By Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor 2/21/09
California’s plight and its tendency to be a leading indicator of the national direction has a lot of people worried.
Wall Street Journal Editorial Writer David Kaminski has a fine piece today about how California became like France – too much spending, too many taxes, and insufficient political will to address the problems. The lingering inference to be drawn from the piece is that as a nation, we may be headed to the same kind of collapse.
Kaminski writes: “Some Democrats and Republicans privately say the best option may be failure. The rough scenario is fiscal insolvency, followed perhaps by federal receivership. No precedent or legal avenue exists for a state to reorganize its affairs under a form of Chapter 11 protection, but that striking suggestion sounds better by the day.”
So consider this – what reasonable person would want to run such a basket-case state? The election is now about 20 months away and you’d think they’d have to see who draws the short straw to pick a governor. It was one thing when Der Governator, the porno star, Gary Coleman, and everybody else were running to follow the just-recalled Gray Davis. But now it’s clear that decades of fiscal mismanagement and misplaced priorities will make the next governorship about salvage and not salvation.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome, Attorney General Jerry Brown, and Rep. Loretta Sanchez are all potential Democratic nominees. LA Mayor Antonio Villariagrosa is also expected to join the fray. None of these choices would be a significant departure from the Democratic mainstream.
Among the Republicans there’s McCain pal and former eBay Boss Meg Whitman and former congressman and state finance director Tom Campbell. Both are big-brained, social liberals and fiscal conservatives. If either of them becomes the GOP nominee or governor, it could portend a shift toward a more libertarian Republican Party that favors Milton Freidman but doesn’t pay as much attention to James Dobson.
The current party wouldn’t allow that to work, but the question for non-Californian Republicans is if the country does slide into a California-style collapse, would they be willing to accept a Whitman (or a Romney) if it meant victory and a potential end to economic misery?
