McClintock: Election will bring pain to CA

Nov. 19, 2012

By Katy Grimes

Abraham Lincoln said that if the voters get their backsides too close to the fire, they’ll just have to sit on the blisters for a while. After the Nov. 6 election, Californians have some very nasty blisters to sit on.

However, after pain, enlightenment usually comes. If not, California pharmacies will be selling out of salve.

A house divided

For a post-election reflection, I spoke with Rep. Tom McClintock, who represents California’s 4th Congressional District. McClintock spent 22 years in the California Legislature, ran for governor during the recall election of former Gov. Gray Davis, and was elected to Congress in 2008. He gets California as well as the national state of being.

“Unions may have won everything in California, but only in the short term,” McClintock said. “In the long term, unions are one step closer to the people in California awakening to the danger.”

That danger is “running out of other people’s money,” as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said.

While President Barack Obama was just reelected, those same voters reelected a House Republican majority. McClintock said that exit polls showed that the American people agree with Republicans on nearly all of the issues and ideals. Polls also showed that Obamacare is at an all time low approval rating. “The American people are about to get a college-level education in Obamanomics,” said McClintock. “At the end of the college course, they will be a lot wiser. But the question is, will they wake up and recoil?”

As California goes…

While California’s liberal politics are rampant in the Obama administration, McClintock said he’s always held out hope that California would become a morality play.

Because California Republicans have acted too much like Democrats instead of holding true to ideals, they’ve helped to facilitate a huge net-out migration population — of Republicans. “Much of that is Republicans fleeing the state,” said McClintock.

“I should also warn you of the strange sense of déjà-vu that I have every day on the House floor as I watch the same folly and blunders that wrecked California now being passed with reckless abandon in this Congress,” McClintock told colleagues in 2009.

In that speech, McClintock warned America about California’s debilitating policies, and what was to come:

“To understand how these policies can utterly destroy an economy and bankrupt a government, you have to remember the Golden State in its Golden Age.

“A generation ago, California spent about half what it does today AFTER adjusting for both inflation and population growth.

“And yet, we had the finest highway system in the world and the finest public school system in the country.   California offered a FREE university education to every Californian who wanted one.  We produced water and electricity so cheaply that many communities didn’t bother to measure the stuff.  Our unemployment rate consistently ran well below the national rate and its diversified economy was nearly recession-proof.

 “One thing — and one thing only — has changed in those years: public policy.  The political Left gradually gained dominance over California’s government and has imposed a disastrous agenda of radical and retrograde policies that have destroyed the quality of life that Californians once took for granted.”

“Many are leaving for the garden spots of Nevada, Arizona and Texas.”

Republicans did not make the case

Will 2014 be another 2010, where Republicans swept Democrats out of office across the nation? “Having bought the lie again from President Obama, it will be obvious in 2014,” said McClintock. “Particularly after the graduate course in Obamanomics.”

But how does the Republican Party get rid of its own deadwood and leadership?

“Nothing in the state Constitution says that the state has to be governed by idiots. It can change anytime,” he said.

He described many of the state’s Republicans as “self-defeating” and lacking the courage of their convictions. Consequently, liberty and freedom went down in flames this election. McClintock said that this won’t change as long as the American people put up with self-defeating Republicans and socialistic policies. But he anticipates a shift, especially after two more years of Obama’s policies and California’s economic collapse under Gov. Jerry Brown.

“The voters who reelected Obama are those who have been and will be hurt the most by that election,” said McClintock. But it happened because Republicans failed to make their case or effectively present their ideals to those voters, McClintock explained.

“Immigrants come to America for economic freedoms and to get away from an authoritarian economy,” said McClintock. Many of those immigrants are small business owners. They, and all small business people are hanging on by their fingernails. “Small, medium and large businesses” all are making alternative plans and downsizing.

“California is like the shopkeeper who leased out too much space, ordered too much inventory, hired too many people and paid them too much,” he said. “Every month the shopkeeper covers his shortfalls with borrowing and bookkeeping tricks.  Ultimately, he will reach a tipping point where anything he does makes his situation worse.  Borrowing costs are eating him alive and he’s running out of credit.  Raising prices causes his sales to decline.  And there’s only so much discretionary spending he can cut.”

And while he was sounding the warning bell three years ago, McCintock’s warning still rings true, but is even more dire today. “If anything, the collapse of California can at least serve as a morality play for the rest of the nation — unfortunately in the form of a Greek tragedy.”