Editorials

After every election, writers interested in politics are strongly tempted to expound at great length on the deeper meaning of the results. I’m no exception to that pattern, but today I’d like to try to resist the temptation and instead touch on some of the shallower lessons which can be derived from national, state and local outcomes. (Bob Burnett, in these pages, has done a bang-up job of analyzing the national situation, by the way.) 

First,. I’d like to say Goodbye and Good Riddance to a number of annoying Blue Dog Democrats. These are the people who thought that Republican Lite was the way to get and hold seats in Congress, but in general they were defeated by Real Republicans or even Tea Partisans. It seems that voters at the moment, stressed as they are by the economic situation, are looking for passion, any kind of passion, in their elected representatives, and tepid Dems just don’t cut it. The Blue Dogs have had entirely too much influence in Congress, contributing to voters’ perception that Democrats are toothless tigers.  

At the moment the rump of the Dogs is taking the outrageous position that the way to win the hearts and minds of the American voters is to dump Nancy Pelosi. The logic of this position, supported in putatively impartial news stories on the front pages of supposedly objective publications like the New York Times, is baffling. . In terms of bloc voting, almost everyone except Old White Guys voted Democratic, but too many Democratic-leaning potential voters didn’t show up at the polls. Absent the drag on the message which the timid losing congresspersons caused, the Democrats might have a shot at renovating their image to motivate a wider variety of voters. 

As usual, California and New York are out ahead of the pack. Together they constitute a huge market, though because of the peculiarities of the way district and state lines are drawn they have less influence nationally than they should. The Republican candidates in both states were appalling: almost comic in New York, profoundly irritating in California. Meg Whitman came across as a Poor Little Rich Girl, a sympathetic figure for no one. Jerry Brown, after an extraordinarily prolonged adolescence, finally looked like the grownup in the race. Fiorina in the last analysis couldn’t disguise the fact that she was a failure as an executive and had nothing else to boast of.  

It’s hard not to think that the reason Kamala Harris ran behind the ticket is that while she’s well qualified to be the state’s chief prosecutor she couldn’t play one on TV. Steve Cooley is a burly white ex-cop; she’s an attractive younger African-American woman. That is to say, for the thousands of California voters who think street crime is the main threat to public safety, Cooley looks the part, never mind that corporate crime steals more from citizens and Harris is better equipped by intelligence and education to fight it.  

A perennial problem in all elections is the skill with which computer-aided politicians are able to carve out safe districts where incumbents almost always win. Jerry McNerney’s bizarre congressional district was supposed to be Republican. It’s remarkable that he won it in the last election, and it will be even more remarkable if he holds on to it. It will prove that it is possible to win over at least a few Republicans 

And then there’s the East Bay. My mathematically inclined friends have gotten a big bang out of the Oakland mayoral race, regardless of who eventually wins. The “anybody but…” strategy seems to have worked, or at least (as of this writing) come very close to working, for perhaps the first time since Ranked Choice Voting got a toehold in the United States. Having three very plausible mainstream candidates and a serious Green contender in Don Macleay made the difference.  

Which leaves Berkeley. My shade-tree mechanical analysis is that Berkeley these days is little more than a very comfortable bedroom community, the land of the free-range organic lotus eaters, which is why all the incumbents won handily. What’s not to like, for most hill dwellers especially? The center-city districts, Arreguin’s downtown and Worthington’s south of campus, have been stressed by development pressures, but both councilmembers assiduously respond to their constituents’ worries, even though the cozy rest-of-town could care less what happens downtown. 

Measure R won handily because its ballot argument consisted of the kind of purple prose that was formerly used to sell motherhood and apple pie (both of which are now less popular than they once were.) Readers with an active bullshit detector realized that it was bogus, but Berkeleyans tend to be True Believers, or they wouldn’t have ended up here. 

The specter of more Big Ugly Boxes crowding downtown affects few hill dwellers, who shop in El Cerrito, Emeryville or Walnut Creek. Few knew and even fewer cared that the so-called “Sierra Club” mailers they received were actually funded by big corporations like Sam Zell’s Equitable Residential, which stand to profit handsomely if their people can control downtown Berkeley planning and zoning. 

In my Local Government class in law school, the teacher made merry of city plans in general. She said that they were almost always ignored, especially in charter cities like Berkeley which are explicitly exempt from having to follow their own plans. Good-Government girl that I was in my youth, I was indignant at the cynicism of this analysis, but you know what? She was right.  

In the last 15 years or so, I’ve watched plan after plan, General Plan and Area Plans both, debated and adopted in Berkeley, and almost without exception they’ve subsequently been ignored by the city planning department, the zoning adjustment board and the city council. If Measure R’s “advice” should by some odd twist of fate result in the council’s adopting an actual Downtown Plan, the results will probably be the same. 

Fortunately, too, this particular “advisory” measure was 83.5% cotton candy, far from being a real downtown plan. If the Mayor’s machine tries to enact the last 16.5% (ostensibly binding under specific scenarios) as zoning ordinances, these can always be referended just as the council’s last downtown plan was, annoying and time-consuming though that process might be. There’s still a hardy band of watchdogs ready and willing to bark if the fox tries once again to rob the civic henhouse.  

Meanwhile, it might be time for someone to look into what’s up with the Sierra Club these days. Myself, I quit when David Brower did and have never rejoined, but they’ve done a number of good things even without David and me. But if you’re a member, you should perhaps be asking exactly how the Sierra Club got into bed with corporate interests, as they seem to have done in this election. Just sayin’.