Editorials

We’ve gotten a number of requests from readers that the Planet endorse ballot proposals and candidates in the upcoming election. Some of these, of course, came from candidates and proponents, but others were from sincere individuals who just wanted a little help in deciding how to vote. Our principal response to this request has been to expand our opinion section as much as we can, to let candidates and advocates speak for themselves. We think we’ve learned a lot by doing that, and we hope readers have too.  

On the other hand, it would be false naïveté to claim that none of us around here have made up our minds on some topics. We can tell you that the Executive Editor and the Publisher are sure about how they’re going to vote in most cases, and that we haven’t heard many contrary opinions around the newsroom.  

We’re voting for John Kerry for President. This might come as a surprise to some readers, but if so they haven’t been paying attention. We don’t take formal votes on editorial endorsements, but let’s just say that no one at the Planet has expressed as much as one word of support for Bush in our hearing. It wouldn’t surprise us, after the election, to hear some people say that they had cast protest votes for Peace and Freedom or Green Party candidates because they were sure Kerry was going to carry California. Who knows, we might even be tempted to do the same next week, but as of now we’re running scared. If Kerry wins, the work will have just begun. If he loses….but let’s not go there for now. Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. 

Barbara Boxer has a few things to answer for. We still haven’t forgotten her attack on San Francisco prosecutor Kamala Harris for not going for the death penalty in a prominent case. She’s way ahead in the polls, and it might be good if Boxer ran a bit behind Kerry (who opposes capital punishment) in Berkeley, so we’re looking for other anti-death penalty candidates for the Senate. Barbara Lee continues to make us all proud, and we’ll certainly vote for her. 

In local elections, we (the Publisher and I) are glad we don’t live in one of the council districts which have election contests this round. The vigor (some might say unseemly vigor) with which charges and counter-charges have been hurled in the Planet’s opinion pages is bracing, to say the least. Issues important to the city have surfaced in each race; no clear winner has yet emerged in most. Norine Smith gets our award for perseverance in her second attempt to galvanize complacent District 6, where most residents, elevated above the congestion, traffic and crime problems which beset flatter districts, are much too comfortable with the status quo to want to change a thing, including their councilmember of 20 years duration. 

Ballot proposals? Like most of you, we still haven’t had time to finish reading our sample ballot. We do know that we don’t think gambling is any way to finance government, so we’ll vote no on both casino propositions, 68 and 70. We’ll vote for Prop. 63 as a small way of supplying the mental health services which have been terribly underfunded since Reagan was governor. We’ll vote for Prop. 66, even though it’s not a perfect way of fixing problems with the three strikes law. We’ll probably vote for Prop. 71, funding stem cell research, as a way of showing the flag for government support of reality-based science, even though cynics fear that it’s a ploy to fund the biotechnology industry, which in our book is not exactly the same as science.  

Local measures? A real can o’ worms. We can’t buy the arguments of the two new organizations which have interlocking directorates with the Grumpy Old Men of previous anti-tax efforts in Berkeley: Voting No on Everything Will Send Them A Message that Berkeley government needs to be more efficient. We’re not fooled by the city’s stratagem of using young people, librarians and paramedics as poster-children for tax increases, but voting no on any or all of the specific tax measures won’t solve the real problems of the Berkeley city administration. We fear that the inefficiencies (and downright stupidities) will just persist at a slightly reduced scale even if the added taxes are defeated, and that bureaucrats will gleefully axe useful programs in order to protect their own pay and benefits.  

This is especially true of the school tax Measure B (which even the Grumpies don’t officially oppose). A friend is a computer professional who used to teach an economical and effective computer class as a part-timer in a Berkeley school. He was replaced by a lot of expensive equipment and a couple of less well qualified full-time teachers who don’t know how to use it. But will he vote against Measure B? Of course not, because he knows, as do we, that a No on B vote won’t get to the heart of Berkeley Unified School District’s problems. Measure B has a core of dedicated watchdogs watching how its funds are used, and it only lasts for two years, so there’s really no excuse for voting against it. It needs a two-thirds vote.  

How about prostitution and drug dealing? Ballot initiatives on these topics are poorly drafted and would cause more problems than they solve. As far as prostitution is concerned, we have the old-fashioned idea that sex shouldn’t be work, but if it is, it should be subject to the same careful regulation of the workplace as any other form of paid labor. It’s one thing to decriminalize recreational sex, but sex as work should be much better regulated than Measure Q contemplates. Dispensing medicine, including marijuana, should also be done in controlled circumstances, for the protection of patients particularly, and putting dispensaries all over town, especially if they’re called clubs instead of clinics, won’t do anyone any good.  

Measure S, the Berkeley Tree Act, offers a useful and positive way to suggest to the city bureaucracy that they’re not doing everything right. True, it would add a couple of staffers to the budget, but they would be supervised by a citizen board which could make sure that their work actually contributed to the public good instead of just to their paychecks. In our experience (and you don’t even want to hear the stories) caring for Berkeley’s beleaguered urban forest is one area of government activity which could use a lot of improvement. Measure S offers a good place to start government reform, at a modest scale and for a realistic cost. Even the neo-Grumpies in BASTA (Berkeleyans Against Soaring Taxes) aren’t against it. We’re voting for it. 

That’s as far as we’ve gotten. Anything else, we haven’t decided yet. 

—Becky O’Malley 

Letters note: despite our best efforts, we weren’t able to squeeze them all in today. So we’ll run the rest of your letters which beat the Sunday deadline in Friday’s opinion section. No more election letters, please, but thanks for what you’ve sent already. 

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