A sight of a left-wing takeover

JOSEPH N. BELL

I’m writing this on the day after.

I just checked the morning newspapers. I needed confirmation.

They’re reporting the same results I heard last night. Davis is out.

Schwarzenegger is in. Democracy is right on schedule in Iraq. And the

Cubs lost to the Marlins in extra innings.

Then I got these e-mails from my two grandsons. Trent, who is a

sophomore at George Washington University, wrote: “I guess Hollywood

does rule California. I predict that when Arnold has to make

decisions, his wife will give him proper advice.” And Trevor, who is

promotion director of a San Francisco radio station, was more

succinct. He wrote: “I can’t wait to see Poppa’s article on this

one.”

That put a lot of pressure on me. And it got me thinking about an

article the New York Times did recently contrasting the housing

market on the two coasts with the country in between. As a test case,

the editors chose to do an in-depth real estate study of Fort Wayne,

Indiana, where I grew up.

For a lot of years, I drove back to the Midwest regularly to draw

sustenance from my roots, and I would always come home with the real

estate pages from newspapers en route. My wife and I would pore over

them and inevitably learn that with the equity in our California

home, we could buy upscale outright in any of these cities and have a

life of writing novels without mortgage stress. This was underscored

by the New York Times study which quoted a realtor as saying: “You

can still live like a king in Fort Wayne with $200,000 housing -- and

you can live pretty well for $100,000.”

So I have to admit to my grandsons that when I went to bed Tuesday

night, I was fantasizing the possibility of kicking mortgage stress

and watching Arnold the Governor from afar. This act of cowardice can

only be excused by the late hour and the apt description of

California as “the next banana republic” by Los Angeles Times

columnist Peter King, to which the president of a Southern California

crisis-management firm added: “California has now developed the

reputation of a lot of Third World countries.”

I was still in that state of mind when I padded out to get the

morning paper and make absolutely certain that a flood-tide of votes

from East Los Angeles hadn’t turned the election around while I was

sleeping. It hadn’t, of course. Revolutionaries in our banana

republic had truly overthrown the government in Sacramento. The car

tax was dead meat.

That’s when two items on our kitchen counter caught my attention.

The first was a pair of tickets to the Kirov Ballet, coming soon to

the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The second was a clipping

from the Pilot that Mike Scioscia, the manager of the California

Angels, had just bought a home in Newport Beach. In a sudden

epiphany, it became clear to me that neither the exquisite joy of the

Kirov nor the Angel manager as a neighbor would be likely in Fort

Wayne. Or any other city with bargain housing in between.

That set me to thinking about all the other things I would leave

behind, especially friends and family. And I decided that -- unlike

the car tax -- I would not become another victim of the revolution.

California may be a banana republic, but it’s my banana republic.

So does that mean onward and upward with Arnold? I have no idea,

and nothing he has said to this point suggests that he has any idea,

either. But the slogans and generalities and lines from his violent

movies with which he has been seeding the California countryside

won’t grow any grass in Sacramento. Everybody is for “the people”

there. If you doubt it, just ask them.

Sooner or later, Gov. Schwarzenegger will have to face a simple

equation. When government expenditures are greater than income and

the gap is growing dangerously, there are only two possible

solutions: either expenditures must be cut or taxes raised. Or both.

Tying government’s hands on either of these options is an invitation

to disaster. That’s what happened during the budget fiasco earlier

this year. We’ll see if Arnold can prevent it from happening again.

And that’s only the beginning.

We’ll also see if successfully opening the can of recall worms in

California will start a spate of similar actions in which the recall

becomes simply a device to reverse elections that -- like the Davis

election -- were perfectly legitimate and involved no malfeasance in

office. If that does, indeed, happen, it must not happen again in

California. Any effort to turn this weapon back on Schwarzenegger

would be seen as vengeance and would be counter-productive anywhere

but the Doonesbury comic strip.

One other thought occurred to me while I watched the empty podium

where Arnold would appear to make his acceptance speech. The crowd

waiting for him onstage and massed behind the podium was loaded with

Kennedys. They are unmistakable in any group, and this one even

included old Sargent Shriver who once ran as a Democrat for the

vice-presidency of the United States -- and on this night was

whooping and hollering with the rest of the Kennedys present for a

Republican governor of California.

About the only thought on the long election night that I found

amusing was the possibility that the Kennedys are using Arnold as a

front man in a left-wing plot to take over California. I’ll be

watching him carefully to see how many Kennedys he brings into his

governing team. It’s good to know that if he goes overboard, we can

always recall him.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.