Arnold Steinberg

The Philadelphia Society Regional Meeting

Los Angeles, October 16, 1999

For a long time California has been recognized as the vanguard state, but for what? In culture; or perhaps, counter-culture? In free speech, or was it filthy speech? In the conservative politics of Ronald Reagan or the confrontation playbook of Willie Brown? But the reality is that, for better or worse, things are done here first. It’s not simply that the state’s gross national product is larger than the GNP of nearly every country. Even before Silicon Valley, this state, partly due to the postwar electronics and defense boom, was a leader in technology. With less glamour than in high tech, the state remains an agricultural colossus. Its naturally rich soil and relatively stable climate make its central valley a laboratory for efficiency and innovation. With a relatively shorter history and even less tradition than for Eastern states, California, in many fields, was simply more responsive to change. For example, while the rest of the country pursued traditional banking, this state pioneered in the postwar growth of the savings and loan industry, which underwrote mortgages for the massive growth in home ownership following World War II.

Indeed, one of the most generous benefactors of conservatism in California, Howard Ahmanson, Jr., is the son of the late Howard Ahmanson, a marketing genius who understood one principal legacy of the Great Depression, the insecurity about banking. So, his Home Savings offices were not rented ground floor storefronts in office buildings, but costly stand-alone one story edifices that conveyed permanence and continuity. "There’s no place like Home," his announcer, the right-wing Harry von Zell, of Burns and Allen fame, and, later, George Fennimen, Groucho Marx’ straight man, would say. When liberal Democrat Pat Brown was elected Governor in 1958, he would raise a fortune from liberal Democrats who wanted state approval for the valuable state S&L charters. Brown himself was not as liberal as others – the California Democratic Council (CDC), a farther-left California version of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which at times seemed more socialist than liberal, but anti-communist, nonetheless.

And what about Hollywood? Despite runaway productions, it remains the undisputed center of film, although it still competes with New York as a center of liberal culture. Hollywood, like the S&Ls, and long before Silicon Valley, offered the potential to develop a new class of rich people without inherited wealth. As for television , the original three networks, before all the mergers and cable – ABC, NBC, and CBS – tested their most advanced ideas at their owned and operated stations in Los Angeles, the second largest media market next to New York, but the first in innovation. Here, local news first expanded in more minutes on the air, again and again, before it did elsewhere. Here, local news in more recent years was watered down, again and again, before it was diluted elsewhere. Today, an all-news radio station is a given in many major cities. We have two in Los Angeles; one of them, KFWB 98, one was the leading rock station in the sixties with its Fabulous Forties format before it became all news. In fact, the original all news format ("All news, all the time, X-Tra News) started here in Los Angeles in the sixties, just as talk radio started here with the legendary Joe Pyne.

Let me say that I will not talk about these things very much, not because they are unimportant, but because we do not have time to explore the rather important relationship between culture, values, politics, but I do encourage your questions. I do not talk at all, for example, about the vast University of California and its companion California State University systems. The "Future of Conservatism in California," is affected, positively and negatively, by lots more than politics. Also, we have great leaders and organizations in California that advance common causes. Make no mistake, the quibbling aside between libertarians and traditional conservatives, there are broad areas of agreement not only on the free market but on opposing the wave of political correctness. Indeed, the campaign for 209 to end racial and gender preferences united libertarians and conservatives. More about 209 soon.

Surely we cannot really explore the future of conservatism, in this state, or even nationally, without noting the importance of organizations and the people behind them. The Hoover Institution has been a bastion in the anti-communist movement. There is the great influence of The Claremont Institute and Larry Arnn. Consider the economics department at UCLA which some had called "Little Chicago," to recognize that many of its most illustrious faculty were trained at Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago. The Pacific Research Institute and Sally Pipes, and the Independent Institute and David Theroux, and the Reason Foundation and Bob Poole, and the David Horowitz conglomerate, are a few. We also include within our borders more than our fair share of elder statesmen like Bill Rusher and Frank Shakespeare, not to mention the great Nobel Laureate, Milton Friedman. We have generous benefactors like Jerry Hume who supports the Heritage Foundation and many other national conservative endeavors. Our Henry Salvatori, whose death ended an era of ideological big givers to politics, contributed a quarter of a million dollars to Goldwater before Bill Gates made such sums sound trivial. Mr. Salvatori and his fellow tycoons launched the Reagan candidacy for Governor while meeting at the same California Club that some of you will enter tonight to hear Bill Rusher. Talk about optimism. They met in 1965, not long after Goldwater’s crushing defeat, to lay the ground to elect an actor as Governor of this nation-state. All this before Warren Beatty.

