This week, the nation watched as grappled again with the ordinarily straightforward task of counting votes in an election. While large states such as Florida declare election winners within 24 hours, California may take up to two weeks to count all the votes.
Even cannot count its votes in the time of large states despite giving the Clerk an annual budget of $336 million and a $448,179 a year salary with the help of 1,100 budgeted positions.
In most states, voters would be outraged by the incompetence, waste, and inefficiency. However, in the Golden State, voters shrug, as if they can demand no more from their elected officials than subpar performance.
Call it the Politics of Low Expectations and California is the model for the nation.
For years, my students have asked me what the secret is to a successful marriage approaching four decades (For full disclosure, there is an ongoing contractual dispute over my counting eight years of monogamous dating â leading to two dates on our anniversary cakes). The answer is simple. I reduced her expectations so low that I have exceeded them on a daily basis.
That began with our eloping on New Years Eve. We were married after an actual shotgun wedding where the clearly expectant teenage brides family was screaming profanities at the teenage groom. After paying $50 and using my ring for a wedding ring, we stepped out on the street of Old Town Alexandria as a drunk was retching in the gutter. That left only room for improvement.
On any given day, my wife is simply grateful that I have not traded the house and car for a handful of magic beans.
California Democrats seem to have applied my approach to matrimony to , creating a politicians dream voter with few expectations.
That is most evident with Gov. s infamous high-speed train to nowhere.
In 2008, voters were promised a 500-mile High-Speed train running from to Los Angeles for $33 billion. It is now projected to cost somewhere between $126 billion and $231 billion. After roughly two decades, no track has been laid, and the current plan is to focus on building a track between Bakersfield and Merced.
Without any track to display, Newsom recently stood before a freight train on an existing track to insist that his train is moving speedily along.
One would think that citizens would be coming for their leaders with torches and pitchforks. Instead, there is a collective shrug as if it is perfectly normal to spend more than the entire budget of Amtrak on a non-existent train.
The same leaders have burned billions in other boondoggles, including a massive solar power farm that produced energy at a higher cost and incinerated thousands of birds a year.
California is facing a growing crisis of rising homelessness, dismal education scores, and an . It has also imposed taxes that make gas the most expensive in the nation while suppressing its own energy industry.
Now, after many voters took the unprecedented step of for governor and L.A. mayor, citizens will wait for weeks to learn the results of an election that would have been called days ago by third-world countries.
The same politics of low expectations are evident in other states. In , voters just shrug when told that they have a budget rivaling that of the entire state of Florida, resulting in awful educational, infrastructure, and other conditions. Voters have watched as wealthy taxpayers have taken their money and jobs to other states.
In return, figures like Mayor promise state-run grocery stores, which will cost tens of millions of dollars to build and operate at a loss.
In , elected officials allowed billions to be stolen in fraud while businesses fled a state rife with rioting and homelessness.
In virtually every major city from Los Angeles to to New York, public schools are spending massive amounts on education to graduate many students who lack basic proficiency in English a
