SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010 “
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Extreme Greenies: see now why we push ‘drill, baby, drill’ of known reserves & promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?” — Sarah Palin, chiding environmentalists about the gulf oil spill via Twitter
Myths about 5 California politics by Bruce E. Cain T 1
uesday is Election Day in California, with primary races for governor and U.S. Senate that have received much national attention. But when it comes to national politics, is California a bellwether, an outlier, a mirror, or a little of each? From a distance, appearances can be deceiving.
California is a high-taxing, big-spending state.
Although California’s prolonged budget battles and eye-popping deficits have made it America’s
BEN KIRCHNER
In Google we trust, a bit too much
by Nicholas Carr J
ust before dawn on the morning of Jan. 19, 2009, a Los Angeles woman named Lauren Rosenberg was hit by a car while crossing a four-lane highway in Park City,
Utah. Last month, more than a year af- ter the accident, she filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that the route for her walk had been suggested by Google Maps. She’s asking for more than $100,000 in damages, in part to cover the hefty medical bills she says she incurred. Google, Rosenberg’s lawyer said in
explaining the suit, bears some re- sponsibility for her injuries. He argued that Google Maps provided walking di- rections, which Rosenberg download- ed to her BlackBerry, that sent her down a busy road without sidewalks or streetlights, putting her in harm’s way. Blaming Google seems like a stretch.
Using any kind of map requires cau- tion, and on its site the company warns people about the dangers inher- ent in walking near traffic (though it’s not clear whether the warning ap- peared on Rosenberg’s BlackBerry). Google, a multibillion-dollar company, is a big target, and Rosenberg’s suit may prove frivolous. But her experience should never- theless give us pause. It highlights a re- markable shift in the way people get around these days. We may not all be wandering across highways in the dark, but most of us have become de- pendent on computer-generated maps of one sort or another. I know that when I’m in my car, I rarely give much thought anymore to where I am or what route I’m taking. I just turn on the GPS and follow the instructions. The trust we place in computerized
directions can, as Rosenberg discov- ered, have unintended and unpleasant consequences. Internet mapping services and GPS
navigation systems are extraordinarily useful. They guide us to distant and out-of-the-way places that were once a hassle to find. They quickly get us back on course when we take a wrong turn. Listening to instructions from a GPS device certainly beats wrangling with a big paper map while trying to steer a car — something I confess to having done all too often in the past. In extreme situations, GPS units can even be lifesavers. Just ask anyone
who’s been lost in the wilderness dur- ing a hiking or camping trip. When you have a GPS device in your pack, you always know the way back to civili- zation. But even though our gadgets seem magical, they don’t know everything. As most of us have discovered, naviga- tion systems can give bad advice as well as good. You may not get hit by a car, but you could find yourself driving in circles or stuck at a construction site or marooned in a dodgy part of town. Because the software programs that
generate maps tend to recommend routes based on simple calculations of speed and distance, they can end up promoting convoluted and dangerous traffic patterns. Sometimes, for in- stance, they divert drivers from high- ways and send them through resi- dential neighborhoods or past schools. A couple of years ago, a quiet hamlet in southwestern England called Bar- row Gurney found itself suddenly overrun by cars and trucks. A GPS sys- tem had calculated that the route through town could provide a time- saving shortcut between highways, and drivers robotically followed the re- sulting directions. The local govern- ment lobbied, fruitlessly, to have the town erased from computer maps. GPS units have also been implicated in thousands of accidents. Last month, a New Jersey driver, dutifully follow- ing GPS commands, made an illegal left turn and caused a four-car pileup. Too often when we turn on our naviga- tion systems, we turn off our common sense and stop paying attention to where we’re headed. More ominously still, there are signs
that our growing reliance on automat- ed GPS directions could end up alter- ing the circuitry in our brains. A famous study of London taxi driv- ers, conducted in the late 1990s, found that an area of the cabbies’ hippocam- pi was much larger than normal. The hippocampus is thought to be the place where we store maps of our sur- roundings. It plays a crucial role in our ability to keep track of where we are and to get from one place to another. As the taxi drivers built their mental maps of London’s incredibly complex road network, the study indicated, their hippocampi expanded, and their navigational skills strengthened. Eleanor Maguire, the neuroscientist who led the study, fears that if the cab- bies adopt satellite navigation, their
hippocampi will shrink, and they’ll lose much of their remarkable naviga- tional sense. “We very much hope they don’t start using it,” she told a reporter for Britain’s Independent newspaper. All of us who rely heavily on com- puter maps and GPS devices are exer- cising our innate navigational skills less frequently and less intensively. As a result, those skills are probably de- caying. And if our kids rely on com- puter maps from a young age, they may never establish those skills in the first place. When we upgraded from at- lases to gizmos, we made our lives easi- er. But we lost something, too. Just like the cabbies, we may be fat-
ed to experience a dwindling in the size and functionality of the part of the hippocampus devoted to representing space. As that happens, we’ll begin to lose touch with the physical world that surrounds us. And in turn, we’ll be- come even more dependent on our computers to shepherd us around. We’ll turn into modern-day Hansels and Gretels, lost without our digital trail of crumbs. But here’s the really scary part. In addition to stockpiling mental maps, the hippocampus plays an essential role in creating and storing memories. Some studies have found, in fact, that a shrinking hippocampus is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Véronique Bohbot, a professor of at McGill University in
psychiatry
Montreal, has done extensive research demonstrating the connection be- tween the size of the hippocampus and the degree to which we employ our navigational skills. She worries that, should our hippocampi begin to atro- phy from a lack of use in navigation, the result could be a loss of memory and a growing long-term risk of de- mentia. “Society is geared in many ways toward shrinking the hippocampus,” she said in an interview with journal- ist Alex Hutchinson last year. “In the next twenty years, I think we’re going to see dementia occurring earlier and earlier.” That’s still speculation. Bohbot’s fear may well turn out to be ground- less. But it’s something to keep in mind the next time that pleasant, computer- generated voice tells you to take a left.
