A Green Perspective: Why I’m Voting "No" on the Recall but "Yes" on Future Reform

By Mike Feinstein
Santa Monica City Council member

I firmly believe in the institutions of Initiative, Referenda and Recall.

These institutions -- however imperfect and in need of improvement -- provide an important check-and-balance in our democracy, offering a direct voice to many who would otherwise go unheard.

Here in Santa Monica, residents have successfully used the initiative process to limit the proliferation of luxury hotels on the beach, and to prevent a giant commercial office complex at the Santa Monica airport. Through use of the referendum process, we’ve questioned inappropriate development for our Civic Center.

But on October 7th -- despite my general support of the recall concept --, I will be voting an emphatic “NO” in the California gubernatorial recall election. Why?

I share reasons with many other Santa Monicans who are voting ‘no’ -- that the recall process has been hijacked for partisan purposes and that the leading replacement candidates are underwhelming at best, to put it mildly.

If the recall were only to be held in Santa Monica, those two reasons would be enough to sink it. But the election is being held statewide, and we need to understand why so many people are supporting it. If we don’t, then we will miss the larger dynamic of what is going on around us, and miss an opportunity to improve our democracy as a result.

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To all but the least sophisticated voter, the recall is about far more than just ‘punishing’ Gray Davis for being Gray Davis -- a person California voters have elected four times to statewide office (Governor twice, Lt. Governor and Controller). If it were only about Gray Davis, maybe we should just recall those voters, instead of dragging our state through this rudderless and costly exercise.

Or perhaps just maybe, rather than blaming the voters, we should fix our deeply flawed electoral system, which imposes the mediocrity of institutionalized duopoly upon our state. Oops! Most Democrats and Republicans don’t’ want us to talk about that. But we need to -- just a little bit later. For now, let’s focus on the recall.

The recall -- in addition to being a referendum on the Governor’s performance -- is also about whether we Californians will seize this extraordinary opportunity to truly rethink the direction of our state.

Some people argue that the recall provisions of the California State Constitution should be reserved only for cases of criminality, or other kinds of malfeasance in office. While I embrace these as reasons for holding a recall election, I don’t believe those are the only reasons to do so.

There are also rare, extraordinary situations where we have to empower ourselves, as a society, to be able to make needed change -- if/when our state’s existing political structure is incapable of and/or unwilling to deliver it.

Are we in such a situation? I believe so. Despite the fact that the recall has been hijacked by partisan forces, it is also true that our state’s financial and electoral systems are deeply flawed and in need of reform. Unfortunately, too few of our state-level representatives have been willing to confront these structural deficiencies head on.

Has the recall provided a solution in their place?

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The 2003 California Gubernatorial recall election has been a historic opportunity for our state to rethink its vision. To the extent that we can judge its success by what we are hearing out of the leading replacement candidates, the recall has utterly failed California in a most fundamental sense. Agreement has not been achieved, in the least, on innovative, transformative solutions to our state’s most pressing problems.

Without evidence of agreement on a clear plan to improve our state, I am not ready to take the radical step of replacing the head of government in mid-term, in the fifth largest economy of the world, let alone instigating personnel changes to the more than 1,000 administrative, judicial and advisory positions that the Governor appoints.

On the topic of the state’s finances, the leading Republican candidates have offered little more than rehashed, trickle-down Reaganomics. This tried and failed approach has negatively impacted the California economy over the last 20+ years under Deukmeijan/Wilson/Davis to predictable effect. We’ve seen a shortage of living wage jobs and a deteriorating environment on one hand. On the other, we have an increasing tax burden on the middle-class and poor, while the wealthiest individuals and corporations pay less and less.

Faced with the internal contradictions of their approach, the Republican candidates have answered that more privatization and deregulation will be a magic bullet for all the public services they can’t fund (or won’t admit that they would prefer to cut.)

This lack of imagination should’ve opened an enormous political door for the Democrats. But instead, they’ve fiddled while Rome burns. Democratic Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante has consistently missed historic, populist opportunities to advocate a fair reform of property, income and corporate taxes, let alone promoting ecological and affordable land use patterns that would reduce the cost of doing business in the state.

