But the state Senate has had only Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, as president from 2008 until a few weeks ago. Steinberg left to media accolades this fall. Note this long Q&A in which the Bee reporter’s framing is consistently favorable to the former teacher.

Yet his successor, Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, is off to the roughest start of any Californian assuming a high-profile office since Lane Kiffin took over as coach of the Oakland Raiders.

De Leon has gotten skeptical to scathing media responses for a relatively long list of things in a relatively short time.

More perceived screw-ups since Walters tore him up

On Dec. 4, Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters blasted him for a “series of blunders.”

Walters ripped de Leon for verbal gaffes that proved hugely damaging to a Central Valley Assembly Democratic hopeful; for a self-important, pompous “inaugural” ceremony in Los Angeles; and for gutting many of the Senate’s most experienced policy analysts because of murky budget problems. Insiders said if the Senate really were hurting, the logical thing to do was lay off the political apparatchiks on all Senate staffs, not the people with the institutional memory.

The knocks have kept coming since Dec. 4.

De Leon’s announcement last week that he would pressure CalPERS and CalSTRS to disinvest from coal-affiliated companies — but not those in oil or natural gas — struck a chord in the wrong way with just about everyone.

I talked to one insider who said there was disbelief among lawmakers that 1) this symbolic, hollow gesture was highlighted as an early priority of de Leon’s and 2) that de Leon wouldn’t realize this would seem insubstantial and not worthy of his time. Another Sacramento watcher told me he couldn’t believe de Leon would focus on this trivia instead of grabbing a chance to be enviros’ hero by talking up a fracking ban. New York state’s passage of such a ban last week shows how much it’s where greens want to go.

Oversight office abruptly scrapped

Then de Leon was pulverized last week by editorials in both the Bay Area Newspaper Group and its sister Los Angeles News Group over other actions as well. This is from the Vallejo Times-Herald’s version:

“De León has eliminated a team of Senate aides dedicated to evaluating state government institutions and programs. He declined to renew the Senate’s Office of Oversight and Outcomes, established in 2008 by then-Senate President Darrell Steinberg with a goal “to ensure taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely and productively.

“The four-person staff’s combined salaries of about $379,000 seemed a small price for the good it did.

“Among the reports the office produced just last year were ones on the misuse of student meal funds by school districts, including $158 million in misappropriations and unallowable charges by Los Angeles Unified; about how the state’s system for overseeing substance-abuse counselors failed to flag sex offenders; and assigning blame for problems with the $373 million state payroll system. Among earlier reports was one looking at 10 tax breaks that, over a decade, cost state coffers $6.3 billion more than anticipated.”

Accused of wide range of political sins

What’s interesting is that these criticisms of de Leon don’t just focus on money-grubbing or another particular sin that politicians sometime specialize in. Implicitly, they make quite a sweeping case.

In possibly costing an Assembly candidate a chance at victory, de Leon is accused of poor political acumen.

In staging a showy unofficial “inaugural,” de Leon is accused of grandiosity.

In his Senate shakeups, de Leon is accused in one of a power grab and, in the other, of showing ignorance of the importance of a new but respected Sacramento institution.

In thinking that going after coal while ignoring fracking would make him look good, de Leon is accused of — to be blunt — stupidity.

The Sacramento version of the Stockholm syndrome

That is a pretty sweeping bill of particulars. What’s going on here?

The most obvious problem is that de Leon is politically tone-deaf in a way that’s striking for someone who’s made such a rapid ascent.

But the less obvious problem is that a lot of times it’s not fun to cover politics. It feels sleazy, disheartening, transactional, petty and repetitive. Steinberg made it feel more principled and sincerely, earnestly progressive.

That mattered to a bigger chunk of the Sacramento media-political establishment than people far from the state Capitol might imagine. This establishment didn’t miss Steinberg’s, er, colorful predecessor Don Perata at all.

Going by the metrics, John Chiang may be the strongest candidate to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018 or U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer in 2016.

You’d never know it by the way the media have zeroed in on Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris — even before the Nov. 4 election in which both were re-elected. Chiang, the outgoing state controller, was elected as state treasurer. All are Democrats.

