I misspent my adolescence in the 1970’s.  In the first part of that time, I went to public schools that were the best in the nation.  Ronald Reagan was Governor.  80% of the people could afford a median price home (about $25,000.00 at the time).  Freeways took about 5 years to build.  Gasoline was about 20 cents per gallon.  California had just finished to California Water Project.  It cost $300 a year to attend a UC school, and the total state budget was around $7 billion a year.  There were no government employee unions, and CalPERS was the example to the nation of the right way to run a pension system

Interesting time.  Recently my youngest daughter has hooked me on the television series "That ’70’s Show" which is rampant with sex, drugs, and rock and roll (which unfortunately the zeitgeist of the ’70’s), but really funny.  I had friends who were like the characters in that show.  I think that is what makes it so funny.  The show is set in Wisconsin, which is unfortunate, because it is so applicable to the State Capitol of California in the 1970’s.

The Chamber just stopped its commercials on Jerry Brown, which I think is a good thing.  They were boring, typical political commercials.  Jerry Brown’s a bad guy, he spent lots of money, yada, yada, yada.  Get some imagination.

Jerry Brown was that ’70’s Governor.  A loveable Kelso, caught up in the philosophy of the era, but not really smart.  By the time he left the Governor’s office, housing was so expensive that only 18% of the people could afford a median price house.  Taxes rose so fast that Proposition 13 was born.  Government spending exploded, and government unions were born.  We stopped building freeways, dams and oil refineries, and traffic jams, water shortages, and gasoline shortages followed.  Just about every problem in state government today can be traced back to some policy implemented by Jerry Brown when he was Governor.

But why say it serious?  He is that ’70’s Governor.  We could show Jerry Brown in the circle, coming up with the crazy idea that he implemented as Governor (the circle on the show, by the way, is where the characters in the show smoke marijuana, come up with crazy ideas, and then realize when they sober up that they can’t remember the ideas, or they are really stupid).  Most of the things Jerry Brown did had to be the product of some chemical alteration of his brain.  No sober person would do to California what Jerry Brown did.

And we should have fun pointing it out.  That ’70’s Governor, sitting around in the circle with Willie Brown, Gray Davis, and Rose Bird, smoking marijuana and saying "Hey, I know, let’s protect endangered species by stopping people from building houses" then sobering up and saying "What, we were protecting rats, weeds, and flies, I didn’t want that to happen." (The California Endangered Species Act as been used to protect the Stephens Kangaroo Rat, the Delhi flower loving Sand Fly, and several weeds in Riverside County).  People will get it, and we have lots of examples.  More important, it will make this election a little bit more fun, and remind Californians why we called him Governor Moonbeam

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.