How one report means different things to different people

by Brian Leubitz [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

A friend of mine, Sasha Horwitz, that I graduated from UC Berkeley's policy school wrote a report a little while ago about term limits. You can download the PDF here. It took a bunch of research from a previous PPIC report, some analysis of some capitol watchers and pundits (like um, the force of nature that is Dan Walters), and synthesizes it in with some original analysis to come up with a finding that Prop 93's twelve year plan would "improve some of [California's term limits] structural weaknesses."

So, it's hard to see the report as anything but an endorsement of Prop 93's purpose.  But, as in any academic report, there is a lot of hemming and hawing. That's just good 8-fold path analysis. Mad Props to Sasha, but it also grants a lot of wiggle room for political spin. You know as somebody who's worked in politics for a while, and who has been educated in public policy, it's pretty clear that there are some inherent conflicts there.

And so, we get the spin in Steve Harmon's MediaNews report. Follow me over the flip...
From that article:

Richard Stapler, a spokesman for "Yes on 93." "And Prop. 93 retains what's good about term limits. We applaud the study's findings."

Kevin Spillane, spokesman for the "No on 93" campaign, countered that the study affirms term limits' benefits and debunks some claims made by proponents. (MediaNews 11.26.07)

See? That's some serious spin. Spillane, who does a lot of work on behalf of Howard Jarvis initiatives, manages to make some lemonade out of those lemons. In the end, what Mr. Spillane is arguing is that we should reject Prop 93 not because it's bad policy, but because he doesn't like people messing with his group's law. He doesn't dispute the underlying fact that this reports thinks that our system will be better after Prop 93. He just spins some more.

Look, before Prop 93, we had term limits. After Prop 93, we have term limits. This year out of the 80 Assemblymembers, 38 were freshman. What business could sustain such turnover? Yet, that is exactly what Spillane is advocating. How can we expect good results from our government when we don't give them a reasonable chance of success?