Why I voted for Steve Westly Today

I have never been as undecided in a primary election before as I was filling out the ovals today to elect who would be the Democrat to challenge Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor of California.

I stood for a full 10 minutes in the booth reviewing what I know about the candidates and the race. Ultimately--my headline spoils the surprise--I voted for Steve Westly.

In the final analysis, I voted for Westly because I believe he is the best candidate to beat Arnold in the general election and because the race is so close between him and Angelides that I believe my vote matters. The pivotal issue for me is the role of special interest money in the race. I believe that the unheard of $7 million independent expenditure on advertisements in favor of Phil Angelides by a father-daughter team of Sacramento developers renders it impossible for Angelides and the Democrats to run against Arnold on the issue of his being beholden to special interests.

Seven Million Dollars?!@#$ This is largest single contribution to any race other than self-financed millionaires.

Before they put this money in, Angelides was badly behind Westly, not getting his message out. Now, especially with having a ground operation (Westly is said to have none--Angelides has all the big union endorsements), Angelides is positioned to win the primary. If he does, he will quite literally owe his election to the Tsakapoulouses (or howsomever you spell it).

Morever the most recent polls show Westly beating Schwarzenegger with Angelides losing badly-- and I really don't want the Democrats to lose. It's imperative to defeat this Governor.

All other things being equal, I'd be inclined to support Angelides over Westly. I think he's more of a real progressive. He's endorsed by all the groups I care about. And I think he'd be a good governor.

But neither are the differences between these two candidates especially stark. Both are socially liberal and fiscally conservative (in the sense of being anti deficit spending). Both support public financing of elections. Both have strong environmental records (there seems to be a real split among environmentalists I know as to whom they prefer, but it is clearly a subject about which reasonable minds can differ).

There are two important policy differences that I am aware of:

1) Phil has openly advocated an income tax increase, while Westly has not.
2) Westly has supported the San Francisco District Attorney's forward thinking reforms for prisons and penalties for drug offenders, while Phil as not.

As to the first difference, while I agree strongly with Angelides that an increase in the income tax is the wiser public policy for creating a fiscally sound government, I do worry that it is politically suicidal of him to espouse it and am concerned that that alone could tank the general election for him.

As to the second, I think the lack of political courage to reform and cut back the prison industry in this state is of vital importance.

So, at the end of the day, I voted for Westly. Now let me have it--why was I wrong?

Clinton and McCain--Through the Looking Glass

I can't be the only one who has noticed the unpleasant parallels between Hillary Clinton and John McCain's candidacies for president, all of which spell doom for Democrats (which is kind of like cuckoo for Cocoapuffs, but less sweet).

Actually I miswrite when I call them "parallels." These eerie resemblances between the candidates show up more like a funhouse mirror reflection of each other than anything else.

First (and probably most significant) distorted resemblance: Hillary is a centrist (whom most of the country mistakes for a feminazi) while McCain is a maverick conservative (whom most of the country mistakes for a centrist).

Second distorted resemblance: Hillary is highly likely to win to her party's nomination despite her recent pandering to social conservatives while McCain will have to fight to win his party's nomination despite his recent pandering to social conservatives.

Third eerie resemblance (which itself strangely resembles #1): due to eerie resemblance #1, if Hillary wins the nomination (no matter who is the Republican nominee), all her pandering to the right will have been for naught and she will go down in flames as the poster child for limousine liberals. Due to resemblance #2, in the unlikely event that McCain wins the nomination, he wins the Presidency easily owing a lot to social conservatives, with whom he has consistently voted (adopted black children notwithstanding) and governs accordingly.

D-O-O-M for Democrats no matter how you spell it--S O S!!!

Fifty Angry Citizens (including me) Storm Capitol Leaders’ Offices

Read what two other bloggers had to say about it--in the Daily Kos and in Frank Russo's The California Progress Report (which has pictures of the sit-in).

Since these guys cover it well, I'll refrain from writing about it because I'm now banned from the Senate leader's office and don't want to doing anything to give them one more excuse to tank my favorite reform.

Will the Senate Dems Do the Right Thing?

In a year with the public clamoring for reform in Washington and Sacramento, the California Legislature seems poised to kill AB 583, the California Clean Money and Clean Elections bill by Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) tomorrow in the Senate Elections Committee.

The bill, which would create a broad-based system of public financing of elections in California modeled on successful systems in Arizona and Maine, passed the California State Assembly earlier this year on a party line vote with 47 out of 48 Democrats voting for the bill and no Republican votes. Early in the State Senate, the bill received the public support of Senate Leader Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland).