As far back as 2011, reporters have been setting the stage for the inevitable “Kamala vs. Gavin” showdown.

“Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris: the California Democratic Party’s future?” the L.A. Times asked in 2011. “The party’s top officeholders — Gov. Jerry Brown and U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer — are all in their 70s. Newsom and Harris top the list of up-and-comers.”

The Friday following this month’s election, the San Francisco Chronicle asked, “Newsom vs. Harris: Who got bigger bang for the buck?” In his recent speculation on the next round of Democratic name brands, Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton mentioned Chiang as an afterthought. That was better than his colleague Cathleen Decker, who didn’t bother to include Chiang in her list of Democrats in waiting.

Consultants, too, are billing the Kamala vs. Gavin show.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re on a collision course for running for governor in 2018,” Democratic consultant Garry South told the Times earlier this year.

Yet, when you look at every available metric, Chiang has outperformed both Newsom and Harris: 2014 margin of victory, lifetime votes, number of successful campaigns, cash on hand and party support.

2014 Margin of victory: Chiang closest to Brown’s vote total

There are still roughly half-a-million late absentee and provisional ballots left to count, but Chiang is on pace to deliver the best performance of any statewide candidate after Brown.

Despite being further down the ballot than Newsom, Chiang earned the most votes after Brown and had the widest margin of victory after Brown. He’ll be the second candidate in the state to hit 4 million votes in Nov. 2014.

Chiang performed 2.8 percentage points better than Harris, and 3.4 percentage points better than Newsom. His margin of victory – 17.2 percentage points – was closer to Brown’s 19.4 percentage points than it was to Harris’ or Newsom’s figures.

If you were to classify winning Democrats, you’d put Brown and Chiang in Tier 1 and Harris and Newsom in Tier 2.

Lifetime votes & number of successful campaigns

In the past 16 years, Chiang has appeared on the ballot 10 times, winning every race. That’s one better than Newsom and three more campaigns than Harris. He also has run for seats with more voters than Newsom or Harris. His lifetime vote total, 21.3 million, is nearly double that for Harris.

Every time that Chiang, Harris and Newsom have appeared on the same ballot, Chiang has been the top vote-getter. Of the bunch, Chiang is the only one who has exceeded 5 million votes in an election.

Money: Chiang raised most in 2014, most cash on hand

Statewide campaigns don’t come cheap, and Chiang steadily has improved his fundraising. In 2014, Chiang raised more money than either Harris or Newsom. And not by small margins either. According to the state campaign finance records as of October 18, Chiang’s $1.9 million raised in 2014 was $800,384 more than Harris and $382,510.54 more than Newsom.

Chiang has more available cash on hand, $3.19 million, compared to $2.8 million for Newsom and $2.39 million for Harris. One note on this figure: It’s possible Harris spent down her state campaign account because she can’t directly transfer those funds to an account for a potential federal campaign. But that should be dismissed.

State candidates can get creative with how to spend, transfer and shift resources between state and federal accounts. She could, for example, refund checks to donors, and then solicit those donors to support her new federal campaign account. 

And remember, Chiang outperformed Harris on Election Night 2014, meaning she spent extra money to boost her name ID, but still couldn’t match Chiang’s result. Chiang spent less, has more in the bank and performed better.

Sharing the Wealth: Chiang’s given more to Democrats

Who shares their wealth and is a team player? Again, on paper, it’s Chiang, who outperforms both Harris and Newsom. In 2014, Chiang donated $55,000 from his campaign committee to Democratic Party committees. That’s substantially more than the $11,500 donated by Harris or $3,790 by Newsom.

All three politicians pledged to raise or give the same amount to the Democratic Party this cycle.

That may be true, but Chiang’s financial support is easier to quantify, which will come in handy for persuading Democratic activists and delegates to support him in a tough primary fight.

Newspaper Endorsements: Chiang’s Clean Sweep

Scott Lay, the publisher of The Nooner and AroundtheCapitol.com, kept tabs on newspaper endorsements in the Nov. 2014 general election. Of the three Democrats, Chiang was the only one to achieve a clean sweep of newspaper endorsements throughout the state. The Orange County Register declined to endorse in 扑克王粤语在线 both the lieutenant governor’s and attorney general’s race. The UT San Diego backed Republican Ron Nehring over Newsom and declined to endorse in the attorney general’s race.

