That Empty Feeling on Political Front

We were sitting around at lunch, wondering about the peculiar emptiness of the political landscape in California. We were wondering if there was anyone to save us from the crowd of anesthetists currently maneuvering for the seats of power here, the Van de Kamps, the McCarthys, the Wilsons.

And there was no one. Someone mentioned Peter Ueberroth, a man apparently at sea again after the collapse of the Eastern Airlines deal. Ueberroth once considered making the run for governor, and maybe he would do so again. But the window of opportunity appears to have closed, and Ueberroth now would have to move mountains just to win the nomination.

Who knows about Ueberroth, anyway. Could the man who brought passion to the 1984 Olympics bring the same high pitch to the schools crisis, the transportation crisis, the smog crisis? Is there anyone left in California who could do that?

The other day Tom Hayden uttered a rare piece of truth about the current situation. He was discussing the apparent failure of the Democrats to generate any heat whatsoever in their attempt to re-take the governor’s office next year. “The Democratic race for governor is dead in the water,” he said. “It’s a consensus among a great many people but is just not being voiced. I think it’s now time to voice it. . . .”

Thanks, Tom, but it’s worse than that. We have just finished eight years with a Republican governor so devoid of vision or dreams that his two terms now seem to contain no discernible milestones. And we are about to choose his successor in an election that promises to be a true oddity, a contest for the leadership of the largest state in the nation where neither party can find a nominee it really wants.

In Los Angeles there’s a sadder situation still. Here you have a city transforming itself from a big cow town into an urban beast full of dangerous threat to its citizens. Yet Los Angeles is being led by a mayor as inscrutable as Buddha, who practices his leadership by cutting ribbons at high rises, who has remained unbeatable because no one with charm or wit or a compelling view of the future will rise to challenge him.

The bleak quality that has settled over California politics was evidenced by nothing so much as the 23% turnout in last month’s mayoral contest here, the lowest in the city’s history.

It was evidenced also by the excitement surrounding the return of Jerry Brown earlier this year. Here was an ex-governor running for the rough equivalent of dog catcher, and everyone was fascinated. Jerry Brown, even a re-tooled Jerry Brown, remained more interesting than anyone who has come after.

Just why politics has gone comatose here is unclear. There is one theory, advanced by some of the more discouraged political advisers, that fingers as the culprit the bushel basket of campaign regulations, disclosure requirements, and media-enforced puritanism of the ‘80s.

Believers in this notion say the behavior controls have forced out interesting candidates who would have emerged otherwise, and claim that most of our political heroes, from FDR to JFK, would have succumbed to the intense scrutiny of a contemporary campaign season.

Take, for example, the $1,000 campaign contribution limit now enforced in California. In the old days, the regulation grouchers say, a candidate with unusual ideas just might get bankrolled by a couple of left-wing or right-wing millionaires, enabling him to thumb his nose at his political enemies.

Now the $1,000 limit has forced candidates to beg for small donations from every interest group that comes within their desperate reach. They have been wimpified, the grouchers say, beholden to everyone and terrified of offending anyone.

The other theory is more diffuse and has to do with an old term being applied to the ‘80s. The term is normalcy. Not happy, not content, not even normal, but normalcy. The anesthetizing, nothing-happening, anxiety-filled normalcy of the ‘50s. The notion is we’ve got a case of it, and we got it bad.

You can see the parallels. There is no war, no depression, no social upheaval. Problems sure, but nothing that threatens to tear us apart. We are all waiting, like another generation waited in the ‘50s, for the next big thing to happen. And the politicians are waiting with us.

Normalcy may be a national condition but here in California, as usual, it’s accentuated. We have been spared the rust-belt dislocations, the farm state depression. California seems to drift along in its perpetual, mild boom.

We are left numbed by it, and bored by the leaders it has produced. A friend of mine calls it the era of methadone maintenance in California politics. And maybe there’s nothing to do but wait it out.