Thomas D. Elias

Gerrymandering makes the election of Lt. Gov. John Garamendi to a seat in Congress from the East Bay suburbs of San Francisco and Oakland almost a certainty when runoff day arrives on Nov. 3.

Almost everyone in and around California's state government knows something realized by only a few who are not directly involved:

It's not the two-thirds vote requirement that's been behind the budget delays and IOUs that have plagued this state. It's not even the huge ideological divide that sees Democrats defend labor union interests at every turn while Republicans fight firmly against the tax increases craved by public employee union leaders driven to produce both job security and constant raises for their members

Former Gov. Gray Davis calls this “a possible Prop. 13 moment,” adding that “I think something big is about to happen.” What he means is that Californians are so disgusted with state government they might be ready to make wholesale changes. He’s an expert on such moments: the last time one arose, he became the first California governor ever thrown out of office.

To understand why most Californians – and other Americans, too – feel so alienated from their representatives in Congress, it helps to observe an old dictum: Follow the money.

The most interesting thing about the New America Foundation think tank’s recent Sacramento seminar on replacing the California state constitution with something unknown and unpredictable was that even the foundation’s designated election law expert had to admit the “Pandora’s Box” problem.

California has a budget crisis as bad as any state’s, and it has a water crisis that’s nearly unique. But no California crisis can match the dropout crisis. For most of the last 10 years, this column and a very few other news outlets reported that the high school dropout rate in California was about one-third, even while school districts reported much smaller rates. That is, of every nine students who enrolled in middle school in any given fall, about three would disappear before their purported high school graduation day rolled around.

The announcement on the information line of the Pacific Palisades Democratic Club one recent day said a lot more than intended.

Want to know the recipe for cooking up larger and larger hate group memberships? Take the election of a liberal President, add a governor reneging on his “no new taxes” pledge, toss in the highest unemployment in 30 years and oh, yes, make sure that the new President is an African American.

Few state officials or activists have been more vocal during California’s long-running budget battles than Jack O’Connell, the state’s two-term Superintendent of Schools, who hopes to become its next governor.

For many months, Americans have heard politicians from President Obama to Gov. Schwarzenegger and many lesser figures repeat the cliché that "every crisis offers an opportunity."