We must look to the past for guidance toward our future. Here, in California, we launched the political careers of two Presidents – Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Nixon, who deeply disappointed many of us with his heretical support of wage and price controls, kept the Soviets off balance with what many of us saw as a sell-out of the Nationalist Chinese. In retrospect, this was Richard Nixon playing chess on an international board. Then, there was the nonstrategic Gerry Ford (even he retired to California, in Palm Desert) and the naïve Jimmy Carter (who fortunately has not retired here), and the Soviet invasions of Afghanistan and Poland, and the taking of American hostages in Iran.. Where Nixon played chess, Reagan played poker, raising the table stakes so high that the Soviet empire crumbled. There was indeed morning in America.

But all the while, Reagan’s personal style left the Republican party here in an ambiguous state. The California Republican party never mustered strong leadership or sustained success at the state legislative or the Congressional level. We have produced state legislators like Pat Nolan with great energy who fell victim to a tainted Federal prosecution. We have produced Members of Congress with enormous potential like Bob Dornan who fell victim to himself. But the single dominant figure in Republican politics in California for the last two decades was not one of us. I speak of Pete Wilson, very much of a Nixon tactician who could teach Dick Morris a thing or two about triangulation.

But we talk about more than political personalities. California is not simply a state that has occupied a larger and larger amount of space on the national electoral map. It is a state that has spawned good ideas
The contemporary tax limitation movement started in 1978 with California’s Proposition 13. Essentially, Proposition 13 limited properly taxes in two ways. Property taxes could not exceed one percent of valuation at a time when property taxes were running as high as three percent of valuation. Further, your property tax bill could not increase from one year to the next by more than 2 percent, at a time when increases were in double digits.

If you believe Republicans took control of the House in the 1994 elections because of Newt Gingrich, and not Bill Clinton, then you believe Proposition 13 occurred because Californians were reading Capitalism and Freedom. Remember this sobering fact. Proposition 13 was destined to lose, like Howard Jarvis’ other statewide measures, except for two occurrences. Reassessment notices with huge increases in assessments were mailed in key counties weeks before the election. Also, it was revealed perhaps six weeks before the election that the State of California had a surplus of billions of dollars. Since proposition 13, liberals have learned not to cut government, but to try to raise revenue in different ways. That’s another subject.

California is the largest state with the initiative process. In many ways, as we go, so goes the nation. Just as Proposition 13 spawned successful measures to limit property taxes in other states, the national movement against racial and gender preferences started in 1996 with Proposition 209. But the leadership of the Republican party nationally, and in California, has been sufficiently myopic as to avoid issues like Proposition 209. When they get involved, they do so clumsily, so that they hurt themselves and the issue, as they appear expedient and divisive, rather principled and unifying.

In many ways, issues and political personalities are intertwined. Let’s work backwards for a few minutes, before we look forward, because looking at the past will provide us with clues on where we are going.

Consider the two United States Senate seats. One seat, which currently is held by that intellectual powerhouse, Barbara Boxer, was held in the early sixties by the liberal Republican Tom Kuchel. Kuchel was defeated in a primary by then State Education Superintendent Max Rafferty. In the same 1968 general election for President that Richard Nixon won, Rafferty, who seemed to scare voters with his fire and brimstone style, was defeated by liberal iconoclast Alan Cranston, one time leader of California’s California Democratic Council. Cranston, who had been discredited by his practice, as California State Controller, of appointing tax appraisers who contributed to his campaign, ran a centrist campaign. Afterwards, he showed the power of incumbency. A master of constituent service, especially in helping Republican businessman, Cranston voted liberal but sounded moderate in his radio sound bites. He was everywhere on television and radio.

Cranston was reelected three times. The first time, in post-Watergate 1974, Cranston defeated H.L. "Bill" Richardson, an affable conservative who sought to construct a preposterous coalition of gun owners, hunters and fishermen, recreational vehicle owners, and evangelical Christians. The second reelection campaign for Cranston was in 1980, the strong Republican year in which Ronald Reagan was elected. Cranston defeated Paul Gann, the lesser-known half of Jarvis-Gann who two years earlier had revolutionized California with Proposition 13. Like Richardson, Gann ran an inept campaign, seeking to capitalize on a born-again Christian base that was hardly Republican at that time. The third time, In 1986, Cranston barely defeated U.S. Congressman Ed Zschau who, in turn, had defeated Bruce Herschensohn in a primary. Zschau was a good campaigner who fell victim to the Cranston’s dirty tricks campaign, which funded supposed independent expenditure negative TV advertising against him to evade campaign finance laws.

