State candidates promise a Utopia they can’t deliver

The state of California is mired in what may be its most dire fiscal crisis ever. The budget deficit is rising, political extremism in Sacramento is growing more extreme, and unemployment is barely budging on the local or national levels.

So I turned to the latest campaign materials from our newly anointed candidates for governor and U.S. senator expecting to find some hard truths for the voters to chew over as they look ahead to the Nov. 2 election.

Perhaps there would be policy papers vowing to correct the flaws of the initiative process, which allow citizens simultaneously to vote themselves new spending programs and new tax cuts. Or maybe the candidates would be taking on the inanity of term limits that have turned the Legislature into a nursery.

What did I find instead?

Brochures and websites featuring glossy photographs of sandy beaches and purple mountain majesties. Paeans to California’s indomitable spirit, which will see us through. Pledges of millions of new “green jobs,” thousands of fixed schools, the luster of the University of California restored, waste rooted out. Oh, and no new taxes.

In other words, Utopia.

The promise of sacrifice-free solutions to economic and social problems has been a feature of political campaigns across the country since the first honey-tongued farmer stepped on an upturned wooden crate in his local market square. Yet California’s political utopianism has a flavor all its own. Here politicians fall over each other to make the most extravagant promises that we can have it all: first-class state services at a coach-class price, discounted.

What is curious about the utopianism being offered is that much of it is coming from two card-carrying members of corporate America: Meg Whitman, the former EBay chief executive running for governor, and Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who is campaigning for the U.S. Senate.

The essence of CEO-ship is a hard-headed acceptance of real-life conditions and the options, limited as they may be, to address them. The essence of utopian politics is the refusal to acknowledge facts, coupled with the purveying of nostrums that can’t work and have nothing to offer voters but the fantasy of painless solutions.

The campaign rhetoric of Whitman and Fiorina comes from the business world, but their platforms are utopian to the core.

To find the origins of California utopianism, one has to go back at least to the gubernatorial election of 1934, surely the strangest and most fascinating political contest in California history. The most prominent candidate was the socialist Upton Sinclair, best known as the author of “The Jungle,” the muckraking 1906 novel about the meatpacking industry.

With the Depression having taken the bloom off the California rose, the journalist George Creel wrote later, “swarms of self-anointed ‘saviors’ poured out of every pecan grove, each with a large pink pill for the cure of every social and economic ill.”

In his campaign for the Democratic nomination, Sinclair promoted a program he called EPIC, for End Poverty in California. The program involved the state’s taking over all idle factories and farms, handing out pensions of $50 a month to elderly residents and awarding lavish exemptions on property taxes.

These proposals would have increased California’s $30-million deficit tenfold and stripped almost every county in the state of all its income. But it absorbed the sincere self-confidence of its creator.

Sinclair beat seven Democratic opponents, including Creel, in the primary. The two political parties then made common cause with each other and with conservative business leaders from the banks and Hollywood, who arranged to smear Sinclair out of the running. He lost the general election to a Republican fusion candidate.

The Sinclair race reminds us that utopian politics knows no partisan boundaries; it’s available to socialists and conservatives alike, and infuses the brochures, websites and videos produced for Whitman and Fiorina on the GOP side and Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown and Sen. Barbara Boxer on the Democratic side.

One claim implicit in these campaigns is that California’s ills can be cured without cutting programs with popular support (which is, let’s face it, most of them), raising taxes or addressing the structural flaws in state government.

Fiorina congratulates herself for signing the “taxpayer protection pledge,” a contrivance of the anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist shoved down the throats of GOP candidates for office nationwide. By signing she promises that she won’t vote to raise taxes, ever, under any circumstances.

Is this the sort of judgment she acquired during a career in corporate management? If the Hewlett-Packard board had come to her at some point with the news that, say, cash flow and capital were plummeting and steps had to be taken for the company’s survival, would she have said, “Sorry, fellas, but I’ve tied my hands by signing a pledge never to raise prices or borrow in the debt markets”?

Apparently eager to overlook the damage that term limits have done already to the state Legislature’s stability and professionalism, Whitman (who also signed the no-tax pledge) advocates making the lawmakers part-time, thus ensuring that even less will be achieved in Sacramento in the future.

I’m not an expert on EBay, but I don’t recall hearing that when the company’s growth slowed in 2007, she proposed voluntarily giving up a major source of revenue or turning her top management into part-timers.

Brown and Boxer, being political incumbents, purvey a utopianism of another sort. Former Gov. Brown asks voters to look at his long record in government, including the years he spent as attorney general extracting multibillion-dollar settlements from consumer rip-offs. On primary night he called for “an agenda of humility,” whatever that is, and laced into “the politicians,” whomever they are, for fiddling through the crisis. He said we have to live within our means, which made him sound like that other nonpolitician, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Boxer, meanwhile, offers a list of federal appropriations — $5 billion, by my quick calculation — she has brought home for California.

I suppose it’s naive to expect candidates to tell voters they can’t have it all. But the election of 2010 is one of the most important in the state’s history, an opportunity to confront seriously the partisan shibboleths and easy fixes that have brought the state to the brink of collapse. It’s not too late for that to happen, or to remember that the “Utopia” created by Sir Thomas More was a fictional place.

Michael Hiltzik’s column runs Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at http://161.35.110.226/hiltzik, check out https://www.facebook.com/hiltzik, and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.