Senate Redux: Cal’s Random Observations
The bear flag with my likeness nattily embossed on it, snapped crisply in the fading afternoon light on the west steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento. Sitting in the opulent offices of the President Pro-Tem of the California Senate, mission style desk and cabinets gleaming in the beautiful speckled light filtering in through redwood blinds open wide to the September California sun, in a meeting to discuss the future of the west coast's largest estuary, it appeared Lewis Carroll was writing the script - through the looking glass darkly, smeared in Vaseline, refined from the black gold they ripped from my flesh.
Outside the window a motley crowd of protesters was shouting approval at the rabble rousing speech of a rather dour looking State Senator from the People's Republic of Davis, the home of the University of California, Davis - a perfect utopia renowned for its brilliant white children, culture, art, bicycles, and environmental enlightenment. It was a lovely little berg open to all who could afford the limited and overpriced housing stock. The progressive thinkers had even thought to provide a million dollar tunnel to allow local toads to safely traverse the interstate - was it their fault the toads were too stupid to use it? Everyone was happy and educated and open to new ideas - so long as the ideas did not contradict the ideas of the educated elites who called it home.
The speech was rising to a thunderous crescendo as the crowd chanted, “Save the Delta.” Their ire was directed at the President of the Senate, a rather kind and gentle man sitting directly and intently across from me, as well as at the Senator Coop and I worked for. It seems these two “enemies of the people” had “sold out” the City of Sacramento and the remaining 5 indigenous fish that resided in the Sacramento Delta, 30 miles south of where we were sitting in the state capitol, according to the ragtag band of protesters below.
The scene was surreal. But making sausage is not pretty and the President Pro-Tem pressed on, seemingly oblivious to the shouts coming from just outside the west portico. A bill that purported to begin a process to save the very delta these protesters were so incensed about was moving to a vote on the Senate floor and the meeting we were attending was to count votes. The Senate Leader, persuasive, smart, impassioned, was telling Senator Chupacabra, the bill’s author that the votes were there. That the good Senator from Davis and the Delta, the very speaker outside, would be with us. Chupacabra looked surprised but remained silent as did chief consultant Cooper, who had laboriously written draft after draft and negotiated every comma and semicolon over the previous 4 years.
Coop and I were clearly behind the curve, though hearing the impassioned pleas screamed from just outside to kill the legislation - shouted from the top of her lungs from a Senator whose vote the Pro-Tem was counting on, did leave one with a sense of unease!
Why was I here? The Sacramento San Joaquin Delta - the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas was dying. A marvel of complexity, an inland oasis where two mighty rivers met before passing to the great Pacific through San Francisco Bay - a unique ecosystem created in geologic time had been brought to the brink of extinction a mere 150 years after Colonel Fremont and his Bear Flag revolt had joined California to the great American republic.
6 years ago, disgusted with the vitriol and partisan gridlock and the horrific specter of a long war to protect oil supplies, I had ditched my various animal spirits in my namesake state and moved to the Rogue River Valley in southern Oregon. I had taken up residence on the lovely Rogue to escape the politics of the time. In the White House, in their capital, in that dying imperial swamp, the District of Columbia, said to have all the sophistication of a southern city and the charm of a northern one, the slow witted scion of a political dynasty had won a sham election and taken up residence in the people's house, surrounded by chickenhawks reveling in chest thumping vacuous patriotism, giving just due to the aphorism, "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
War in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, threatened wars with North Korea and Iran. And led by an oily malodorous bunch that managed to avoid service in VietNam when their names were called but loved sending others’ children off to glory in Mesopotamia. Ok. Ok. Montgomery Alabama was kept safe from communist guerillas while George W Bush sat out Viet Nam in the Alabama National Guard. And W, a lazy lapdog to those who staked his run, brought in Voldemort and Rummy, Candy, and Wolfie, the corporate rapiers from Halliburton and Blackwater to run their little nation building enterprise. I needed relief!
6 years ago, when I decided on that fateful day on the Rogue that it would be a worthy experiment for God, country, Madison and Jefferson's legacy, and a few laughs, to accompany Coop back to Sacramento, to work once more in the belly of the beast, that is, a modern legislature, it never occurred to me, when I jumped to the body of that aging, bearded oarsman exactly how far off the rails Jefferson and Madison's experiment in representative democracy had actually gone. The beta test in modern governing started when I returned to Sacramento.
A somewhat sleepy river town located in California's great central valley, Sacramento had come a long way from the cowtown of 1990s parodies. While derisively mocked by the elites in the People's Republic of San Francisco and dismissed as unfashionable and backward in the City of Angels, Sacramento, while decidedly provincial and on its worst days attitudinally more akin to the oil town of Bakersfield than the beautiful hipsters of Yerba Buena under the Golden Gate, it was home to the government of the 5th or 6th (depending on how much cheese the French sold in any particular week) largest economy in the world, and at least in some of its in-town neighborhoods was developing a certain sophistication and panache that was increasingly hard to deny.
