Alejandro Benes's blog

Well, for the record, I watched the Dodgers play their last game of the year and not the debate on Wednesday night. I see no real need to take in live what has pretty much become little more than political theater, if it rises even to that level. I will unavoidably read about it all that night on the web, the next day in the papers and hear about it ad nauseum on public radio. I know more about “Joe the Plumber” than even the Ohio tax collector wants to know.

I recognize the value of the debates. They are incomplete indicators of the composure and personalities of the candidates, but beyond that become events that compress information into relatively tiny, relatively incomprehensible portions to be consumed by citizens who, at their own peril, are too busy or incurious to find the information for themselves.    

The bigger issue surrounding debates is that they take on magnified importance as the political reporting establishment raises the volume of coverage and, as a result, magnifies the significance of the debates and turns them into – what? – boxing matches?  Such was the case in most of the day-after coverage and analysis in California’s big papers. More on that in a moment.

A few things strike me – and distract me -- as I try to write this column and watch playoff baseball and cruise the web and kind of talk back to both.

1.  Well, of course, you’re going to vote FOR Proposition 2 if all you see are cute golden retrievers and cows being tipped over and pushed by forklifts.  All I can say with any conviction is that happier cows produce happier beef.

2.  You have to love the juxtaposition of the piece by S. David Freeman in the San Francisco Chronicle titled, “Mother Nature demands Californians pass Prop. 7” and the ad from the Golden Nugget in Vegas offering, “Stay Two Nights, Get a $50 Gas Card.”  For the record, the Chronicle has editorialized in support of a “no” vote on 7. 

3.  No more toasters?  The bank inside my local grocery store now advertises that your deposits are “safe” as they are “insured” by the FDIC.  

4.  Not every argument needs to be made or should be made in the context of the presidential campaign.

5.  Never trust the polls.

6.  The Dodgers are in trouble.

OK, back to the column.

Back in the day – in fact it was a day in January of 1996 – my colleagues and I announced the release or our book titled, The Buying of the President.  The book examined the records of the declared and likely candidates for president that year and their relationships with what we called their “career patrons."

The effort was the first commercially published book by the Center for Public Integrity, of which I am a founding director and former managing director.  The focus of the center was and still is investigative journalism on government and ethics.

I got home late the other night. Another night of waiting to see what Congress and the Bush administration were going to do with the bailout. I tried to be quiet, but my son heard me and, as he rubbed his eyes open with his little fists, he asked, "What happened, daddy? Did you get the money?"

I took a breath.  I sighed.  I had to tell him the truth. 

"No, son, I did not get the money.  I'm sorry, buddy." 

So, let's recap. The week after the Field Poll shows that the California legislature has the lowest approval rating EVER -- even lower than Richard Nixon -- a budget gets passed. The governor, in the face of a recall threat by the powerful don't-call-me-prison-guards union talks tough and the cowardly legislature gives in. And everybody is blaming each other and the requirement to have a two-thirds majority to pass a budget. That about right? Can't get much worse than that.

Based on the answers given by 504 registered California voters to the most recent Field Poll, one could conclude that the entire political establishment in Sacramento should be pretty much dismantled and thrown away. One could, but there's not much reporting that is that, shall we say, radical.

The Field Poll website telling of the survey leads with:

You, like many citizens -- even those who are professional politicians, even those who are members of the two political parties that recently held national nominating conventions -- are to be forgiven for spending the last two weeks trying to figure out how the vice presidential selections of the presidential candidates (and the candidates themselves) qualify as (1) change or (2) experience. You should be forgiven for focusing on the national scene even if you did so just to escape having to pay attention to the ongoing melodrama that is the California budget stalemate.

I leave the state for a couple of weeks (no, I did not go to the convention) and the governor fails to keep the simplest of promises:  To do nothing.

Instead of keeping his word that he would not sign any legislation until the budget crisis was resolved, Schwarzenegger signed the high-speed rail bill, AB 3034, so that it could be put on the ballot in November.

"The high-speed rail legislation will replace a $10 billion bond measure on the November ballot with a revised version of the proposal that makes the bullet train system more appealing to voters statewide," explained the San Francisco Chronicle.

"In the middle is a sweet, tired town of roughly 35,000 people, three-quarters of them Latino and more than half considered low-income under county standards," writes Scott Gold in the Los Angeles Times of Aug. 22 in a story titled, "In Santa Paula, a white minority blames the poor for the town's problems."

"For several years," the article continues, "there has been a tide of sentiment that Santa Paula has missed out, that it has become a dumping ground of sagging roofs and 99-cent stores while neighbors like Moorpark and Camarillo have prospered. And some critics -- many of them members of the white minority -- have decided that the poor are the problem."

I'm actually going to defend Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week. News reports that "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger missed co-hosting an environmental summit at Lake Tahoe on Saturday to have a knee injury examined by a doctor in Los Angeles" seem to be implying that the governor was kinda looking for a reason to get out of the conference. What  a knee-jerk reaction. 

I don't believe the governor would miss such an important conference dedicated to saving Lake Tahoe and environs. I think Schwarzenegger, a megastar and inaction hero as governor, was being thoughtful by staying away and letting the likes of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-San Francisco) and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), get a little of the spotlight.