Both of those newspapers lean to the right, which makes Chiang’s endorsements all the more impressive and useful in a Top 2 primary. The only other candidate to achieve the feat was reformer Marshall Tuck’s bid for state superintendent of schools.

Other factors

Two final things. Chiang has a potential geographic edge as the lone Southern Californian. Both Harris and Newsom hail from San Francisco.

And when it comes to picking governors, sometimes voters have a funny habit of ignoring the early favorites. Just ask Gov. Al Checchi.

But when it comes to public employee benefits and the damage they wreak on local governments, scoundrels have another refuge: blaming racism for concerns about lavish, unaffordable benefits and broken governments.

We are seeing one version of this in some pontificating about Detroit’s bankruptcy. Now it could be coming to Sacramento, courtesy of Democratic consigliere Steve Maviglio.

Government workers ‘disproportionately black’

Tuesday on Twitter, Steve linked to a Bloomberg column that tried as hard as it could to reframe the pension debate in racial terms.

 “Public-sector workers are disproportionately black. In 2011, about 19 percent of black workers were employed by the government, compared with 14 percent of whites and 10 percent of Hispanics.  …

“The share of blacks in the public sector coincides with worrisome economic figures for blacks overall. Just 52 percent of blacks 16 or older were employed in 2011, compared with 59 percent for whites and Hispanics. Median net wealth for black households was $4,900 in 2010 — about 5 percent that of white households. …

“The upshot is pretty clear: Reducing the value of public pensions and other benefits wouldn’t just hurt blacks disproportionately; it would do so at a time when other economic trends have already hurt them more than most. So the question isn’t whether race is part of the debate over public pensions, but how to address it.”

Groan. The racial makeup of the public sector work force should not be a factor in deciding whether public employees’ retirement benefits are unaffordable and must be scaled back. Math and public policy priorities should be what drives the debate.

But in Sacramento, which didn’t even blink in 2009 when an Assembly speaker likened opponents of tax hikes to terrorists in an interview with the state’s largest newspaper, we can expect cries of racism to be a new blunt-force tool of Maviglio and Maviglian lovers of the pension status quo.

Great. Just great.

Such is the Democratic Party in California. It controls every statewide office. It enjoys supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Last November, it passed tax increases. It’s ruling the roost.

It’s also a troubled family. The L.A. Times reported on an Immigration Town Hall meeting held July 27 by Rep. Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles. She knows the state well because she formerly was the speaker of the California Assembly.

Bass attacked Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, even the immigration reformers among them:

“There is the crude and there is the sophisticated. At the end of the day, I think both opinions are pretty much the same in terms of the disrespectful viewpoint of immigrants.”

Immigration split

But as the Times reported, many of her fellow Democrats at the Immigration Town Hall also were not enamored of the amnesty she favors, which is in the bill passed by the U.S. Senate:

“Several spoke out against a pathway to legalization, saying it would reward those who broke the law by entering the country illegally. Others pointed to the economy and unemployment and argued that the job prospects of Americans — particularly African Americans — would be harmed.

“Keith Hardiner, 57, said he is the descendant of slaves.

” ‘They were separated from their families, but we had to fight and struggle,’ said the Silver Lake resident. ‘And now I feel like we are being set back and the country is being kind of stolen from us.'”

There’s an irony there. A growing economy can support high wages for both current residents and new immigrants. But a slowly growing economy with long-term unemployment — what we have now because of both Democratic and Republican high-tax, big bureaucracy policies — turns people against one another. Competition for shrinking positions is fierce.

We can expect to see more such fissures in the Democratic Party. For example, one day Silicon Valley billionaires are going to get sick of the Democratic politicians they usually support siphoning off hundreds of billions for the bureaucracies and lobbyists in Sacramento — all for roads that keep crumbling, schools that don’t teach and pensions for those no longer even working in government.

And as I noted earlier, top CA Dem Nancy Peloisi is backing the NSA Stasi-Security Supertate that hijacks Silicon Valley’s latest inventions to snoop and oppress. When are the Twitter and other cyber-geniuses living in San Francisco, almost all Democrats, going to bolt from her controls and boot her from office?

