May 19 2009

Jarvis & Reagan are Dead

The demise of California’s Republican Party is nearly complete.
by Clint Reilly

The ghosts of Ronald Reagan and Howard Jarvis are all that’s left of a dying Republican Party in California.

In 1984, I managed the initiative campaign that defeated Proposition 36, Howard Jarvis’s sequel to Proposition 13. Double-digit annual property tax increases had driven Jarvis’s citizen rebellion that blasted politicians out of the water with Prop 13’s passage in 1978.

Six years later, Jarvis wanted to put additional restrictions on government taxation and spending but the voters thought Prop 13 was enough.

The best part of the campaign was Jarvis himself. A burly character with a deep, gravelly voice, Jarvis barreled ahead with a twinkle in his eye and a real gut passion for fundamental reform of state fiscal policy.

The anti-tax Republican legislators in Sacramento are what remain of Howard’s movement that began to die in that Prop 36 campaign in 1984.

Like the dull descendants of a founding patriarch, they mouth slogans and recite numbers that don’t add up. They live off the remnants of a charismatic forebear’s accomplishments.

California’s anti-tax movement actually began when Ronald Reagan beat Pat Brown for the governorship in 1966.

Reagan’s permanent campaign against big government carried him from Sacramento to the White House and provided the intellectual grist for 25 years of Republican political dominance. Reagan’s popularity also rubbed off on a generation of statewide leaders.

Republicans were a statewide force during the 1980s and 1990s. Republican governors counterbalanced a Democratic legislature, and Californians even elected one Republican U.S. senator occasionally.

In 1994, I managed Kathleen Brown’s ill fated campaign for governor against Pete Wilson. The moderate Republican Wilson had been elected to the Senate in 1982 and served two terms before defeating Dianne Feinstein for governor in 1990.

At the time, Californians still believed that Republicans were closer to their views on crime, taxes, spending and economic growth. Brown’s liberal positions on the death penalty and immigration put her at odds with many moderate suburban Democrats.

But California’s Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the right. In 1992, Republicans had nominated a senatorial candidate so conservative that liberal congresswoman Barbara Boxer easily defeated him.

In 2002, another of my former clients, Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan – a popular moderate Republican from California’s biggest city who would probably have been elected – was defeated in the Republican primary by conservative newcomer Bill Simon. Of course, Simon was wiped out by Gray Davis in the November election.

Today, the demise of California’s Republican Party is nearly complete. Ronald Reagan’s anti-government ideology has been discredited by the massive meltdown of unregulated capitalism that was his credo. Washington Republicans have lost their mantra and are aimlessly wandering the halls like defrocked monks who have lost their spiritual master.

Here in California, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is really a Democrat. He cannot muster a single Republican vote for the new taxes that are necessary to bridge a pending $21 billion budget gap that will occur when statewide fiscal initiatives almost certainly lose.

For the past decade, California’s Republican legislators have failed to engage in solving the real problems of America’s largest state: education, corporate regulation, environmental protection, immigration reform, revenue generation, economic growth, renewing infrastructure, and building a new transportation grid.

The great Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn once said, “Any jackass can tear down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

The Republicans in Sacramento are jackasses. The fumes of Reagan and Jarvis have been exhausted.