Opinion: In today’s pages: No on Props. 5, 6, 9 -- and on campaign stunts
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The editorial board gives the thumbs down today to three crime-related measures on the November ballot. And I’ll get to that, but first I wanted to welcome back a much-missed former colleague, Matt Welch, who offers a stinging Op-Ed on John McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign and return to Capitol Hill. Welch, now editor of a cranky, give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death magazine in D.C., wrote a book last year about McCain -- just in time for the Arizona senator’s political resurrection. Anyway, he sees something familiar in this week’s maneuvering by the Republican standard-bearer:
No wonder John McCain ‘suspended’ his presidential campaign Wednesday to focus in a bipartisan manner on a grave national crisis -- he’s been pulling the same stunt for nearly a decade now, boosting his poll ratings by pretending not to care about them.
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a lede. Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, columnist Joel Stein calls out for some good ol’ laissez-faire economics in response to the credit crisis:
Sure, like any American, when I see a photo on the Internet of an adorable little investment bank and find out it’s at risk of being put to sleep, I want to throw in $2,000 to $3,000 of my own money to adopt it. But instead of jacking up inflation, letting the dollar sink further and paying higher taxes so we can keep up cheap borrowing -- which is what this plan amounts to -- I think we need to let those who made bad loans get burned.
Now for the endorsements. Or rather, the dis-endorsements. The board argues that Prop. 5, like all too many ballot initiatives, would achieve the opposite of its stated intent (which, in this case, is to divert more drug addicts out of the prison system and into treatment):
If it passes, Californians would soon learn that they had swept away the state’s few successful diversion programs, inflicted chaos on the parole system, layered on a staggering new bureaucracy and set back the cause of modernizing drug treatment.
The board says Prop. 6, which would dedicate a large chunk of the state budget to anti-gang programs, is another pernicious and counter-productive attempt at ballot-box budgeting:
Simply clueless about where California is in 2008, this supposed anti-gang measure would add new spending mandates -- nearly $1 billion to start -- and would bring the state closer to insolvency with automatic annual increases pegged to inflation.
Finally, the board argues against changing the state constitution to give crime victims and their families more rights and influence, as Prop. 9 would do:
Civilized justice rejects vendetta and instead places retribution in the hands of the entire society. It may seem depersonalizing, but that’s a goal, not a defect, of our system.
The photo of John McCain striding out of a meeting in the Capitol yesterday is by Susan Walsh for the AP.