By Chris Reed

Mankind has been building bridges for more than 3,000 years. A bridge built in the 13th century BC in Greece is still in use.

Building durable bridges over water is not a modern accomplishment. The Roman Empire liked to build simple arch bridges over rivers and put up hundreds and hundreds all over Europe. Quite a few are still in use.

But building more complex bridges over water, such as the suspension Brooklyn Bridge completed in 1883, is also old hat. It’s not rocket engineering, as Sergio Garcia would say. It’s daunting to outsiders but no big deal to those in the biz.

Except if you’re the genius engineers working for the state of California, who somehow managed to botch the $6.4 billion east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge by neglecting basic practices meant to reduce water corrosion on giant steel beams and by tolerating flawed welds and an abnormally high number of broken bolts.

Let’s probe and probe and probe some more

State lawmakers increasingly sound like they’re in a let-the-heads-roll mood over the fiasco, the Sacramento Bee reports:

“Sen. Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, a member of the transportation committee and an engineer, said the opening date must be delayed if safety remained in doubt. … Cannella and state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, chair of the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, called for a comprehensive investigation . …

“He said that the state attorney general, federal officials, or his own committee should conduct the probe. It should require California Department of Transportation executives to testify under oath and compel them to produce internal documents that show who made decisions that led to the current problems, who dissented in those decisions and why, DeSaulnier said.

“‘With the level of personal exposure right now (for Caltrans officials) … there is always the concern that there is documentation that gets lost or destroyed,’ he said.”

State can’t do simple project — but it can pull off an unprecedented one?

So the state government botches an engineering project as rudimentary as a bridge, and now we’re supposed to believe it is up to the challenge of building a bullet train system that costs $68 billion, more than 10 times as costly and a thousand times more difficult?

Sheesh. Why don’t we wait until the winter and just the burn the money in alleys where homeless people sleep? At least it will keep them warm and achieve something constructive.

If you think the state can rise to the occasion, perhaps it’s time you changed or increased your medication. Or maybe you just missed the story about the incredible complexity of the bullet train project.

Or the story about how the geniuses running the California High-Speed Rail Authority quietly rewrote the bidding rules to favor the least competent bidder for construction of the initial 29-mile segment in the Central Valley.

Yeah, that makes sense: Give the toughest project to the bidders with the least expertise. Sheesh again.

Look on the bright side: Watching debacle unfold will be fun

I’m beginning to reach the tipping point on the bullet train. Rationally, of course, I don’t want it to go forward. It’s going to be such a waste of money that could be spent much better elsewhere (or returned to taxpayers). But both ideologically and on schadenfreude grounds, I now am very open to the idea that it will be great fun for critics to watch the bullet train proceed and be the mega-debacle it’s very likely to be.

It will once again remind voters how inefficient and incompetent government is, especially on ambitious projects. But even more satisifying will be how the fiasco will hang like a permanent shadow over the reputations of Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Karen Bass, John Perez, Darrell Steinberg, Dan Richard and the editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury-News and the San Francisco Chronicle. On the bullet train, they’re chumps one and all.

What a difference three years makes. In January 2007, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was fresh off his resounding election victory over Phil Angelides, basking in an aura of “postpartisan” triumphalism. The governor even proposed a universal health care system. “We have to aim high and attack the entire system from top to bottom,” the governor enthused in a major speech. “We can create a model the rest of the nation can follow.”

Democrats met his proposal, and raised the ante, proposing a “single-payer” system, insisting that their plan would “save” Californians $12 billion a year, while the governor’s would cost the state that much, paid for with higher taxes.

The housing boom still was booming, so the money seemed to be there for the taking to turn these and other California government dreams into reality. As 2007 began, housing prices were dropping a little from their record highs in 2006, but still were close to record highs.

Then the bottom dropped out.

The year 2010 opens with housing prices in most places a bit above last year’s level, but with no sign of a boom anywhere near that would erase the catastrophic plunge of 2007-09. The national economy remains in the worst recession since the Great Depression. Even the most optimistic economists expect only a modest recovery in 2010. The most pessimistic, such as Gerald Celente, expect that, after a temporary reprieve, the economy will start crashing again.

