Quoting Chapter and Verse

The “bible” says that California’s establishment has sinned against the people. Sinned with racial preferences, illegal-immigrant services, bilingual education and other evils that tend to divide rather than unite.

These wrongs are recognized by most voters, the “bible” observes, even if they’re not by the establishment--the news media, universities, big corporations and liberal politicians.

This particular holy book is the Almanac of American Politics. For 26 years, it has been not just an almanac, but the bible of national politics, providing gospel for junkies--journalists, strategists, politicians, pundits.

The dirty little secret is that a lot of basic political reporting comes straight out of this nonpartisan reference book, which is updated each election cycle. It is crammed with data--votes by states and districts and by members of Congress--and with thorough profiles of politicians and the locales they represent. It’s all there, a close-up look at every congressional district, every state.

The 1998 edition has just been published--all 1,632 pages--and, being a junkie, I was mildly curious to see what it had to say about my home state. Brief bedtime reading before dozing off, I thought. Wrong. This was an eye opener.

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“California is in a sour mood,” the new bible tells us, partly blaming the recent recession. Tough times, it adds, also revealed “disturbing signs that California’s children were not being prepared to take their place in a sophisticated economy . . . and that the newest immigrant groups were living cordoned off from the larger society. . . .

“Unfortunately, California’s leaders abandoned the process of assimilation which spread universal American values and taught useful skills. . . .

“As affluent families withdrew their children into private schools, conservative elites were content to let school funding drop and liberal elites were content to turn over the education system to teachers unions. ‘Multicultural’ policies slotted newcomers into quota-fed monocultural enclaves in schools, universities and big corporations. Public schools . . . held students in ‘bilingual’ Spanish-speaking programs long past the age when it is easiest to learn English. . . .

“Civil liberties-minded legislators hobbled the criminal justice system, leaving teenage gangs to rule large swaths of central cities.

“Many of the newcomers prospered anyway. Nothing could keep the Asians down, not even the racial quotas which limited rather than increased their places at select universities. And many Latinos struggled successfully to move . . . up into the working middle class, ignoring the spoils-demanding politicians who claimed to speak in their name. . . .

“But even as California started growing again, the divisions fostered by government quota policies seemed to widen. . . . The separate mind-set symbolized by [black] reactions to [O.J.] Simpson was less the result of overt racism by whites than of the separateness of universities, government employers and the corporate sector which is the proximate result of racial quotas: the natural reaction of those who are stigmatized as inferior and needing help to turn aside from the larger society.

“As for Latinos and Asians . . . they have been poorly served by the civil rights paradigm which sees the central problem as discrimination and the central remedy as government-based quotas. . . .

“Conservative politicians and the majority of the voters have sought, fumblingly, to reassert old rules and establish a new order. . . .

“[Propositions 187 and 209] were portrayed by articulate liberal opinion [as] assaults on immigrants and people of color. But both simply asserted principles taken for granted when Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan were governor: That government has no obligation to serve those who aren’t legally here and . . . should not decide issues on the basis of race.”

Oh yes, about the news media:

“California television stations present almost no news of politics or government at all, and the newspapers present leftish-biased coverage which most voters seem blithely to ignore.”

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The almanac is published by the nonpartisan magazine, National Journal. Its president, John Fox Sullivan, says the book’s views are those of its co-founder and principal author, Michael Barone. “We’ve allowed him to open up and be a little more provocative,” Sullivan says.

Barone, 52, was a ‘60s liberal who has become more conservative. What agitated him to take a fresh look at California, he says, was public education’s “loud and glaring” failure.

Notes veteran political analyst William Schneider: “The almanac is the political bible. It it is not the bible of political correctness.”

Indeed, we already have plenty of those. Here’s a different view.