Perata, who has been mired in his own campaign finance scandals for over a year, promised he would move the bill out of the Senate Elections Committee but as of today all indications were that he had yet to twist the arms of his Democratic colleagues. The committee is chaired by Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), who is a co-author and strong supporter of the legislation (she is also a candidate for Secretary of State). The bill also needs two other votes from the five member committee to pass and both Republican members of the committee have long made it clear they intend to vote no.

That leaves Senators Kevin Murray (D-Hollywood) and Gloria Romero (D-San Gabriel Valley) who have been looking to direction from the Senate Leader on this bill that could affect every Senator’s political path. Oddly, while centrist Murray seems open to voting for the bill, the usually liberal Senator Romero seems to be fervently opposed to the measure. The bill needs both their votes to pass.

Earlier this week it was announced that hundreds of signatures were turned in to the Secretary of State possibly qualifying an initiative which would create public financing of elections in California.

The bill comes to a vote tomorrow in the Senate Elections Committee meeting at 9:30am in Room 3191 of the State Capitol.

Must See TV--the Colbert Clip

I'm very late on this, behind virtually every blogger in America, but if there's any chance that you haven't yet watched Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House correspondence dinner, click above to get it.

Even though all of it is devastatingly funny, it's much more courageous and important than it is funny. He stood there, a few feet from the President, and engaged in the most scathing satire of conservatism and this administration that anyone could imagine.

With lines like "we all know that reality has a liberal bias," it was clear that many people in the room had no idea how to react. It is actually painful to watch some parts of it because he is speaking so much truth to power that you have to keep thinking he's going to be killed or at a minimum forcibly ejected.

People in the blogosphere are comparing him to Mark Twain and the best American political satirists and I think they are spot on.

Can Wal-Mart ever do the right thing?

This is a reprinting of my quarterly column Eye on the Pie, Spring 2006--but I'm gonna start writing again!

In the classic choice, people almost always pick the bad news to hear first—they want to cut to the chase. But when the bad news is Wal-Mart, Philip Morris and Coors, unless the good news is “what is the answer to the question which three multi-national corporations are destined to go out of business in the next year,” let’s face facts, you don’t want to hear it.

So what is the good news really? It’s that socially responsible business is hot hot hot. Every company in America is scrambling to prove that that it contributes to the commonweal. And the bad news is, you guessed it, this includes Wal-Mart, Philip Morris and Coors.

Or is it bad? Let’s examine the trends and the opportunities here. Other than the tardy dawning of the Age of Aquarius, it would seem that the main reason for corporate America to go ethical is a market segment called LOHAS.

According to Wikipedia, LOHAS stands for Lifestyles Of Health And Sustainability and describes a $227 billion, 68 million person segment of the American marketplace, 32.3% of all American adults.

This fascinating group of people defies traditional market categorization—they cannot be defined by age, gender, education, or money alone. What defines them is their values, what they want to have happen in the world and how they want their consumer dollars to drive what wants to happen.

No company better meets the needs of this market segment than Whole Foods, whose 100s of stores across the country stock organic and sustainably harvested foods, body care products and, increasingly, clothing and household products.

After decades of double digit growth in the American economy, companies like Safeway and Wal-Mart have developed their own organic lines to go onion to onion with Whole Foods, local natural foods co-ops and Trader Joe’s.

And this is good news, right? This is what we wanted to happen—consumers would make it clear that they wanted environmentally sustainable, naturally pure products and giant corporations would eventually have to respond, right?

Well, maybe. According to Hijacked: Businesses for Social Responsibility by the ubiquitous megaphone-wielding Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Washington-based Corporate Crime Reporter, in an effort to tarnish their terrible images, giant massively unethical corporations including Philip Morris tobacco holding company have taken over a once legitimate business group called Businesses for Social Responsibility.

Soon it seems, the phrase social responsible business may have no meaning whatsoever. If all businesses claim this, how do you discern from whom and what to buy?

The real good news may be that the very qualities that make a member of the LOHAS market buy organic, make them want the product to actually be what it says it is. Accordingly to market research, people who shop this way defy traditional marketing strategies. They mistrust all advertising, read newspapers and books and make their own decisions on the basis of what they believe about what is true.

Invariably, that may leave Wal-Mart, Coors and Philip Morris out in the cold.

©Sara S. Nichols, 2006

Sara is a founding partner of the Gross National Happiness Team, a business that gives away 50% of its sales to organizations promoting peace and justice.