Budget battles

Whatever the case with the economy, the biggest battle will be over the state budget for fiscal year 2010-11, which begins on July 1. The fireworks will begin in earnest when Gov. Schwarzenegger unveils his budget proposal on Jan. 8, followed a couple of days later by the Legislative Analyst’s examination of the proposal.

A year ago, the state faced a $40 billion budget deficit. To close it, the governor signed into law a record tax increase of $13 billion. In a statement, he promised it would “solve our $42 billion deficit and also find meaningful and lasting solutions to our broken budget system.”

The solution didn’t last.

Less than a year later, the budget deficit stood at $20.7 billion, according to the state Legislative Analyst’s report on Nov. 18, 2009. It may even be higher by the time the governor’s budget proposal comes out.

Outgoing Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, told me that Democrats “continue to fight for sensible budget solutions that don’t burden vulnerable Californians with more problems and more costs.”

“The whole year will be devoured by the $21 billion deficit,” Assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Irvine told me; he also is running for the U.S. Senate in the Republican primary. “The Democrats will be frustrated. They will want to write more spending bills, but there’s no more money in the till.”

More new taxes?

Bass wouldn’t comment on whether Democrats would include tax increases in their budget solution.

The 2009 tax increase was imposed because the Republican leadership in both houses agreed to it. “I don’t see them doing that again,” DeVore said. The 2009 tax increases did not close the deficit and this is an election year.

So where will the money come from? DeVore said cutting government programs is imperative. But Democrats are following Gov. Schwarzenegger in begging for money from the federal government. “The whole session will be dominated by a search for money,” DeVore said. “They will go back to D.C. with their palms extended.”

Given the influence of the California delegation, beginning with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), and the way the Obama administration has been throwing hundreds of billions of “stimulus” dollars around, they just might get a few billion.

Education: ‘Race to the Top’ funding

Because it’s the biggest part of the budget, about 40 percent, education also will be a big-ticket item for 2010. Bass said, “Investments in education will be key to training Californians for the manufacturing jobs that every economy needs.”

Federal stimulus bucks already play a part here. As part of his $110 economic stimulus plan for education, President Barack Obama included a $4.5 billion national program called Race to the Top. California could get up to $700 million. It’s supposed to fulfill the president’s appeal to kids, “You can’t drop out of school and into a good job.”

In California, Bass announced progress in negotiations over implementing Race to the Top. She said:

• Our legislation calls for proven turn around strategies for low performing schools and the tools to help teachers make them work.
• Educational data will be used to better coordinate classroom instruction and keep parents and the public better informed about student progress.
• School principals will be evaluated to make sure our schools are working from top to bottom.
• California will develop higher standards in math and language arts that are internationally recognized.

The Orange County Register reported on Dec. 30 on the status of the Race to the Top legislation, “The deadline for states to apply for Phase 1 of the stimulus funding is Jan. 19. Applications for the second and final phase are due June 1.

“The Assembly’s version of the bill is viewed as harder on charter schools and softer on the lowest-performing of California’s traditional public schools.”

Race to the Top would force states to end limits on the number of charter schools. But California’s charter program already is quite advanced, with 809 charters established teaching 341,000 charter students, about four percent of public-school kids. Charters continue to grow at the rate of about 50 per year.

DeVore warned that parents need to keep close watch on any changes to California’s charter-school laws because the powerful teachers’ unions want to put more regulations on charters. But a main reason for charters, and of their general success, is that they dispose of much of the red tape entangling traditional public schools.

It’s also a big question whether more money – and more federal control, with 3,000-mile strings attached – is what California’s faltering public schools system needs, instead of more fundamental reforms.

It seems every new president has a schools reform bill resembling Race to the Top. President Bush’s similar No Child Left Behind program of 2001 was supposed to produce young scholars, but the results have not been stellar. Detroit’s public schools just recorded the worst scores ever, anywhere, in the National Assessment of Education Progress’s 40-year history.

And students in the Chicago public schools performed almost as abysmally. The man who presided over this Windy City disaster is current U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who will implement Race to the Top.

