The importance of being Earnest...

As white papers go, a heavy one landed on my desk yesterday. It came with a title page and a quotation "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." Attribution was given to Groucho Marx but actually, Ernest Benn is credited with that rhetoric in Michael Moncur's Cynical Quotations dictionary. But who knows Earnest?

During the County Chairman's Association (CCA) meeting held at the CRP Convention in Anaheim last month there was plenty of rhetoric going on. What else would you call using a strategy memo provided by Bill Thomas' associate, Roman Buhler, to vote out a censure of House Republican Leader (and conservative) John Doolittle for having a divergence of opinion? The County Party chairmen and women, with a 16-14 affirmative vote, passed a unanimous motion supporting the Governor's Prop. 77 "yes" endorsement. If a two vote margin of victory says 'unanimous', then surely rhetoric is alive and well? But who is Earnest?

The redistricting reform itself is full of rhetoric. On the one hand, we have Arnold-isms and on another, UCLA Law Professor Dan Lowenstein's Iliad 'aka' white paper. The Governor tells us we need reform because process alone can guarantee results. Dan Lowenstein rebuts with more simplistic "rule of law" arguments: civil rights and the federal Voting Rights Laws; selection criteria for judges which are not random nor without the controls for qualifications or competence that were in place when Pete Wilson won a fair redistricting map in 1992; holding a public vote on new lines BEFORE implementation in the next election cycle. Who is Earnest, anyway?

Al Gore used to talk about reform too. In fact, he spawned an entire book about it, named a movement "reinvention" and lost an election. Perhaps Team Arnold needs to coin a new term for the Governor to win friends and influence the people. Surely the Governor's men don't want him to turn into Al Gore who invented the 'net? Should House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas find a way to send more than 77 cents of every federal dollar collected from Californians back to California to help us pay for safer roads, better schools and legal immigration enforcement? Yes? No? Who is... Earnest?

Some might argue a more appropriate quote for the white paper bomb on Proposition 77 might have been "Politics is the art of the possible" by Otto von Bismarck, founder of the German Empire. I love quotes, use them all the time. Quotes are like verbal caricatures, down and dirty. My Rhetoric professor used to ask, "If you can't make your point with one good quote, what use are you?" It wasn't his favorite saying, that one is even more appropriate to today's issue advocacy efforts, "You may not know anything, but if you can't talk about it, what good are you?"