Running for Governor means you are either ignorant or an egomaniac

Clearly, the role of Governor of California is a no-win situation.

Anyone who understands how California is impacted by the referendum process, a super majority requirement for passing the budget, term limits and our current legislative districts would know that being Governor is a sure way to add a major public failure to your resume.

Let’s start with the referendum process.  We, the people, have the ability to force the state to spend large parts of the annual budget on pet projects.  We can make this happen by getting our spending bias on the ballot by virtue of referendum.  Now, this all sounds very democratic, but the reality has proven anything but empowering to the people.  To pass a referendum in the state of California requires a ton of advertising on TV.  This is expensive.  Individual people typically don’t have that kind of cash laying around.  So, corporations are usually the backers behind these issues as they are able to pool the financial resources required to flood the airwaves prior to an election and get an issue passed.  Even better, there’s no requirement that the ads be truthful or even accurately reflective of the issue being pushed.  It could be a bill that forces the state government to spend tons of cash on highway improvements that would benefit the logging industry in some remote location….but the ads on TV could be about how the bill keeps criminals in jail or illegals aliens out…or whatever works in whatever part of the state you want to get some votes.  Logical connections between the bill and the advertisement are not required.

Over the years, this has unfortunately resulted in a majority of the state’s budget getting spent before the legislators even get to argue about what to include or exclude from the budget!  But no politician can campaign for reform for obvious reasons.  Say, I advocated reforming the referendum.  Well, my opponent would call me a marxist or something on TV and say that I wanted to remove the citizen’s right to affect how government spends money.  Yea, I’d lose that advertising campaign and then my next election.  Even though reform is necessary for our state.

Let’s move on to our crazy legislative districting.

Over the years, whatever party is in power has done whatever it could to stay in power.  One tactic has been to redraw the legislative districts so as to ensure a party loyalty per district so the person in power knows they can continue to preach to the choir of their district and stay in office.  Looking at an actual map of California state legislative districts looks like someone threw spaghetti against a picture of our state…it’s ridiculous.

On top of that is term limits.  This limits the amount of time a politician can stay in their legislative role.  Normally, you’d think a policy such as this would promote a healthy turnover of legislators which benefits the state by bringing in new people with new ideas all the time.  Well, when you have highly partisan districts, you get highly partisan representatives.  And when you given them term limits as well, you remove the need for them to ever feel like they want to build long standing relationships with legislators across the aisle.  In fact, every ideological hill looks good to die on!  There’s no personal need to compromise ever.

So, our current crazy legislative districts coupled with terms limits effectively gives us ideologically hell bent representatives with no personal inclination or professional need to compromise with their counter-parties in the government.

When you layer a super majority requirement to pass the budget on top of this crowd of folks fundamentally disinclined to compromise, you get no compromise and no smooth passing of the budget.

Every year, the budget is delayed and the state suffers a fiscal crisis.  The new person wanting to run for governor gets to blame that on the last governor….which as I’ve shown here has very little to do with the systemic problems that truly contribute to our state’s fiscal ineptitude.

So, is the new candidate for governor ignorant of our state’s management issues?  Or is the candidate aware, and just wants the sexy job of governor because it plays well to ego?

Anyone running for governor is either ignorant or an egomaniac.

Possibly more interestingly, that conclusion can be drawn from a series of negative premises regarding the legislature.