The real deal in California

The openDemocracy articles by Jimeng Teng and Teofilo Ruiz indicate that the accession of a woman-groping Austrian movie star to the governorship of America’s most populous state leaves a lot of people across the globe scratching their heads in confusion. Some fear a lurch to the political right; others see a lamentable triumph of America’s entertainment-industrial complex; still others assume that California voters are sympathetic to sexual harassment and alleged pro-Hitler sympathies.

Before condemning the vote from the outside, however, it’s worth looking more closely at exactly what happened. A couple of weeks in California convinced me that the recall process, while flawed, is ultimately a boon for democracy.

Don’t laugh. Rarely, even during presidential campaigns, have I seen Americans so politically engaged. In the bars, at Starbucks, at yoga class – this unprecedented recall is what Californians were talking about. Much of their chatter may have stemmed from petty concerns (the state tax on owning a car tripled on 1 October, a demagogue’s dream), or from fear (my leftist friends say they’re moving out of state). But even with the Oakland Athletics in Major League Baseball’s play-offs, politics is what Californians have obsessed over for weeks. Local television news, which barely even mentioned the November 2002 contest, has overflowed with election coverage. And on voting day, turnout was close to 60% – not a record, but roughly 20% higher than the previous autumn. Hundreds of thousands of Californians voted on 7 October who had never voted before.

An issue of confidence

It’s easy to ridicule an election with 135 candidates, especially when they include a porn millionaire, a porn star, a diminutive, aging child actor and a comedian best known for smashing watermelons. Most of the candidates, however, were not eccentrics: they were ordinary Californians frustrated by the state’s stalled economy and convinced they could do better. The state law allowing for the governor’s recall sets a ridiculously low threshold for alternative candidates to get on the ballot: 65 signatures and $3,500. But the widespread participation also means that every important constituency, ethnicity and ideology was represented on that long ballot.

One of the smartest things I heard about the governor’s recall came – where else? – at a yoga convention in Los Angeles. Waiting for independent candidate Arianna Huffington to show up, a young filmmaker told me that Europeans should think of the state’s recall provision as the equivalent of the “no-confidence” option available in many parliamentary systems.

He’s right. Most Californians were voting less to install Arnold Schwarzenegger than to remove hapless incumbent Gray Davis. The Los Angeles Times exit poll showed that 85% of Schwarzenegger voters said recalling Davis was the most important reason they cast their ballots; only 8% said they’d primarily come to vote for a specific candidate.

A crucial difference is that no-confidence votes are done by legislatures; there’s no way that California’s two legislative bodies, both dominated by Democrats, would have voted to remove Davis. And that, in the minds of millions of Californians, is precisely the problem. The political culture in Sacramento, the state capital, is too chummy, insular and slow-moving to respond to voters’ needs.

Was Schwarzenegger elected by special interests, as Ruiz charges? Yes and no. Actually, a good portion of his campaign came from personal loans. It’s true that he took millions from businesses with interests in the state budget – but that hardly distinguishes Arnold from any of the major party candidates in this race.

After the party

Still, does it make sense to go to the opposite extreme, to adopt a governor with zero political experience? This is, after all, a $1.3 trillion economy, the world’s fifth largest – you don’t want to hand it over to a guy just because he drives a Hummer. Some think Schwarzenegger can’t do worse than Davis did. They may be wrong. One fear is that Arnie will govern by special effects. He’s made seductive, contradictory promises: he will never spend more money than the state has; he will never raise taxes; he will “destroy” the dreaded car tax; and he will improve state-funded education. Will he, like his role model Ronald Reagan, run up record deficits while preaching the virtues of a balanced budget?

Maybe, but Wall Street is not going to be fooled by a few hackneyed lines from The Terminator. Already the state’s bonds teeter on junk status. If Schwarzenegger does not move quickly to reduce California’s massive deficit, which could be as high as $20 billion, the bond ratings will slip further, which will cost the state dearly. And if the state economy doesn’t begin generating jobs at something approaching the level of the booming 1990s, voters won’t be fooled either.

One of the biggest ironies of this election is that California’s governor has limited powers, precisely because the position has been so straitjacketed by voter referendums over the past three decades. During a press conference in which presidential hopeful General Wesley Clark endorsed the doomed campaign of Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, Clark essentially said that there’s not much a governor can do in the face of national Republican policies that have killed jobs nationwide. If that’s true, there may not be reason beyond personal style to elect one candidate over another – and Schwarzenegger certainly has style. But it also means that Californians are in for a harsh lesson in fiscal reality: their chosen actor-governor is either going to have to impose painful spending cuts they will hate, or else be deemed as ineffectual as the man he terminated.