The blame game is on; in fact, it’s reached the playoffs and fan
interest is at an all-time high. Advertisers are raking in the
revenues sponsoring the sport and a lucrative endorsement contract
has been signed by the leading team’s mascot, the wildly-popular,
ever-engaging Scapegoat.
The blame game is on; in fact, it’s reached the playoffs and fan interest is at an all-time high. Advertisers are raking in the revenues sponsoring the sport and a lucrative endorsement contract has been signed by the leading team’s mascot, the wildly-popular, ever-engaging Scapegoat.
It’s understandable: In the obtuse lexicon of high-level economists and deep political thinkers, “Things suck.” That means pretty much everything from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Persia – the economy, the jobs market, the environment, the stock market, the housing market, the Giants – and we need someone to pin it all on; it needs to be someone’s fault, and for ease in focusing our anger it should be a specific group so we can drive all the guilty ones into the same corral and start thinning the herd.
Centuries ago – not so long as the evolution of human nature goes – the argument ran, “The crops failed this year and Mortimer’s favorite cow died; therefore there must be a witch. Burn the witch.” In the 1930s the Nazis decided Germany’s troubles were assignable to a different group of folks. And so it goes.
This year many have decided the witches all belong to a coven called Career Politicians. A recent letter to the editor of the Big Paper in San Jose distilled the essence so well that I have to quote it: “Because of lifetime politicians like Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer, California has a bloated bureaucracy, the highest taxes of any state, crumbling infrastructure, a failed education system, employers fleeing the state, and the list goes on … their ineptitude has taken us to the brink of bankruptcy. It is clearly time to give career politicians the boot and bring some fresh ideas to the table.”
So well put, such a sweeping indictment, and yet, how many “career politicians” do we really have in California and are they really the ones who whacked Mortimer’s cow?
Well, there are the two aforementioned, although Barbara Boxer is technically in the Federal area of sorcery so her influence on state infrastructure, bureaucracy, taxes, and well, all the rest is somewhere between nominal and nonexistent. Jerry Brown? Well, he was Governor 30 years ago when we were all living on a different planet, and since then he’s been mayor of Oakland and Attorney General; neither of those offices have a measurable effect on the letter-writer’s List of Shame.
In California the lion’s share of political power rests with the Legislature, which if anyone is responsible for The List; those are the career politicians we must root out in order to get those fresh ideas percolating.
However, the species Careerus Lawmakerus was driven extinct by our strict term limits: three two-year terms in the Assembly, two four-year terms in the Senate, and those are lifetime limits – no taking a break and then coming back. Consequently, by the time anybody gets halfway skilled at what is unavoidably a complicated job they’re back on the street. Oh, they can run for offices in other parts of the government, but those parts don’t control The List.
Ah, but there’s the Governorship; let’s get some fresh ideas in the executive branch. What we need is somebody with a pile of money big enough to be independent of the “special interests;” someone with no political experience whatsoever, to insure freshness. Someone with a background in a rough-and-tumble business; someone who is by nature fiscally conservative but socially not quite so much. Someone who will run as a Republican on a platform vowing to fundamentally change the way California does its thing, someone not afraid to shake things up, indeed if necessary to (figuratively, of course) “blow up the government.” Someone who, unburdened by political baggage and backroom deals, is willing to flex their muscles and twist arms until they snap like twigs under a bulldozer. The very antithesis of a career politician, that’s what we need.
The foregoing, as some may have noticed, is a rather precise description of the Governor we have had for the past five years, and how successful has the Terminator been in bringing the Legislature and the List to their knees? With all his “I’m no politician” think-outside-the-box street cred how much better off is California than it was five years ago?
Career politicians? We outlawed ’em. Rich political newborn brimming with fresh ideas? Been there, done that; no joy.
We need a better witch to burn.
Despite being an award-winning columnist, Robert Mitchell doggedly remains the same eccentric attorney who has practiced general law in Morgan Hill for more than 30 years. Reach him at
r.****@ve*****.net
.