Finally, in 1992, Cranston was no longer viable, victim to his cozy relationship with savings and loan tycoon Charles Keating, himself a one-time crusading anti-pornography conservative who had headed Citizens for Decency Through Law, whose chief spokesman was Bob Dornan, just before Dornan as elected to Congress. This time, Bruce Herschensohn was the nominee, having defeated Tom Campbell, who sat out the election. Herschensohn lost to Barbara Boxer, again falling victim to Democratic dirty tricks at the end. Finally, last year, in 1998, Barbara Boxer defeated State Treasurer Matt Fong who ran a lackluster underfunded campaign.

What can we learn from the Boxer seat? In Max Rafferty, Bill Richardson, and Paul Gann, we ran variously conservative candidates who lacked money and an appealing political presence. None of these candidates made effective use of television and radio advertising. Zschau, and then Herschensohn, would have won, absent dirty tricks and, in Herschensohn’s case, he was harmed by Bush’s early concession of California. Herschensohn’s political base had been defined by his years as a commentator on highly rated KABC-TV in Los Angeles. As for Fong in 1998, his television ads featured his mother asking people to vote for him. Fong had defeated Darrell Issa, a businessman who ran a silly campaign in which, even after Micheal Huffington’s $30 million campaign, Issa boasted about how much money he would spend. So, we can see that it is not a rejection of conservatism that accounts for someone as liberal, and as dumb, as Boxer Boxer represented this great state.

Let us now turn to what has been called the jinxed U.S. Senate seat, which political expert Tony Quinn reminds me is the historic seat of the Hiram Johnson, who led the fight against the League of Nations and who joined the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. In 1958, Governor Goodwin Knight and U.S. Senator Bill Knowland decided, inexplicably, to trade offices and push a right-to-work initiative at the same time. Political hubris. The initiative energized the opposition. Knight lost the Governorship to Attorney General Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, and Knowland lost the Senate race to Clair Engle, a veteran California politician first elected to the California State Senate in 1942 and then the U.S. Congress in 1944. Now, in 1962, four years after Governor Knight had lost the Senate race, and four years after Sen. Knowland had lost the Governorship to Pat Brown, Pat Brown was reelected, defeating Richard Nixon who was trying for a political comeback after losing the Presidency in 1960. Parenthetically, note that Nixon, after that defeat, was pronounced politically dead. Meanwhile, back to the Senate where, in 1964, Clair Engle, suffering from a brain tumor, did not withdraw from the primary and lost to former JFK Press Secretary Pierre Salinger. When Engle died, Governor Brown appointed Salinger to fill the unexpired term.
Salinger, running as an incumbent, was defeated by actor George Murphy. That was in 1964, the same year Barry Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson. Was Murphy a conservative? In many ways, he was. But he won because he was considered a nice guy. Indeed, that same year, a measure called Proposition 14 was on the ballot to repeal the Rumford Fair Housing Act and to prevent further such anti-discriminatory legislation interfering with property rights. By the way, to show you how times have changed, the liberal Los Angeles Times supported Proposition 14. That is, the Times supported a flat prohibition on so-called fair housing legislation. In any case, Murphy was asked how he would vote on this high visibility ballot issue. "Good heavens," he replied, and then lectured voters on the sanctity of the voting booth. Murphy told them soldiers had died to protect the secret ballot, and he would never say how he would vote. And that kind of campaigning worked a generation ago.

Do not lose sight of this: A bad year for Goldwater and Republicans. But actor George Murphy wins. Again and again, Californians go for an affable public personality.

The jinxed seat. Clair Engle did not complete his term. Salinger did not serve a full term. And Murphy, following disclosures that he, while U.S. Senator, was on a private consulting contract with conservative business tycoon Pat Frawley, lost to Congressman John Tunney, son of the boxer. Conservatism did not lead to Murphy’s loss. Indeed, that same year, Bill Brock won in Tennessee and Jim Buckley won in New York. But this California seat continued jinxed. Six short years later, in 1976, even while Jimmy Carter won the Presidency, John Tunney was defeated by S.I. Hayakawa, who ran an eclectic campaign that capitalized on Hayakawa, as San Francisco State College president, standing up to student radicals in the 60s. Despite relative obscurity following that incident, the memory of the slight man physically confronting student thugs, solidified his identity for years to come. But Hayakawa tended to fall asleep, and not merely figuratively, in the U.S. Senate. So he, too, served only one term.

