"The voters had a temper tantrum"

When the late Peter Jennings gave the above disgruntled reaction to nationwide Republican wins in the 1994 congressional elections, the comment was widely and rightly interpreted as meaning "The voters voted in a way I didn't like." I'm sure at some level, I'm saying basically the same thing when I apply the ABC anchorman's phrase to Tuesday's results in the California special election—though I stand by the principle that it's always a beautiful thing when voters say no to every single item on a ballot.

But I still challenge anybody to attribute any rationality to an electorate that recalled Gray Davis and enthusiastically elected Arnold Schwarzenegger just two years ago, but now rejects every single measure Schwarzenegger proposed to solve the problems that drove Davis out of office.

Back when the recall was just a glimmer, when Schwarzenegger said he was out of the running and the frontrunner was Rep. Darrell Issa (we were all young and crazy back then), I opposed the recall as another step down the Golden State's path toward mob rule. A popular doomsday scenario at the time was that Gov. Issa himself would be subjected to a recall in no time flat. Obviously that hasn't happened, but the special election result was just as incoherent: You had a state budget crisis so grave it was worth going to the trouble of recalling a governor you'd re-elected less than a year before, but not so grave that you're willing to risk some union dues and and an incremental increase in teacher tenure?

There are two pretty good explanations for this paradox: First, that none of the proposals on the ballot Tuesday would have done much to solve the budget crisis. Second, that we shouldn't expect coherence from any electorate because different interests get represented, shifting subsets of voters come out to the polls in different elections, etc. This second point I'll go into in more detail in an article that's supposed to show up in one of our fine California dailies tomorrow. Meanwhile the pious afterword to the Austrian Oak's debacle is that he needs to go back to the Democrats in Sac and find "bipartisan" solutions. (As Lurch would say, mmmhhhhhuuuuhhhh!). That's a crock: It's because Schwarzenegger couldn't get anything going with the Democrats that he went the special election route in the first place. California is, for the time being at least, an ungovernable state. (But still a helluva nice place to live!)