Schrag: For $2 Million You Can Get Just About Anything on the Ballot--2008 with 3 Elections Will Have Plenty

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

In the words of the patron saint of political consultants, there's a sucker born every minute. In California it'll cost you a couple of million to reach the suckers. But the consultants aren't complaining.

For evidence, consider the likely initiative menu for next year's three -- count 'em, three -- elections. There's the initiative, almost certain to make the February presidential primary ballot, which would replace the existing legislative term limits -- six years in the Assembly, eight in the Senate -- with a system limiting any legislator to a total of 12 years.

Backed by the wording of Attorney General Jerry Brown's ballot summary, it's promoted as a reduction from 14 years in the two houses combined to 12. But since incumbents, including Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, who under current law are both termed out in 2008, would be able to run again if the measure passes, it's both a reduction and an extension.

The backers of California's term limits law, enacted in 1990 as Proposition 140, sold it as a return to a government of dedicated citizen legislators who would briefly set aside careers to honorably serve their fellow citizens in Sacramento and then return home.

But now that our incumbent citizen legislators are fiddling with Proposition 140 to extend their own tenure, U.S. Term Limits, the chief opponent of the effort, is calling them a slimy bunch of self-serving pols.

Better yet, a recent Field Poll suggests that the more frustrated voters became last month with the Legislature's failure to enact a budget -- actually, it was only Senate Republicans who blocked it -- the more likely those voters were to support the new initiative.

They seemed to believe that by giving Núñez and Perata another few years -- a possible six in the Assembly for Núñez, four in the Senate for Perata -- they were punishing them. Moral: pass a stupid law in 1990, and you get slippery fixes in 2008.

Now add Tom Hiltachk's proposed "Presidential Election Reform Act," which, instead of allocating all of California's 55 electoral votes to the candidate who carries the state, as has always been the case, would give one vote to the winner in every congressional district; two would go to the statewide winner.

Hiltachk, a Republican strategist and long-time lawyer for conservative initiative campaigns, sells it in the name of fairness: Why should all those Newport Beach Republicans be voiceless? Our traditional winner-take-all elections, the proponents say, can't possibly reflect California's great diversity.

But their argument that their measure would put some of California's electoral votes in play, thus forcing presidential candidates to pay more attention to California's interests, is nonsense. Since nearly all of California's districts are already safe for one party or the other, there'd be no more incentive to campaign here than there is now.