So that is where I disembarked on my return from Oregon's beautiful Rogue River Valley. It was the beginning of one more deep dive into modern democracy.
It was a place where nothing taught in high school civics class governed, and where one member, upon quitting suggested they simply paint the dome red, because inside, under that beautiful 19th century cupola, the citizens of the state were clearly being fucked for money. While I came to believe that might be slightly inaccurate - at least in straight up prostitution the john came and there was some pleasure involved, it did occur to me that the “members,” as the legislators were called (I know, I know, but calling them dicks just seems so juvenile), could at least help public awareness by identifying for the public their sources of campaign dollars BEFORE elections were held. My host, between jobs after his previous employer had been unceremoniously tossed from the legislature due to a unique modern wrinkle called "term limits," had an interview upon our return with a spanking new Senator who had just won election to the Senate and would be taking his seat in a month.
Water is for drinking and whiskey...oh never mind. In the west water flows uphill - towards money, or so the rumor goes. Cooper’s boss, Senator Jack "Pomp" Chupacabra, had just been elected to the California State Senate. One of the smarter, if supercilious members of the Senate, Jack was an iconoclast among run of the mill pols.
He not only represented the masters of the universe in Silicon Valley, he had actually lived and gone to school in the district he now represented, having grown up the child of a single mother in the projects of East Palo Alto, not to be confused with, but just a stones throw across a highway 101 overpass from tony Palo Alto.
EPA, as it is euphemistically known, is a fascinating little "community" in its own right. An African American enclave, originally named Rancho de las Pulgas (or Flea Ranch) by Spanish settlers, for a while in the 90s the murder capital of the US, it exists wedged between the elite and exclusive community of Leland Stanford University on one side and high tech revenue producing real estate along San Francisco Bay anchored by Sun Microsystems and other corporate campuses on the other.
For most of its history, East Palo Alto was part of unincorporated San Mateo County. As such, it did not have an official boundary until it incorporated in 1983, most notably not including any of the bay-front properties. In other words, in the middle of all this fantastic wealth lies a tiny city where some streets remained unpaved, flood gutters are non-existent, and poverty is the norm. Did I mention that it is primarily African American with a few Mexican immigrants thrown in? Until recently, the main commercial drag was known as Whiskey Gulch, populated by pawn brokers, low end bodegas selling lottery tickets, cheap whiskey, 37 varieties of red hot Cheetos, and several low rent gang infested bars.
In many ways EPA stands as a lesson on wealth, race, and power in California. The original inhabitants were Ohlone / Costanoan Native Americans. Spanish ranchers took over, followed by Caucasian speculators and settlers. For a time Chinese laborers were prevalent. Japanese and Italian immigrant truck farmers producing flowers and fresh produce for nearby San Francisco followed in the 20th century. East Palo Alto later became the largest African American community on the peninsula. And therein as they say, lies the rest of the story.
African American migrants first arrived in East Palo Alto during World War II. Most of these Southern migrants found jobs in the shipyards and munitions factories in the east bay, but because of pervasive racism in Oakland, combined with restrictive housing covenants, needed to find homes elsewhere. As these black migrants came for work, there was an opportunity to find lives in EPA when good old American ingenuity combined with legal racism handed local real estate professionals a golden opportunity.
The Japanese farmers who owned much of the land had been interned and their property confiscated as fears of the yellow peril took on near hysterical levels with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Local real estate agents were all too happy to sell the confiscated land to the new migrants, minus services and a tax base. And thus, Senator Chupacabra began his lengthy career as a rare white resident in a largely black and poverty stricken neighborhood from where he rose to be a member of the school board, mayor, County Supervisor, Assembly-member, and now, one of 40 "esteemed" members of the State Senate.
Pomp however was not overwhelmingly popular among his colleagues. As an Assembly-member he came across as arrogant (graduate degrees from Stanford and Berkeley can lead one to speaking in big complicated phrases like “fiscalization of land use” and “budget stabilization”, not well understood by 70 of the 80 members of the people's house. As an Assembly-member he regularly introduced legislation that attempted to actually solve public policy problems, both characteristics not likely to lead to winning a popularity contest among the party hacks, dim bulbs, and blatantly corrupt members of the State Assembly with whom he served for 4 years.
