LOS ANGELES -- Lord, but California is election-weary. America's mega-state endured the dreariest of gubernatorial contests in 2002, followed by the most surprising of gubernatorial recalls in 2003, the drama of the presidential race in 2004 and, just last November, the who-asked-for-it special election in which business and labor spent nearly a quarter-billion dollars fighting over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's wildly unpopular ballot initiatives. No wonder something like 70 percent of California's registered voters elected not to vote in Tuesday's primary, which was essentially a sliming contest between the two leading Democratic candidates for governor.
If the states are laboratories of democracy, as Louis Brandeis called them, then Californians have become guinea pigs in a vast failed experiment. Hold a major election every year -- complete with a torrent of attack ads and mailings and recorded phone messages from a startling array of personages attesting to the virtues of your state assembly candidate -- and eventually nobody will vote. The relation between permanent campaigns and voter participation, it turns out, is inverse.
Still, a few hardy souls, steeled in their civic duty, stumbled to the polls here on Tuesday. California Democrats chose state Treasurer Phil Angelides to go up against Schwarzenegger in November's gubernatorial contest. For some time the conventional wisdom has been that the liberal Angelides would have a harder time beating Arnold than the centrist state controller, Steve Westly -- the man Angelides defeated on Tuesday. But Westly, despite the estimated $37 million of his own money that he put into the race, never really established a distinct identity with state voters. His achievements as controller were imperceptible, and polling showed that voters imputed to him all manner of conflicting positions. California may be the land of malleable identities, but Westly's lightness of being finally proved too insubstantial even for Californians.
Angelides, by contrast, is a figure of hard-core beliefs and rough edges. The Democratic nominee is an unabashed liberal. As treasurer, he responded to the state's Enron-engendered energy crisis by proposing to establish a public power company. The centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign has been his call to raise taxes on the wealthiest Californians -- the only way, he argues, to boost the state's chronically low level of per-pupil education spending.
If Angelides were facing off against a conventional right-wing California Republican, his brand of liberalism would very likely prevail in this solidly blue state. But Schwarzenegger is no conventional Republican, and since his disastrous initiative campaigns last fall, he has scurried to the center in every way possible. The Governator restocked his office with environmental activists and a Democratic chief of staff. He joined with the Democrats in the legislature to place on November's ballot several massive bond measures to rebuild California's transportation and education systems. He now campaigns as the neo-Pat Brown, master rebuilder of the Golden State.
The polling makes clear that Californians like the thought of the new roads and schools, but it also turns up the same distemper and desire for change that afflicts voters nationally. Schwarzenegger's approval rating has improved since last year, but it still hovers under 50 percent, and the state's powerful labor movement husbanded its resources in the primary -- unions helped Angelides, but not all that much -- to better bash Arnold in the general. The state is in for yet another megabucks battle this November, in which a serious liberal will give a serious centrist a serious challenge.
In the other nationally watched contest out here, Republican Brian Bilbray eked out a 4 percentage-point victory over Democrat Francine Busby in a special election to succeed Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Jail) in a solidly Republican district abutting San Diego. Each national party can take some solace in the outcome -- the Republicans that Bilbray, hammering on the immigration issue in this close-to-the-border district, didn't actually lose; the Democrats that Busby, hammering on the incompetence and corruption of the administration and the Republican Congress, came so close.
The themes of the coming election have emerged with crystalline clarity. Democrats decry the debacles -- the war, the price of gas, the sleaze -- devised by the President and Congress. The best distillation of the Republican campaign may be the radio ad for a North Carolina congressional challenger, alleging that his Democratic opponent, Rep. Brad Miller, "sponsored a bill to let American homosexuals bring their foreign homosexual lovers to this country on a marriage visa. If Miller had his way, America would be nothing but one big fiesta for illegal aliens and homosexuals."
Republicans run against one big fiesta; Democrats run against one big disasta. Fiesta, I think, lacks the punch of disasta; but that's just my hunch: I'm not saying it hasta.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.