Instead, Bustamante has seemed content to nibble around the edges with proposed increased sin taxes, along with an occasional mention of the need for more affordable housing, although he’s been silent on how he’d achieve it. For his part, Governor Davis has been AWOL in this debate.

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If a recall election is justified in rare, extraordinary circumstances, where the people have organized to ‘take back’ their government from unwilling/unable public servants, has this recall passed the test? No.

The 2003 recall process fails on this account, because the recall is not a manifestation of a grassroots social movement for something. There is clearly a revolt against the Governor. But what is the recall for? The dislike of the Governor has rallied people together. But there is no shared perspective around which they have done so.

One of the reasons that I support the recall process in principle is that recalls are supposed to be voter-led -- not candidate-led -- processes. A truly grassroots recall process would’ve been generated by an existing social movement or movements with a clear legislative agenda. That movement or movement would’ve first gathered the qualifying petition signatures, and then generated popularly supported candidates coming out of those social movements.

Such grassroots-movement candidates -- at least in theory -- would have the political cache to enact the kind of transformational reform this state needs, because they would have been a reflection of the social movements that brought about the recall in the first place, and their election would’ve been a statewide validation of the vision of those social movements.

Instead, we’ve been hustled by very shrewd partisan political forces, into believing we are using the tools of democracy, when we are the ones being tooled.

“But wait a minute!” you say, “what about the 1.6+ million people that signed the recall petitions? What about the super-majority in the polls that say they disapprove of Governor Davis’ performance in office? Aren’t they evidence of a grassroots mass-movement for social change?”

There is clear, widespread dissatisfaction with state government in California, particularly with the performance of Governor Gray Davis. But saying that, we should not confuse the skillful, strategic exploitation of this popular dissent, with the existence of a true, mass movement organized around specific social change.

Unlike what well-known political scientist Alexander de Toqueville described as a country of "public citizens" in the mid-19th century, today’s United States is a withering democracy, with weakened and isolated social movements. We are increasingly spectators, not participants, in our destiny. Voting is not synonymous with democracy, and recalls are not synonymous with mass-movements. Both are only the last steps to a process that should be begin with ongoing engagement in the body politic by all of us.

In the absence of active social movements, the recall process has preceded backwards. Dissent may be coming bottom-up, but solutions are coming top-down. Absent a bona fide social movement for something, political players from both major parties offered the same approaches they always have, while the “Trojan horse” candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger intentionally has no identifiable program or platform, in order to exploit the overall aimlessness of the recall process itself.

The ultimate problem with the recall is that instead of being “led by the people”, it is the people being led -- in other words, politics as usual.

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Having called out the recall’s failings, the process does deserve credit for reflecting valid concerns about accountability in government. Among many Californians, there is a widespread perception that our state budget has been mismanaged, that budget deficits were disguised for re-election purposes in 2002 and that access to the Governor’s office has been on a ‘pay to play’ basis.

But given all of that, it is again not clear that the recall process has brought about any agreement on needed changes here either.

Regarding the role of big money in politics, the "special interests" funding the leading Republican and Democratic replacement candidates (as well as the "yes" and "no" on recall campaigns) are no different than those that have funded our previous governors. Gray Davis may be a poster child for abuse of the governor’s office, but the root of the problem is structural, and beyond personal.

There has been some interest in public financing of elections by Democrat Cruz Bustamante, owing to Green Party candidate Peter Camejo and independent Arianna Huffington raising this issue in the debates

But interest from just one of three major party contenders -- and the one who may not end up as Governor in any event -- is hardly enough to say the recall has succeeded and is therefore worth voting for.

Camejo and Huffington have also pushed a second needed reform -- Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV) for offices like Governor and Secretary of State. Instant Run-Off Voting (www.fairvote.org) would place power in the hands of voters, not the candidates, by allowing voters to rank their choices, freeing them from being held hostage by the "lesser-of-two-evils" dynamic that plagues our system today.

Again, Bustamante has shown some interest in this issue, which itself demonstrates the utility of Instant Run-Off (IRV) voting, as Bustamante has tried to take on the ideas of Camejo and Huffington supporters in order to gain their votes. This is a positive dynamic in campaigns that would occur naturally in IRV.

