This week is a personal step, marking half a century of writing on the constantly evolving political atmosphere of California.
My move to the Capitol Office of the Union of Sacramento on March 3, 1975, was one of its efforts to become more competitive with the Sacramento bee.
The bee had a large Capitol staff and thought that its only real competition in the political arena was Los Angeles Times. Al Don, who had been the only journalist of the union, and I was determined to change this situation.
The Capitol underwent one of its periodic political upheavals, it was therefore – in the journalistic sense – an environment rich in targets. Jerry BrownThe 36 -year -old son of former governor Pat Brown, had been inaugurated as governor two months earlier and already became a political pop star.
The vaguely political character of the left contrasts strongly with that of the predecessor Ronald Reagan, and he made waves by filling his administration of civil rights defenders, sympathizers of agricultural workers and environmental zerns.
Although the Brown Democratic colleagues held the majority in the two chambers of the Legislative Assembly, he was unpopular, having based his campaign on the photo of the Capitol as a corruption sump which required cleaning. He had sponsored a Successful voting measure of 1974, The law on political reform, to limit the contributions of the campaign and what lobbyists could spend on the legislators, as he said, “two hamburgers and a coke”.
The youth and the impetuous disdain of Brown for the protocol of the unwritten Capitol have irritated a legislature composed almost entirely of white men of middle or even elderly. A senator was elected for the first time in the Legislative Assembly in 1938, the year Brown was born.
There were a few women in the assembly, but the The first woman was not elected to the Senate Until 1976. Brown, on the other hand, appointed a number of women in major administration stations, in particular Pink birdwhich he then appointed chief judge of the Supreme Court of the State, and Adriana GianturcoWho won the contempt for the legislators for blocked new highway constructions and help institute carpools.
Brown’s clashes with the Legislative Assembly, its two presidential campaigns and its battles between the two parties for control offered many opportunities for journalism concerned with the gap as giving and I have led guerrilla warfare against the bee. For several years, we beat everyone in the state budget before he was officially released by Brown.
Giving and I – and later a third journalist from the Union – we had a lot of fun at that time. However, after having covered the Capitol for a few years, I came to believe that California’s policy needed another approach and began to write a daily chronicle on the relationship between the evolution of California and its policy.
This column was launched in January 1981, continued for three years in the Union and 33 more years in the bee before changing sites again in 2017 to calm – around 11,000 columns so far, and to count.
Among other things, the chronicle allowed me to assess the enormous contrast between the first governor of Brown and his second several decades later.
The contrasts, however, extend beyond the personality of Brown. As the demography of California has evolved, as well as the legislator – much fewer white men, Many more womenLatinos and Americans of Asian origin and many with gender identities or sexual orientations that People were less tolerant from in 1975.
That said, today’s legislature is less openly corrupted but more secret and less deliberative than it was 50 years ago. The audiences of the bill on bills were really relevant then but are Especially the charades devoid of meaning now.
California has almost twice as many people than in 1975 and its demographic attributes and its economy underwent massive transformations. Unfortunately, the capacity – or the will of the Capitol – to face the political problems resulting from these changes has decreased.