Chicago Tribune  - February 4, 2008


Campaign 2008

Campaign 2008 Trendsetter legacy fades in California
Politically, it 'no longer sets the stage'

By Jim Tankersley

 

os Angeles—There was a time in American politics when California was ... California.

It was the state that clinched Woodrow Wilson's re-election, nudging the nation toward world war and global power. It gave us environmentalism and the initiative petition; Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; Berkeley and Manson and The Doors; two movements in the 1960s — one counterculture, one countergovernment — that divided the country and set the course of two political parties for a generation.

Now it is a cash machine for candidates, a delegate trove and ... what?

Republican presidential hopefuls gathered at Reagan's ranch last week, then proceeded to shred their hero's hallowed coalition of social and fiscal conservatism. A concrete bunker and three bleached-blue letters on a crumbling pillar are all that remain of the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy celebrated a critical 1968 victory, then lay dying.

The last California politician to mount a serious presidential bid lost the 1992 primaries to the governor of Arkansas.

When that governor left the White House and Little Rock behind in 2001, he settled not here, the state where he sent his daughter to college and where he found comfort in the darkest days of his administration, but in New York.

'Where people play'

California remains a giant of culture and agriculture, the world's sixth largest economy, the land of iPods and IPOs. But politically, "California is a stage where people play," said Joel Kotkin, an author, professor and futurist who has spent 35 years writing on the state's politics. "It no longer sets the stage."

Memories of the California that was have echoed across the state as it reasserts its prominence in the most wide-open presidential race in a half-century. There has been Gipper nostalgia in Simi Valley and Kennedy channeling in East L.A.

But there has been something else too: a telegram from a more distant past, a hope of relief for a polarization-weary America.

It has showed in a resurgent California governor's embrace of a resurgent Arizona senator, in the name of working across party lines. It has showed along the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Parkway, across the street from the old Ambassador site, where Spanish-speaking families strolled past storefronts with Korean lettering. It showed in the rise of a moderate, Latino-heavy immigrant population and its embrace of the politics of problem-solving, a California ethic reborn.

The influx of Latinos — who embrace a less-partisan, anything-is-possible-under-the-American-Dream style of politics — has given California "a pluralistic political culture," said Harry Pachon, a University of Southern California professor. "There's been a move toward the center, and you don't hear as much extreme rhetoric."

Californians have always enjoyed a cutting-edge, big-personality politics. The Southern Pacific Railroad political machine gripped the state for decades straddling the 19th and early 20th Centuries, until progressives broke it. Along came the initiative, which allows voters to bypass the Legislature to make laws, and a ban on partisan designations for local offices.

Author Upton Sinclair nearly won the governorship on a socialist ticket in the 1930s. A decade later, a crime-fighting Republican attorney general who would one day author landmark court decisions won the first of his three terms as governor. In his 1942 campaign kick-off speech, Earl Warren addressed national security, education, fiscal discipline and war.

"None of these problems permits a solution through partisanship," he said, as recounted in Gladwin Hill's 1968 history "Dancing Bear."

In the booming 1960s, California fractured on party lines — and on social lines, class lines, racial lines. Nixon lost the governorship but won the presidency. Student protests turned campuses into cultural battlegrounds and gave birth to a generation of Democratic leaders. A backlash arose that Reagan, then the governor, harnessed on the road to his conservative "revolution" of 1980.

Those two movements — student counterculture and Reagan conservatism — still defined the parties in 1992, when former California Gov. Jerry Brown lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Bill Clinton. Over the next eight years, newcomers began to reshape California.

The Latino surge pushed the state to the left, politically. They tend toward fiscal liberalism but social conservatism, Pachon said, and prefer independent leaders. Their support factored heavily into the re-election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor who has scored his biggest political victories — on limiting carbon emissions, for example — by working with Democrats.

"The new California is a Mediterranean climate and a Mexican-American feel," said Tom Hayden, the 1960s student activist who served 18 years in state government, "I don't think it adds up to a vision, but I think Californians want somebody who will handle diversity in a graceful and efficient way."

Schwarzenegger's tent

The unofficial symbol of the Schwarzenegger administration is his "smoking tent" in a state capital courtyard, where the governor invites lawmakers to cut deals over cigars and Schnapps.

Last week he endorsed John McCain, who has a similar flair for bipartisan negotiations.

A new group of largely Republican-leaning young entrepreneurs, called Generation NeXt, is eschewing social issues and devoting itself — and a $1 million budget — to growth, education and security. "It's a new set of conservatives who are willing to confront issues that have previously been owned by liberals," said Michael Davidson, 27, CEO of the organization.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Barack Obama's stump speech seems to lift straight from the victory salute Robert Kennedy gave at the Ambassador on June 5, 1968, shortly before he was shot.

"I think we can end the divisions within the United States," Kennedy told the crowd. "... the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment of our society, whether it's between blacks and whites, the poor and the more affluent, between age groups or on the war. ... We can come together."

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