But again, interest by one candidate is hardly reason to declare the recall process a success.

More deeply lost in the debate is the negative role of the 2/3 voting requirement to pass a budget in the State Legislature. California is one of two or three states in the nation to have this threshold. Combined with our lowest in–the-nation per-capita representation, the 2/3 requirement gives a tyranny of the minority to a small number of legislators, to hold our entire state budget process hostage for their personal political agendas.

The recall process has generated no concrete movement to fix this problem. And this follows a gerrymandering of the legislative districts after the 2000 census by the Democrats and Republicans, that has only entrenched this negative dynamic further. Most state legislative seats are now uncompetitive. Therefore, each legislator has to go through even less compromise-building to get elected than ever before.

The fact that none of these real structural issues have been strongly embraced by the leading replacement candidates, is yet another indication that the recall has failed to deliver upon a needed, transformative vision for our state.

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Where do we go from here?

I personally did not sign the recall petitions and I am no fan of Governor Gray Davis. I didn’t vote for him in 2002 or 1998 when he ran for Governor, nor in 1994 when he ran for Lt. Governor. In all three cases, I voted for the best candidate -- the Green Party candidate.

But despite my lack of enthusiasm for the Governor, I am going to vote ‘no’ on the recall, because this is about far more than what kind of job Gray Davis has done in office.

Not only has the recall process failed to deliver a widely supported vision of where our state should be headed. But in its place, we are faced with an outright theft of our democracy, cloaked in populist rhetoric. This theft is being maneuvered by the same forces that were not only behind the Florida 2000 presidential coup, but also voting machine irregularities in Congressional elections in Georgia and Nebraska (by companies in league with the Bush Administration), where heavily-favored incumbents were inexplicably defeated, despite no prior indications from the polls.

Even the attempted recall in Venezuela is part of this phenomenon, with the Bush Administration behind that effort, after their 2001 attempted coup to remove President Chavez was thwarted by popular support.

Here in California, the Trojan Horse candidacy of Schwarzenegger, which claims to represent "the people," is backed by some of the worst elements of corporate America. Our state government is fighting to get back at least $9 billion of the money that was stolen from us by out-of-state energy companies. Schwarzengger takes his ‘advice’ from some of those same interests, including Enron’s own discredited former CEO Ken Lay.

After signing a landmark global warming legislation last year, our state is trying to become a global leader in renewable energy and ultimately to enter the hydrogen age. Hydrogen can either be produced with other clean, renewable sources of energy, or through destructive sources like nuclear and out-dated fossil fuels. Guess which side our would-be Governor Arnold is on?

Instead of voting "yes" on the recall and supporting this charade, the positive alternative is to vote "no" on October 7th, and then to vote "yes" next year on State Constitutional Amendment 14.

Written by State Senator John Vasconcellas and co-sponsored by our own State Senator Sheila Kuehl, SCA 14 would offer California residents a positive vision for fixing our broken democracy.

SCA 14 -- which has already been introduced into committee and will need a 2/3 vote of the legislature to put it on the ballot in time for the November 2004 elections -- includes:

* Instant run-off voting in statewide constitutional elections, to provide for more voter choice and to ensure majority winners.

* Public financing of campaigns, to lessen the effect of big money in politics.

* A binding "none of the above" option, so that voters are not forced between voting for who they don’t like and not voting at all.

* Moving the primary from March to later in the year, to make campaigns less expensive.

* Creating smaller state legislative districts to make them more representative and increasing the size of the legislature, to keep up with California’s population growth.

* Fixing term limits by changing the number of two-year terms a State Assembly member may serve from three to six; and change the number of four-year terms a State Senator may serve from two to three.

* Establish an independent redistricting commission, to take the gerrymandering of legislative districts for partisan purposes away from the politicians.

* Changing the enactment of the state budget from 2/3 to a majority vote.

* Establishing a commission to make budget recommendations to the legislature on long-term planning.

Gray Davis may deserve a lot of criticism for his job in office. But let’s not cut our nose off to spite our face. We can improve our democracy by passing real reform, rather than allowing ourselves to be sucker-punched into giving up what we already have.