California, the Anti-State

Politically, California is irrelevant.

Despite California's obvious economic, social and cultural importance -- it is home to one in eight Americans, not to mention Hollywood and Silicon Valley -- it barely counts politically. Look at this week's presidential primary, where Californians merely ratified a decision made weeks before on the Democratic Party's presidential nominee.

The irrelevance of California in presidential selection process highlights a larger problem of America's democracy: the nation's most populous state has been, politically speaking, silenced by mice that roar: smaller states that are less complicated, more nimble and speak louder on the national stage.

California's size lies at the heart of this paradox: how come the nation's largest state is a Mini Me in the realm of politics. Doesn't size matter in America?

Part of California's paradox is that the state is solidly Democratic at a time when Republicans control the Presidency and both houses of Congress. The latest reminder that President George W. Bush doesn't need California to get re-elected came in February when Bush released his proposed budget for the next fiscal year. Of the nine states Bush wants to receive less federal money next year than this year, California is slated for the largest cut. And in a special Valentine to the Bay Area, President Bush proposes to raise the "rent" the city of San Francisco pays to the federal government for the Hetch Hetchy reservoir -- from $30,000 to a staggering $8 million annually.

Is there another country in the world where a President seeking re-election in a tight race would blow off his country's most populous, wealthy and diverse state? Only in America could California, whose boosters fancy the state to be a nation, have so little clout with the powers that be.

Republican hegemony is only a symptom, not a cause, of California's political irrelevance. No Democratic candidate for the Presidency -- and certainly not the presumptive nominee, John Kerry -- embodies the spirit of California either. Nor do Bush's Democratic rivals spend much time worrying about the fate of the state. And why should they? California has become the anti-state. The mystifying gubernatorial-recall election last year underscored the emergence of California as a political counter-indicator, a negative polarity, for the rest of the nation.

"Now people from other states point to us and say we don't want to be like you," says Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project in Sacramento.

California wasn't always the Big Ugly. Once, the state was the epitome of the new American frontier, a land of endless charm and imagination that allowed the nation to forget about declining Rust Belt cities and industries. California's ambitious farmers were lubricated by water, gained through adroit politics. The state's sunrise industries were marinated by large investments from the federal government. Good weather attracted the best and the brightest from other states.

Out of the California's intoxicating brew of irrepressible individualism and pragmatic communalism arose a schizoid politics that for decades defined both the Left and the Right in an America prone to simplistic nostrums. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, California set the political tone of the nation: electing two presidents (Nixon and Reagan), creating the country's finest public university system, launching the tax revolt and incubating the movement for gay and lesbian rights.

By the election of Bill Clinton, in 1992, California had become the Ur-state, the epi-center of American optimism. But unnoticed during the Clinton years and very much noticed since Bush took the Presidency, California reached a tipping point: the chickens of hyper-growth, sharp inequalities and skin-flint public services came home to roost.