Good LA Times column on what ails California:

Skelton wrote a column in the LA Times that I think pretty much sums up what is wrong with California... The problem isn't our governors, it is us...

Don't blame Schwarzenegger - latimes.com

I have been pleased what Schwarzenegger has tried to do as governor. He has taken his responsibilities very seriously. While I am normally pretty skeptical of anyone who campaigns as an outsider, overall I think he has really tried to approach his job in a serious and professional way. He hasn't accomplished much, but I think his heart has been in the right place. He has certainly had some missteps, but he learned from them. He has been making the best of a very bad situation. Every time he has tried to accomplish something significant, however, he has been stymied by hacks on either the left or the right. Given the circumstances, I find it hard to believe anyone else could do much better.

The state is broken in many ways. The accumulation of initiatives over the years have paralyzed state government, especially anything related to budget. The supermajority rule for budget related items is especially pernicious. Proposition 13 is silly. We need to go back to basics for budgeting, including spending and taxation, with a simple majority vote. If the party in control overreaches, voters can exercise their rights and throw the bums out at the next election. Until we fix the budgeting process, nobody is going to be able to govern California.

More generally, the initiative process has to be shut down, or at least tightened up. It has become a tool of anyone with money to spend who wants to bypass the legislature, whether on the left or the right. The most disgusting recent examples of abuse of the initiative process of course are the efforts by electrical utilities, oil and auto insurance companies to buy passage of initiatives that they tailored to suit their own needs.

The other problem is that the primary system now guarantees that in both parties, hacks and extremists are nominated for the general elections. And meanwhile on both sides, we have bored rich people who apparently have nothing better to do trying to buy office like gentry in 19th century England, spending their inheritance to buy seats in rotten boroughs. At least back then, the rich people distributed ale and whiskey to voters. Now all the money goes to consultants. Maybe we should allow vote buying as a means of wealth redistribution: people with too much money and not enough to do could squander their fortunes bidding for our votes. They already do, but because they can't buy votes directly, they throw their money away on political consultants, and we don't get any of that gravy.

Anyway, it is pretty clear that the state is dysfunctional. We could re-animate Abe Lincoln and he would probably try for a few months and then give up and tell us that reuniting the Union was easier. We could re-animate George Washington and he would give it a try and tell us that he would rather deal with the Continental Congress than with the voters of California. We would just have to hope that reanimating Lincoln or Washington wouldn't yield zombies who would run around infecting everyone.