California: The State That Everybody Loves to Punish

They are dancing on our ruins again.

They being the major East Coast news organizations and trend watchers who breathlessly chronicle our trials by fire, flood, drought, earthquake and assorted man-made calamities. Now they’ve added rolling blackouts to the Apocalypse California list.

Our energy crisis is big stuff, media-wise. Public television’s “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” does special segments on us; we even made it on “Nightline”--several times. We’re the talk of cable television’s political talk shows, and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is so worried that our power shortage could push the country into recession that he lowered interest rates and endorsed a tax cut. Is that California clout or what? The last time we got this much wall-to-wall exposure was the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial.

It is worth wondering, of course, whether national television would have jumped on our burgeoning energy crisis quite so vigorously if there hadn’t been a news vacuum in the weeks between the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the presidential election and George W. Bush’s inauguration. Would the political talking heads have bothered with us at all if Gov. Gray Davis weren’t a big mention for the 2004 presidential race? It’s a good bet the answer is “no” in both cases.

Frankly, it’s hard to decide which is more infuriating--that California is worthy of national media attention only when it suffers a disaster, or that national reporting on our tribulations always has the unmistakable tone of tongue-clucking “told you so.” Blizzards in upstate New York or hurricanes in South Florida are covered merely as severe weather. California’s bouts with Mother Nature are some kind of cosmic retribution for living too well. Maybe that’s why the tone of the energy coverage in recent days is not just apocalyptic, it’s downright hostile.

To be perfectly fair, we do bring part of the sensationalistic and disaster-driven coverage on ourselves. Out of some twisted combination of superiority and inferiority complexes, some desperate need to be taken seriously by the Easterners, we Californians can’t resist portraying the state in extremes.

We don’t have plain, sustained economic growth; that would be too ordinary and boring. We have booms and population explosions and instant Silicon Valley millionaires. Similarly, we don’t have mere economic setbacks or policy miscalculations. We have spectacular, hand-wringing crises and high-stakes battles over how to solve them. California, after all, is special, a nonstop preview of the future, the cutting edge of the trend that will overtake the rest of the country--for good or for ill.

Small wonder, then, that as the consequences of our failed electricity deregulation policy sink in, we expect help from both the federal government and our neighboring states while we fumble our way to a solution. We’re special, remember; we deserve it. And small wonder that neither the Feds nor our neighbors see it quite that way.

Conservation-minded Washington and Oregon have been forced to send us power they really need themselves. They figure we’re all busy firing up our hot tubs while their residents are forced to pay higher rates for electricity purchased at spot-market prices. The Bush administration figures we sold out to the environmentalists and the NIMBY’s by failing to build more power plants. President Bush would like us to freeze in the dark awhile and contemplate the error of our ways.

The flawed deregulation plan and the confluence of events that got us to this sorry pass are actually a good deal more complicated than the administration would have it. But Californians, or anybody else for that matter, wouldn’t know that from anything they saw on television or read in the newspapers. Coverage of the 1996 dereg legislation and the changes it set in motion was scant.

Why? Because the legislation was considered and approved near the end of the legislative session when reporters are busy with hundreds of other bills. Because committee hearings on the bill were held late in the afternoon, around deadline time, and were therefore inconvenient for news organizations to cover. Because state Sen. Steve Peace of San Diego was the man who put the bill together and reporters regarded him as a policy wonk--too knowledgeable to do anything really bad and too boring to cover on those hot summer afternoons. The hearings were dubbed the “Steve Peace death march.” As any Sacramento reporter would agree, it wasn’t hard to convince an editor that the details of this eye-glazing deregulation stuff didn’t make much of a story. Besides, didn’t electricity deregulation belong on somebody else’s beat?

And now, just as reporters and California rate payers have begun to understand the deregulation basics they missed the first time around, the state is embarking on a new and perhaps riskier venture. Ready or not, under legislation approved last Thursday, California is in the electricity business for at least the next 10 years.

It’s unlikely that this was the fix Bush had in mind when he instructed us to work things out on our own. And it seems equally unlikely that he will be able to do much besides taking rhetorical jabs at Davis and the Democrats to alter it.

That’s because sooner or later, perhaps as soon as this summer, when the real energy crunch occurs, blackouts and rising electricity prices will also become Bush’s problem. The National Energy Policy Development Group the president established last week to study power issues in the Western states is tacit acknowledgment of that.

Meanwhile, Bush can “punish” California in the headlines, thereby scoring points with the Western states and East Coast media that figure we’re due some pain.

But California, as we used to say about the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, is too big to fail. It won’t be long before the new president understands that, too.