Hayakawa’s successor was Pete Wilson who, in a multi-candidate Republican primary race, was the only candidate with a base – San Diego. Pete Wilson then was elected in November primarily because his opponent was by-then the unpopular Jerry Brown, whose anti-growth small is beautiful philosophy was incompatible with the recession.. Wilson was blessed with another weak opponent six years later, in 1988, Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy and broken the one-term spell of this seat. Then, two years later, the seat’s instability reappeared. Upon Wilson’s election as Governor in 1990, Wilson appointed a crony, John Seymour, a colorless and unknown state senator who offered little except loyalty to Wilson. No wonder Seymour, who could not energize anyone, much less conservatives, was defeated by Dianne Feinstein when he sought election just two years later, in 1992, to the balance of Wilson’s unexpired term. Feinstein herself, running for her first full-term in 1994, which, incidentally was her third statewide race in six years – losing to Wilson in 1990 for Governor, defeating Seymour for Senator in 1992, was now running against Michael Huffington, a first-term Congressman. Again, the race was void of ideas. Huffington, tried to rally the Christian right while spending $30 million in a cliché-ridden anachronistic campaign that attacked Feinstein as a "tax and spend Democrat."

In sum, we see that California voters tend to go more for personality than for issues. How else explain the great disparities, such as Goldwater losing badly in 1964 and Murphy winning, or Carter defeating Ford, but Hayakawa winning? Consider the Governorship. Voters rejected Nixon in 1962 because they felt he was more interested in running for President than serving the state. Ronald Reagan, a nice conservative in the George Murphy mold, won in 1966 and 1970. Just as Murphy refused to tell his position on Proposition 14 in 1964 , Ronald Reagan in 1966 was able to get away with refusing to condemn the John Birch Society.

Jerry Brown was blessed with boring moderate Republican opponents. He defeated State Controller Houston Fluornoy in 1974 and State Attorney General Evelle Younger in 1978. A boring but more conservative George Deukmejian defeated Tom Bradley twice, in 1982 and 1986. The first time was due to absentee ballots. Bradley won on election day, but Deukmejian ultimately won through the votes of people who voted by mail. The second time, four years later, Bradley had, if you’ll permit me, a colorless campaign. Wilson ran a better and more conservative campaign than Feinstein in 1990, then proceeded, upon his election, to repudiate his base by raising taxes. In 1994, an underfunded, then-conservative challenger, Ron Unz, received more than one-third of the vote with a minimal and grossly underfunded campaign. Wilson was blessed with Kathleen Brown in the Fall of ‘94. The crime and immigration issues helped him, but so did an inept Kathleen Brown campaign.

In 1998, Gray Davis ran a disciplined, centrist campaign. Lungren, hailed inexplicably by National Review as the "next Ronald Reagan" ran a campaign that emphasized himself. But Lungren was not, and is not, Ronald Reagan. He lost badly and helped bring down others.

The future of conservatism in California means a lot of things. Here are a few. We must reconcile the libertarian and traditionalist strands of conservatism in the kind of friendly and engaging manner that made George Murphy and Ronald Reagan appealing. Yes, there is a social conservatism among the state’s very rapidly growing Latino population. But it is irrelevant unless these voters see conservatives as truly reaching out. Proposition 187 was a clumsy and poorly drafted measure . The Pete Wilson "They just keep coming" television spot was overkill and certainly aired to excess. Conservatives made a principled start with the victorious Proposition 209, a dignified and positive effort to end race and gender preferences. Proposition 227, to end bilingual education, was another positive move. In both cases, the Republican party, anxious for wedge issues, bungled, just as they may yet do next year with the Defense of Marriage Initiative, which is being marketed as a religious crusade against homosexuality, rather than an affirmation of marriage.

In a state with Silicon Valley, conservatism should be for an Internet that is self-regulated, not government regulated. Certainly, we should go far beyond knee-jerk support for big business toward embracing a truly free economy. That allows for populism – opposing state and local government subsidies for urban redevelopment, shopping malls, football stadiums. When it comes to criminal justice, we need to lead the way from discredited policies that imprison marijuana users and drug addicts. Clearly, we can show a greater appreciation for civil liberties while advocating the strongest possible penalties to lock up repeat violent criminals. We have issues like school choice, which was mangled in a premature 1993 initiative that set the movement back. Contrary to what you hear, the future of conservatism in California is not held hostage to demographic trends that favor minorities and youth. We are hostage only to the incompetents who inhibit more thoughtful communications. The demographic reality is that form 1991 to 1996, much of the drop in the white population was due to a reversible exodus to nearby Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Washington, and elsewhere.

The future of conservatism is not bleak, but it is not Buchanan. It is an optimistic and future-oriented vision that emphasizes the opportunities of the market place with the thoughtful need, in a turbulent environment, for civility.