A second problem was that Chupacabra had won his election against a heavily favored party regular by working effortlessly door to door, shaking hands, kissing babies, and actually holding sidewalk office hours where he met with real constituents and listened to their concerns. Certainly not a recipe leading to a hearty welcome to the State Senate where glad handing, back slapping, and minimal boat rocking were de rigueur. As a result, Chupacabra was "awarded" the least desirable office space in the Senate. A closet sized office previously inhabited by a discredited wing nut Republican Senator from Bakersfield voted "least intelligent Senator" by the capitol community and infamous for inadvertently giving a speech at a KKK rally which he thought was simply an all white costume party complete with resplendent Christian symbolism in the guise of a burning cross.
When Cooper interviewed for the job, he had just left a position working for a Governor who had been recalled in a special election following a self-inflicted energy crisis in which rolling blackouts became a new thing in California. Cooper, who wanted to return to the Senate, had carefully researched newly elected members and upon a call from Senator Chupacabra's chief of staff had come to sit for an interview. He had a long history in left wing politics going back to his earliest days as an attorney representing radical black activists in San Francisco and toxic exposure litigants in Georgia.
Coop was highly skeptical of Pomp Chupacabra, a member of the so-called Mod caucus of Democrats, whose primary function, best as Coop could figure, was to pimp out to the highest bidder while remaining within the Democratic Party. The Mods stayed “loyal” to the Democratic party mainly because, in the sclerotic two party system, running as a Republican in the urban counties in California, where the overwhelming majority of Californians live, was about as popular as Macolm X at a Klan rally, and a recipe for political extinction for any ambitious pol.
Pomp certainly fit the image of a mod Democrat representing a business constituency. A rotund balding middle aged white guy, with black plastic eyeglasses, dressed in a baggy navy suit, rumpled white button down oxford shirt, a nondescript red tie, and brown wingtips he peered out from behind his prison authority issued "members" desk in his tiny office and surprisingly opened with a hard pitch as to why Coop, well known environmental lawyer and left-wing agitator, should come to work for him. He claimed he wanted to actually accomplish things - REALLY!. If Zak studied his record (which he had), he would discover that the conservative button-down image was a carefully tended ruse. That behind the nerdy glasses was the heart of a rebel who never forgot his hand to mouth upbringing and fervently believed that through education and proper govt programs his benighted hometown and all the other down at the heels hoods, barrios, and rural poverty sumps in the golden state could be provided the hope and resources to allow residents to live the California dream. He closed the deal when he said he fully understood that most of the third house govt relations reps plying the halls of the capitol in Sacramento "would betray their own mothers for a new corporate client and 1% increased market share."
Cooper, long-divorced, but with two children from two different moms, somewhat the norm in the capitol, as I was to discover, went home to his leafy in-town Thrifty 50s neighborhood a few blocks from the Fab 40s home made famous by Nancy Reagan in an earlier era, to celebrate and prepare for his new position. Arriving at 7AM the next morning we found the Senator already hard at work. We were to shortly discover that 7am till 10 at night were Senator Chupacabra's normal work hours Monday to Thursday. Unlike most of his colleagues, Senator Jack had not moved his life to Sacramento. He eschewed the fundraisers and social life to the greatest degree possible and maintained his permanent residence with his lovely well connected political wife, Maria at home in the district. In Sacramento, he rented a modest studio apartment, walking distance from the capitol, furnished with a cot, a toothbrush, and 2 clean identical blue suits. Nothing more.
About 15 minutes after Cooper sat down with just about enough time to unpack a single box, open a family photo, and gather a few office supplies the Senator summoned Zak and Malcolm, the two recently hired senior staff into his office. First off, he asked Cooper, "based on your long experience in this business, what advice would you give a new Senator?" Coop pondered the question carefully, and finally said, "do not fall in love with your own bills. Often the best solution is not reached with legislation. Understand how power is actually exercised, and do this by forgetting everything you learned in your American civics lessons." Malcolm followed up by stating, "while Senate rules allow you to introduce 30 bills a year, DO NOT fall into that trap. There are 120 members of the legislature. Multiplied by 30 that is 3600 hundred new bills each two year cycle! Limit yourself to several important subjects and stick with them. Introduce no more than 5 bills each year!"
The Senator peered owlishly from behind his nerdy black rimmed glasses, designed almost perfectly to highlight his rotund fleshy face, and vigorously rejected the advice. "If I do not love my own bills, who will?” he peevishly replied. Ignoring our admonition that "you are a Senator, and there is much more to the job than introducing new largely unneeded legislation," Chupacabra retorted, "I am a legislator and I will legislate!" This was a statement we would all live to both appreciate and rue.
Having summarily rejected this advice he leaned far back in his chair and tore open a sleeve of girl scout thin mint cookies, a snack we would learn could serve equally as breakfast, lunch or as a midnight repast. "What are your primary public policy issues that concern you?" he asked Zach. Zach, who had stood to leave, stopped, looked quizzically at his new boss, and answered, "there are two at the top of my list. First, I would like to find a way to pay to clean-up the toxic legacy left behind mostly in poor and minority neighborhoods, from our industrial past, and second, and this is my passion, I want to end California's water wars! People have been fighting over the finite supply of water since the padres built the first aqueduct at Mission Santa Barbara to quench their thirsty citrus and grapes 300 years ago and for the future of this state, we must end the perpetual squabbling that has paralyzed this legislature as well as the public."
