Can anyone govern California?
Has California become just too complicated to govern? Have the problems become so vast -- and the politics so bitter -- that state government can't get anything done?
In more polite and elegant language, those are essentially the issues raised by The Ti
mes' Evan Halper and Michael Rothfeld in an incisive look at the political problems facing the nation's most populous state. They quote Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger observing that California's chief executive wields only so much power and needs the cooperation of the Legislature.
"Look, I'm frustrated," the governor told reporters last week in Sacramento. "I'm sitting here and we have a system where we rely on the 120 legislators to make those decisions. I cannot make them stay here. I cannot lock them into the building. I don't have those kinds of powers. Believe me, I would do it otherwise." (Above, that's the governor in November, discussing state finances. Not surprisingly, the graph ends on a downward slope.)
Halper and Rothfeld also have sobering comments from Leon Panetta, a former California congressman and White House advisor who co-chairs California Forward, a bipartisan think tank focused on solving the state's problems. "For whatever reason, democracy is not working in Sacramento right now," he said. "I am convinced it can be fixed. But people have to make sacrifices" -- in politics and policy.
Some people, including those behind a blog called Three Californias, have even suggested that the state should be chopped up in three parts. Follow this link for the full analysis from Halper and Rothfeld.
-- Steve Padilla
Speaking of California, you don't need to be anywhere near there to register here to receive cellphone alerts on each new Ticket item. RSS feeds are also available here. And we're on Amazon's Kindle too.
Photo credit: Ken James / Bloomberg News
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
Subscribe to this Blog
