period in which government is not trusted, and people feel they're not getting their money's worth."
The result, he suggested, could be recall movements in others among the 18 states that allow it. The message that roars out to be heard -- an almost desperate wish for change -- can hardly seem encouraging to incumbents, including the one in the White House.
Whether Tuesday's vote actually produces change in California depends on the outcome, of course, but also on the message that Sacramento lawmakers take away. With the public mood as sour as it is, repeated polls suggest that lawmakers have been lucky they, too, cannot be recalled en masse.
"Republicans can't just sit around and say, 'No new taxes' and provoke gridlock," said historian Starr. "And Democrats can't sit around and say, 'Spend, spend, spend' and promote the same gridlock."
Otherwise, Starr went on, "this could actually be just the first in a repetitive cycle of recalls and voter vigilantism."
Vicki Haddock, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 5, 2003):
[I]t will be up to the post-recall governor to restore order and help California feel good about itself again.This ability to influence the public mood for the better is the essence of politics. It is actually more critical than mastering the intricacies of, say, the workers' compensation system. Consider two of the most successful presidents of the last century, each an optimist extraordinaire: Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republican Ronald Reagan.
Brushing past incumbents who failed to grasp the importance of instilling public confidence, FDR and Reagan soared by making enough people believe the best times were yet to be. Despite the Great Depression and World War II, Winston Churchill compared talking to FDR with uncorking champagne. It's no coincidence that Roosevelt said if he hadn't gone into politics, he might have become an ad man, and Reagan actually did become a pitch man for laundry soap.
Both presidents were quick to seize the day.
It was at his first inauguration that FDR made his epochal warning: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He went on to utter what might serve as a credo for California today: "Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money. It lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men."
Reagan, who campaigned in 1980 during stepped-up inflation and the humiliating captivity of American hostages in Iran, ran ads that famously declared, "It's morning in America." He used his inaugural address to reassure Americans, "I did not take the oath I have just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world's strongest economy."
This is not to suggest that sound-bite slogans, let alone campaign hucksterism, are enough or that core principles and a keen intellect aren't important qualities in a politician.
To the contrary, one of the reasons FDR and Reagan were effective is that their rhetoric was coupled with swift, vigorous action.
FDR used fireside chats to build public support for more than a dozen revolutionary New Deal federal programs, creating public works jobs for the unemployed and enacting bank guarantees to keep people's money safe. Reagan's ideology tilted the opposite direction. He used his first months in office to push fat tax cuts, 25 percent over three years, to lift the economy out of the stagflation of the Jimmy Carter years.
Now, in this tumultuous time, California needs a savvy statesperson who can inspire us beyond the petty, the mundane, the factional.
Californians always have been united by a sense of limitless possibilities, reaching even for grandeur. Historian Kevin Starr observed that the majesty of Yosemite is the ideal symbol for how we see ourselves: "We are a people animated by heroic imperatives."
We're looking high and low, and perhaps in vain, for a governor who can calm our exaggerated sense of anxiety while channeling our exaggerated sense of optimism into a new and greater California.