The Senator thought about this a moment, popped another cookie into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and stared out the small window towards the parched brown grass of capitol park and beyond at the bone dry trout pond on the east lawn, drained of fish, and awaiting what all concerned hoped would be the cool rejuvenating fall rains, as Californians endured the 5th consecutive year of drought, and answered emphatically, " I don't do water! Nothing EVER gets resolved. The many interests from agriculture to cities to environmentalists have zero interest in negotiated solutions. They prefer trench warfare in what they view as a zero sum, existential battle to the death! And I will not waste my time and your staff hours dreaming impossible dreams of reasonable compromise...Because that will not happen in my 8 years here! So forget it. Find another issue. I do not mind tilting at windmills if the windmill can be defeated, but if the windmill is protected by 200 lobbyists and really is a dragon, I draw the line. Do not waste my time and NEVER speak of water legislation again. Am I clear?
Coop settled in and began his reeducation into the legislature and the working of party politics in the new millennium. First off, was the dirty little secret of actual power within the majority party and how it functioned in practice. With the death by attrition of industrial labor unions in the 1970s, as manufacturing jobs moved offshore, this bedrock of support for Democrats from FDR through Lyndon Johnson dissipated, and combined with the culture wars fulminating since Vietnam and the civil rights movements, drove a further wedge into the heart of the old Roosevelt coalition. As a result, the Democratic party of the new millennium was increasingly and overly dependent on public employee unions for support. This created a nearly existential problem of governance for Democrats.
Under the old patronage model that existed from the 30s through the 70s, coincidentally the period of the greatest growth of the middle class in human history, the "customers" of the Democratic party were the recipients of govt services. Whether rural voters in eastern Tennessee gaining electricity for the first time through the Tennessee Valley Authority, retirees benefiting from Social Security pensions, or farmers in California provided subsidized water, power, and flood control, the beneficiaries of govt service voted reliably Democrat.
That changed in the 1980s. Private unions lost leverage. Strikes were impossible if factories could be moved to Mexico, China, the Philippines, or any other nation whose citizens were desperate for work - any work. Or a nominally communist govt could guarantee a compliant low wage supply of labor. According to this theory, the US and Soviet Union fought the cold war and China won! China was proving that the best govt for a capitalist production system could very well be a one party communist state. Who knew?
Facing this new reality the Democrats had a choice. Face a future in which they would be grossly outspent or find a new base of support. The new bulwark would be public employee unions, not private. Police unions, prison guards, firefighters, state workers and teachers would be the new constituents of the party. While this might seem an insignificant change the reality is much different in two critical ways. First, and somewhat invisible to the public is the fact that under the older model the "customers" of the party were recipients of govt services. Success was measured in the quality of services provided. In the modern version of the party where the customers are the people who DELIVER govt services, success is measured simply in a growing budget. Growing the budget means more employees which means more union dues leading to more power.
What is missing is the quality of the services provided. The second critical distinction is that in the private union model, despite its well-documented faults, negotiations were at arms length between employees represented by the union, and management. In the new reality, the public employee unions CHOOSE who sits across the table at negotiations. Their campaign cash elects the city council and mayors, county supervisors, Assembly and Senate members, and at the top, Governors, who they will negotiate with! The result of this hidden dance are fire captains and police lieutenants drawing 6 figure salaries and gold plated pensions, and prison guards compensated like lawyers and doctors. An unsustainable system on the verge of bankruptcy. A system that if played forward will lead to govt being nothing more than a pass-through of taxpayer dollars to public workers and the slashing of vital services to the very constituents democrats claim to support.
After one long day in committee, having been inundated by testimony from the shiny-shoed bottom feeding lobbyists representing tobacco companies, gun manufacturers, and the payday loan usury industry, he ruefully suggested to a Chamber of Commerce lobbyist that it would help, if lobbyists, like NASCAR drivers, wore logos on their jackets. The logos could be of various sizes and colors to help members identify corporate sponsorships as well as amounts donated. As such, it would be readily apparent, a great time saver, if govt relations vice-president Smith could be identified upon taking the witness stand, as representing Altria and Reynolds tobacco, Smith and Wesson, and Gambino Easy Money (interest starting at 400% per day), rather than having to force her to divulge this important information. A larger red logo would indicate dollar donations to Republicans and a blue one to Democrats! On a separate occasion, Jack volunteered that applying the NASCAR dress code to members as well as lobbyists might be a worthwhile objective!