Poking Holes in Truth-in-Packaging for Politicians

No matter how much we try, there are some problems that government is simply not competent to solve: an education system that will please everyone, for example, or anything having to do with San Francisco, or a foolproof truth-in-packaging law for politicians.

The last has been the cause of considerable clamor in this election season arising from some dubious claims that Paul Gann, the LaRouche organization and Los Angeles county assessor candidate Jim Keysor have made in their various campaigns.

The French have a saying that there can be no rose without thorns. Certainly it seems that there is no such thing as a Paul Gann proposal that doesn’t suffer from sloppy drafting, confused intentions and a raucous court fight.

This time around, Gann and his adversaries are arguing over how many people his salary-setting initiative for public employees (Proposition 61) would actually affect--whether it would save the taxpayers several hundred million dollars by capping the salaries of a few top officials or wind up costing billions for all the unused vacation and sick time that government agencies might have to buy back from thousands of their employees. A Superior Court judge in Sacramento has ruled that the voters have to be warned of these potential costs in both the ballot summary and the longer fiscal analysis that appears inside the state ballot pamphlet. The California Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of that ruling.

Gann now wants his name off the ballot-pamphlet arguments that he drafted on behalf of the initiative. The prospect that Proposition 61 might do far more damage than he ever intended has not persuaded Gann to abandon the proposal altogether, of course; that would be too much to hope for. But since the court also altered his prose defending the initiative, he contends that it no longer reflects his views and should not bear his name.

Gann has a point. If he wants to take issue with the official analysis of his initiative, that is his privilege and that is what the arguments pro and con in the ballot pamphlet are for. Certainly when it comes to predicting the potential effect of some of Gann’s vaguely worded proposal, no one has a corner on the truth or a flawless crystal ball.

Gann’s opponents argue that the public should not have to underwrite the distribution of false or misleading statements through the ballot pamphlets. Nonsense. Taxpayers shoulder the cost of publishing all sorts of persiflage, bombast and deceit in the newsletters that legislators send out to their constituents and the self-congratulatory press releases and reports that public officials at all levels of government issue every day by the ton. The ballot pamphlet itself, on issues in which there is no formal opposition, has frequently carried any statement of opposition that some publicity seeker might send in so long as it maintains at least a superficial relevance to the proposition at hand.

If it isn’t libelous or likely to endanger public health and safety, and if he’s willing to put his name to it, Gann ought to be able to say any fool thing that he wants to. He always has.

The traditional constraint on free speech that most of us learned in school derives from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum that the right does not extend to shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That was in essence the test that another Superior Court judge applied in striking down some of the more incendiary claims that the LaRouchites offered to stir up support for their AIDS-control initiative (Proposition 64). Presumably their unscientific theories regarding the spread of infection would not have been so objectionable to the court if they had been talking about measles. But AIDS is a special case. So little is known about the disease that there are few clear truths or falsehoods; rather, the court was asked to weigh the relative reliability of various speculations against the effect that their publication would have on public fears.

The controversy concerning Keysor’s use of the local ballot pamphlet is distinct from the Gann and LaRouche examples in the sense that the statement that Keysor wants to include is not so contemptible in itself as it is contemptuous of the intelligence of the voters. Keysor, the chosen heir of outgoing assessor Alexander Pope, has been serving as an unpaid, part-time assistant in Pope’s office about long enough to figure out where the lunchroom is located. Nevertheless, in his campaign against a 14-year veteran of the assessment business, Keysor is using his official statement of qualifications to create the illusion that he is an experienced deputy who has been working “to keep . . . the assessor’s office efficient.”

In the years since Howard Jarvis’ Proposition 13 in 1978, assessors generally have lost so much of their discretionary authority that it is doubtful whether their positions even need to be elective. Keysor may be as competent as anyone else from outside the assessor’s office in performing what has become essentially a clerical function. And we do not apply any more rigorous tests for truthfulness to a candidate’s statement of qualifications than we do to a job applicant’s resume or an ad for soap. Candidates, after all, are not expected to list their divorces, their grades in school or how many times they failed the Bar examination, no matter how useful that information would be in the polling booth.

The absurdity of Keysor’s claim is certainly not mitigated by the breathtaking sweep of his gall. But under the law it would be objectionable only if it succeeded in getting him elected--and maybe not even then. As a concrete example of his trustworthiness, it has probably hurt Keysor’s cause more than it has helped. For, in the last analysis, the only effective defense that the voters really have against this kind of nonsense is their own common sense.