Homeowner assistance

“While focused on creating jobs, Assembly Democrats will also continue to fight for homeowner protections to avoid another wave of foreclosures,” Bass told me.

Last year, the Legislature enacted AB260, which stiffened penalties for mortgage brokers making false claims. The California Association of Mortgage Brokers opposed the law because its language was vague. AB260 goes into effect on July 1.

There already are signs of recovery in the housing market in California. “Single-family home prices in California rose for the eighth consecutive month in October. The median cost of an existing, detached house gained 0.3 percent from the previous month to $297,500. Prices dropped about 3.2 percent from a year earlier, compared with annual declines of 7.3 percent in September and 17 percent in August,” reported Bloomberg on Dec. 26.

“Foreclosures represented 41 percent of sales, down from a peak of 59 percent in February, research company MDA DataQuick said in November.”

At this late point in the housing crisis, the best way to help forestall foreclosures might be to make it easier for businesses to create, and keep, jobs, so folks have the money to pay their mortgages.

Health care

Bass wrote me that “advances in health care must be sustained to improve health and avoid another decade of exploding health-care costs.”

The key here is how the new federal health care legislation will affect California. That will unfold as the fine print in the bill is discovered and interpreted.

DeVore pointed out that more regulations on health care generally raise insurance costs through “mandates” on coverage. In the past, governors have vetoed most, but not all, of these expensive bills to prevent health-care costs rising even higher.

I covered this in an article for The Freeman magazine, where I wrote:

• Every 1 percent increase in the cost of insurance therefore means 22,222 to 33,333 people lose insurance. In-vitro fertilization coverage mandated by the state raises costs 3 percent to 5 percent. So this mandate alone means 66,666 to 166,665 people lose health insurance.
• California also mandates mental-health parity, which raises costs 5 to 10 percent. This mandate causes 111,110 to 333,330 people to lose coverage.
• Put another way, if just these two mandates were repealed in California, from 177,776 to 499,995 people could again afford insurance.

Health Access, an interest group advocating more government involvement in health care, provides a list of legislation it supports. It’s a good indicator of where the debate will be occurring in 2010.

For example, AB1218 “Requires HMOs and health insurer to get approval for increases in premiums and cost-sharing” – a form of price controls. But as anyone aware of the history of price controls knows, there’s a way around them: stop offering the service, in this case by an insurer leaving the state.

AB29 “Would allow individuals up to age 27 to remain on a private insurance policy as a dependent, but employers are not required to contribute to the cost of coverage for dependents over 23.” So now your kids will have another reason for hanging around.

SB316 involves “Capping administration and profit ­– Would set a minimum medical loss ratio – requiring every insurer to spend at least 85 percent of premiums on patient care.” Just as the Legislature is trying to increase administrative costs with expensive new laws, it wants to limit, by edict, the amount that insurance companies can use to pay to comply with the edicts. This would provide another reason for the insurance companies to exit California.

AB722 is the “Pre-existing condition exclusion – Would prohibit individual insurance plans from denying coverage due to a pre-existing condition.” As with similar proposals at the national level, this would kill off the insurance companies. People would just not get insurance until they got sick. So the insurance companies would only be insuring the sickest people, whose expensive care they would have to fund, with healthy people paying nothing (until they got sick), thus defeating the whole reason for insurance.

Era of limits

Back in the 1970s Jerry Brown, the once (and perhaps future) governor, talked about an “era of limits.” He was wrong. California, in part because Proposition 13 in 1978 limited government’s ability to tax productive citizens and businesses, boomed for another three decades. Population and the economy grew at rapid paces.

But 2010 really is an era of limits. There’s no money for anything. Because not enough cuts were made in 2009, even deeper cuts will need to be made in 2010.

More tax increases would just drive businesses and jobs from the state. Nevada, Texas, Washington and other states are waiting with open arms and no state income taxes.

The year also will see the end of the Schwarzenegger Era, with a new governor elected in November. Although Schwarzenegger’s grappling with the Legislature will be what determines the numbers in the budget, the future of the state will be decided by the debates in the race to be his successor, and in the choices made by voters for that office and the legislative offices.

We live interesting, and limited, times.

John Seiler is an independent writer. His email: writejohnseiler@gmail.com.