Returning the public interest to center stage

Yes, Virginia, there is a Mandate

Striking like lightning, the voters have ended the self-absorbed,
left-wing, special interest politics of the Davis era. Now what?

by John Kurzweil

John Kurzweil is editor of California Political Review.

An article of unshakeable liberal faith states that the voters never really take sides against liberal ideas and policies. Almost immediately after October 7, contemplating the biggest political upheaval to hit California since Proposition 13, Senate Democrat Leader John Burton informed us that “Forty-eight percent of the vote is not a mandate ... I think he (Schwarzenegger) had a good, decisive victory. That and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee.” Some numbers for Mr. Burton to consider along with his 48 percent:

Mr. Schwarzenegger ran in a race with no primary, so, consequently shared the ballot with 134 other candidates.

Mr. Schwarzenegger received 200,000 more votes than Davis did in 2002.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, who shared a landslide 62 percent victory with state Senator Tom McClintock, went to great lengths during the campaign to assure voters that there was virtually nothing to choose between him and the senator on the broad, critical issues of taxes, spending, regulation, and the overall foolishness of trusting big government to run our lives for us.

Nearly four and half million Californians (55.4 percent) voted to do something no other majority has supported in state history: dump a sitting governor.

Exit polls found Governor Gray Davis holding an approval rating below 25 percent, lower than Nixon’s when he resigned, but still significantly ahead of the Legislature’s 19 percent job approval rating recorded in a July Field poll.

Cruz Bustamante, running as an out-and-out liberal (tax increases, drivers licenses for illegals, and so on), received third party levels of support in many heavily-populated counties, failed to break 40 percent even in Democrat stronghold L.A. County, and lost everywhere but the loony-left Bay Area. This is a mandate. The voters want an end to incompetent, ideologically-frenzied, and pay-to-play government. It is true, most of them probably would not specify exactly what they would like to see in its place, and, indeed, they should not. That is the job of political leaders: to identify exactly what is wrong and how to fix it. But the clear mandate of the voters is to restore the public interest as state government’s primary concern, which means putting the narrow personal, ideological, and spending lobby interests that dominated Sacramento under Davis back at least into second place. Borrowing a Heritage Foundation phrase employed at the outset of Reagan’s Presidency: Californians have given the new governor a Mandate for Leadership.

So, the question is not: is there a mandate? but, how should we serve it? Schwarzenegger outlined his broad conception of the state’s problems and their solution in a September 24 Wall Street Journal article titled “My Economics.” Writing that “the two people who have most profoundly impacted my thinking on economics are Milton Friedman and Adam Smith,” he summarized what he learned from them as a “lesson every political leader should never forget: that when the heavy fist of government becomes too overbearing and intrusive, it stifles the unlimited wealth creation process of a free people operating under a free enterprise system.” He then specifically promised (a) to “restructure our tax system” which he decried as “among the highest in the nation,” (b) to champion a “good spending limit,” (c) to “overhaul worker’s comp” and generally to reduce business’s regulatory burden, and (d) to de-centralize education.

This program is nothing more than a formula to achieve what voters said they wanted October 7: re- establishing the public interest ahead of politicians’ interests by placing reasonable limits on spending and taxation, after five years’ grossly irresponsible abuse of both, and saving jobs and the tax base by easing a regulatory regime that is driving business out and under, after five years of Democrats catering to special interest unions and trial lawyers at the public’s expense.

The new administration, already, as we see, under pressure from the left to forget the mandate, deserves both moral support and the benefit of many minds working on the details of how to do this job well. The several articles that follow begin the discussion and debate, the comparison and contrast of ideas, that will flesh out the broad program the voters have demanded.

Because the new governor proclaims it his own inspiration, we begin with an excerpt showing the philosophical and logical foundation of the Schwarzenegger reform from Milton and Rose D. Friedman’s landmark 1980 book, Free to Choose.