Steve Westly looks like the candidate from Central Casting. California's controller, who is currently the front-runner in the state's June 6 Democratic primary for governor, has tousled hair, a toothpaste-ad smile and a photogenic family. The state's voters don't know a lot about Westly -- public service in Sacramento is one of the nation's highest forms of invisibility -- but apparently, they like what they've seen.
What they've seen are a whole lot of very skillful ads that Westly -- a onetime Stanford University business professor who went to work at a Silicon Valley start-up called eBay and made himself a fortune -- has funded out of pocket. The ads tout Westly's environmentalism, his work at eBay (one big business that people genuinely like), his -- well, his good looks. And they've worked. In the most recent Field poll, Westly opened a lead of 37 percent to 26 percent over his rival, state Treasurer Phil Angelides, whose financially outmatched campaign is only now back on the air after nearly a month of going dark.
Angelides is an impassioned wonk who looks every bit the part. Gangly, voluble, brilliant and not shy about showing it, Angelides was a developer who served as the state Democratic Party chairman in the early 1990s and who's just wrapping up his second term as the state's chief financial officer, and probably the country's most powerful proponent of socially responsible capitalism. As a guiding force on the boards of California's public employee retirement funds -- the largest investment funds in the nation -- Angelides has steered millions of dollars to inner-city development, small businesses and renewable energy technology. He's also used the power of these funds to alter boardroom behavior (he was the first official, for instance, to demand that the New York Stock Exchange take back the platinum parachute it gave to departing chief executive Richard Grasso).
More than any other California Democrat, Angelides has opposed, from the start, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the Governator was trying unsuccessfully to balance the budget by underfunding schools and cutting back admissions to the state's universities, Angelides countered by proposing to raise taxes on California's wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers -- a proposal he's not backing away from now that he's a candidate.
When I interviewed Westly last weekend (coincidentally but not inappropriately in the boardroom of an investment firm), he took issue with Angelides's economics, arguing that by closing some loopholes and doing a better job of collecting taxes, he could close the deficit and fund the schools -- and only then, if necessary, consider raising taxes on the rich. "I'm progressive on social issues and fiscally moderate," he said. "Phil's not. If voters want a candidate who will raise $10 to $15 billion in taxes, they should vote for the other guy."
Angelides (whom I also interviewed last weekend, coincidentally but not inappropriately as he was about to address a union audience) counters that "no one thinks you can close a $4 billion budget hole through efficiencies. Westly says we ought to consider rolling back the tax breaks on the rich as a last resort. When's that? We're 43rd out of the 50 states in per-pupil spending. Should we wait until we're 50th? Enough is enough.
"The right has stigmatized common-sense investment in the economy," Angelides said. "I'm proposing a smaller tax hike than what Pat Brown, Pete Wilson and Ronald Reagan all asked Californians to do."
Seven weeks before the primary, millions of California Democrats remain undecided, but Angelides acknowledges his is an uphill climb. What might save him would be a massive independent expenditure campaign from California's unions, particularly the Service Employees International Union and the California Teachers Association, which last year provided most of the cash that helped defeat Schwarzenegger's special-election ballot measures. Precisely because they spent so heavily last year, however, the unions don't have that much money in the till right now. As well, they need to save some resources to help the eventual Democratic winner take on Schwarzenegger in the fall -- and they may not want to antagonize Westly, whose campaign is plainly in a groove that Angelides's has not reached yet.
For liberals, the prospect of Angelides and New York gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer running America's two largest blue states would be a dream come true: The Democrats could use two chief executives willing to take on the excesses of big business in an age of big-business excess. Whether Angelides can make it past the primary, though, is not at all clear. For his service as state party chairman and his fidelity to progressive causes, he may be, as Lenin said of Bukharin, the rightful favorite of the party. Then again, after Lenin died, it wasn't Bukharin who made it to the top.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.
