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Progressives never imagined game of
'initiative chicken' Some are near-duplicate versions of the same measure; others are just gleams in the eye of wannabes with the $200 needed to file initiative versions of the 135 people who ran for governor in the 2003 recall. But some are chess pieces in what may be the biggest and most complicated game of political chicken in California history. If Hiram Johnson and the California Progressives who wrote the initiative, referendum and recall into the state constitution had ever been suspected of planning anything as goofy as this, they would have been run out of Sacramento on a rail. This is the initiative process on steroids. None of these measures originated with "the people' in whose name Arnold Schwarzenegger has been Hummering around. Few would qualify, much less pass, without the big bucks that deep-pockets interest groups pony up. And that's what initiative chicken is all about. The governor is flying around the country to raise the $50 million he promises (or threatens) to get to run his reform campaign. He's hoping to raise it all from big-business interests a lot of them, in the words of a staffer working for a Sacramento Democrat, eager to join "Brand Arnold.' On the other side are the teachers, cops, firefighters and other public employee unions targeted by the governor's proposed pension overhaul and spending caps and the politicians who don't want to give up their safe legislative and congressional seats. In the coming days, the unions and their allies will decide whether to launch their proposals to raise the minimum wage, create buyers' pools to drive down drug prices, repeal electricity deregulation and toughen the state's auto lemon laws. The proponents of those initiatives, all ready or nearly ready for signature collection, insist that they're inherently meritorious. Several passed the Legislature but were vetoed by the governor. All, the proponents say, have polled well among voters, many of whom were surprised that Schwarzenegger had vetoed them. But the initiatives have another purpose as well, and that's to cool out some of the governor's biggest fiscal supporters the pharmaceutical industry, the car dealers, the energy industry and business generally. Also pending is a measure that would prohibit California corporations from contributing political money without shareholders' consent. That one is the mirror image of an initiative proposal being run by a longtime right-wing activist and ex-Bircher named Lewis K. Uhler, once a member of the Reagan administration in Sacramento, that would require public employee unions to get specific approval of members before they could spend dues money for political campaigns. A similar union-dues measure, Proposition 226, went to the ballot in 1998. Opponents succeeded in keeping most big-business money out after they threatened to run their own corporate contribution measure. At this point it's hardly clear what initiatives the governor really will support. His reform campaign has already shrunk. The proclaimed move to impose merit pay on teachers seems to have been forgotten, and the proposal to lengthen the time for teachers to get tenure has been reduced from 10 years to five. (It's now an unrealistic two years.) The initiative overhauling the state's public employee pension system is stuck in a wording mess that, in the attorney general's analysis (denied by the backers), denies death benefits to the survivors of cops and firefighters killed on the job, a great example of how, in the absence of a deliberative process, initiatives go awry. In the course of his Hummer happening last week, the governor endorsed Ted Costa's convoluted reapportionment reform, not the proposal by Assembly Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (now revised from its unworkable first version) that was supposed to reflect the governor's wishes. In addition, the governor's loudly proclaimed intention to "blow up the boxes' of state government by abolishing some 88 boards and commissions as recommended by a team of state bureaucrats has been quietly abandoned. It's been reliably reported that even as the governor has been excoriating the Legislature for inaction, negotiations have been going on with the leaders of the Senate and Assembly. Those talks, like the governor's threats to go to the ballot, are also part of the game. A lot of his initiative proposals may be bargaining chips to be traded for the things he really cares about reform of the state's dysfunctional budget process particularly. But driven by the governor's huge political campaign operation, the game itself has escalated in complexity and in its unpredictable potential costs, political and financial a new, more grotesque level in the megabucks initiative system. Who'll blink first? However Schwarzenegger may have first imagined it, deal making in politics isn't like muscling and manipulating people in Hollywood. It's far more complicated and involves many more competing interests. It may even be more honorable.
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