Nicholas Carr is the author of the new book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”
poster child for fiscal recklessness, the case is not so clear. Factoring in personal income levels, California’s per capita state and local tax burden ranks 18th among all states. Meg Whitman, the leading Republican candidate for governor, said recently that she intends to solve the state’s budget crisis by cutting 40,000 public jobs. But according to 2007 Census data, California has the second-lowest number of state employees per capita (103 per 10,000 residents), a rate 28 percent below the national average and lower than the ratios in more conservative states such as Arizona, Nevada and Texas. To put California’s budget woes in a local context, Maryland’s Montgomery County, home to about 1 million people, including a number of California’s most prominent national critics, has a budget deficit of $1 billion. Based on California’s population of nearly 36 million, if the state spent like Montgomery County, its deficit would be almost twice current projections.
California is a majority- minority, solidly blue state.
2
A majority of California’s population may be nonwhite, but the reverse is true for its
electorate. While non-Hispanic whites now make up just over 42 percent of the population, down from 69 percent in 1978, they still account for about two-thirds of voters. (This voting gap between whites and nonwhites is primarily based on differences in average age, citizenship rates and socioeconomic status.) And even though Democrats have had an almost continuous advantage in California party registration since the New Deal, voters haven’t been especially loyal to the party: In the 20th century, the state had only four Democratic governors. So at best, California is pale blue, and one might argue that its true color is brown: Two of the four Democratic governors were Browns (Pat and Jerry), one (Gray Davis) had been Jerry Brown’s chief of staff, and now Jerry Brown may win another term as chief executive, a position he last held in 1983.
California politicians are soft and flaky.
3
When Nancy Pelosi became House speaker in 2006, the prevailing wisdom in
Washington was that she would be weak and ineffectual. After all, she was a liberal Democrat from San Francisco. But after the passage of the health-care overhaul this year, most people now agree that Pelosi is one of the most effective political negotiators of our time. Whatever influence Pelosi’s original home town of Baltimoremay have had, San Francisco, home of some of the savviest, most calculating minds in the history of American politics — among them Phil Burton and Willie Brown — provided her with ample role models. Among California’s other contributions? Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. With Jerry Brown again seeking the
governorship, opponents and journalists are sure to use his onetime nickname (“Governor Moonbeam”) and other bits of lore from the 1970s (he dated Linda Ronstadt; he proposed a state space program) to suggest he’s an eccentric. Sure, Jerry is unconventional, but Dennis Kucinich he is not. He began politics as much an ascetic as a Democrat, vetoing more bills put forward by the Democratic legislature than any Democratic governor of California before or since. Brown was a maverick before John McCain, one who
would switch on a dime if survival required it. He was against the 1978 anti-property tax ballot initiative Proposition 13 before he was in favor of it. And while he presided over lenient sentencing procedures as governor, he shifted to the right on crime after stints as Oaklandmayor and state attorney general.
California is fertile ground for grass-roots politics.
4
California’s user-friendly direct democracy (think ballot initiatives, referendums and
recall elections) and populist culture would seem an ideal breeding ground for grass-roots politics. But California is much closer to a plutocracy than a grass-roots democracy. It takes lots of money to draft initiatives, get them on the ballot and run a media campaign for or against them. As a result, the ballot initiative process has been taken over by the very special interests that direct democracy was supposed to counter. For example, Tuesday’s ballot contains a measure sponsored by a big utility that would require a two-thirds vote for a community to start generating its own electricity, along with an insurance-industry-backed measure that would reward consumers with discounts for continuous auto insurance coverage. And running for office continues to
get more expensive. California now has two breeds of statewide candidates: the perennials and the rich. The former are predominantly Democrats who have managed to stay on the scene for decades and who have reputations and name recognition that money can’t buy —among them Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and most of the congressional delegation. The other group is self-financing. Republicans, lacking as deep a bench, have put up a series of extremely wealthy candidates —includingMichael Huffington, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carly Fiorina, Bill Simonand Meg Whitman. Rarely do big names like these start at the bottom of the political ladder, of course. Their egos and investments lead them to aim high, and when they win, they have to learn on the job.
California is immune to political trends in the rest of the country.
property tax limitations and term limits) that the state first passed and then were adopted elsewhere. By this logic, California may tell us something about the nation’s future, but it is too far out to tell us much about the present.
5
But in reality, California is buffeted by the same political winds as the rest of the country. Like a majority of Americans, 53 percent of Californians say jobs and the economy are the No. 1 issue on their minds. And like other Americans, 61 percent of state residents disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Border issues rile the southern part of the state almost as much as they do Arizona and could play a role in November. And Californians, like voters elsewhere, are opposed to tax increases unless they are targeted at sinners (smokers, drinkers) or the very wealthy. As a result, what happens in the rest of the country will not simply stay in the rest of country. Might the GOP sweep California’s open Senate seat and governorship, and even pick up a seat or two in the House? Yes. If voter frustrations about health care, bank bailouts, the deficit and Afghanistan create a national wave against the Democrats in November, California may well be part of it.
Bruce E. Cain is the Heller professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley and executive director of the UC Washington Center.
California is widely regarded as a policy trend-setter, mainly because of measures (such as
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