Cal Voters Don't Want More Programs

Never mind about Cal-50, the special election that Republicans won in California last Tuesday. Look at what California Democrats voted down on the rest of the ballot, writes liberal pundit E.J. Dionne.

There were 500,000 more Democratic votes than Republicans in the election because the main event was a contested Democratic primary for Governor, and yet good solid liberal issues went down to defeat.

California voters voted against Rob Reiner’s universal pre-school initiative and even a library building initiative. What gives?

The wealthy rebelled against the big income tax increase -- the top rate would have gone from 9.3 percent to 11 percent -- and bankrolled the opposition. Private preschool providers worried that the public provision of preschool would threaten their businesses.

Yes. Let’s hear it for the private pre-school providers. What does rich Rob Reiner care about them? Small businesspeople making an honest living, yet Rob Reiner is going to pull them up by the roots and substitute a bureaucratic model. Real smart, Rob.

Progressives have a lot to think about. For one thing, there remains a deep skepticism about government spending, even for the best purposes. On the same day that the two propositions went down, voters in five California counties rejected sales tax increases, mostly to fund transportation projects. Attacks on tax and spend sound old and tired, but they still have force.

You know, I should hope so, after a century of surging government spending. The point is, E.J., that is it one thing to say that something is desirable, even necessary, and another thing to say that it should be provided by tax-supported bureaucracies. That is a complicated way of talking about “tax and spend,” but you would have to be an imbecile not to see that most government programs are not about the clients they serve but about the clients who get paid: the teachers in education, the bus drivers in mass transit, and the government workers who provide social services.

Why not think about how progressive ideals can be served without the cruelty and the injustice of government programs? That would be really progressive.

And it could be a big vote-winner.