I finally finished reading Michael Lewis’s long piece in Vanity Fair. It’s good writing, with fascinating information, and quite a bit of style. It’s definitely worth the half-hour it takes to read. I learned, among other things, that the two most common causes of death for firefighters are heart attacks and truck crashes. I thought it would have been collapsing buildings or smoke inhalation or burns. Here’s another interesting bit. The author conducted at least part of his interview with former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger while riding bikes at breakneck speed around Venice Beach.
If there had not been a popular movement to remove sitting governor Gray Davis and the chance to run for governor without having to endure a party primary, he never would have bothered. “The recall happens and people are asking me, ‘What are you going to do?’ ” he says, dodging vagrants and joggers along the beach bike path. “I thought about it but decided I wasn’t going to do it. I told Maria I wasn’t running. I told everyone I wasn’t running. I wasn’t running.” Then, in the middle of the recall madness, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opened. As the movie’s leading machine, he was expected to appear on The Tonight Show to promote it. En route he experienced a familiar impulse—the impulse to do something out of the ordinary. “I just thought, This will freak everyone out,” he says. “It’ll be so funny. I’ll announce that I am running. I told Leno I was running. And two months later I was governor.” He looks over at me, pedaling as fast as I can to keep up with him, and laughs. “What the fuck is that? ”
Yes. What the fuck is that? What kind of country are we living in where this is how the biggest state in the union selects its governor?
I have one more part I want to share because it pertains to the current governor of California and to our president.
A compelling book called California Crackup describes this problem more generally. It was written by a pair of journalists and nonpartisan think-tank scholars, Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, and they explain, among other things, why Arnold Schwarzenegger’s experience as governor was going to be unlike any other experience in his career: he was never going to win. California had organized itself, not accidentally, into highly partisan legislative districts. It elected highly partisan people to office and then required these people to reach a two-thirds majority to enact any new tax or meddle with big spending decisions. On the off chance that they found some common ground, it could be pulled out from under them by voters through the initiative process. Throw in term limits—no elected official now serves in California government long enough to fully understand it—and you have a recipe for generating maximum contempt for elected officials. Politicians are elected to get things done and are prevented by the system from doing it, leading the people to grow even more disgusted with them. “The vicious cycle of contempt,” as Mark Paul calls it. California state government was designed mainly to maximize the likelihood that voters will continue to despise the people they elect.
Again, absent the term limits and initiative problems, and with the two-thirds problem replaced by the filibuster, doesn’t this sound like what’s happening to the federal government?
