San Francisco Chronicle

Below the surface of all the big issues facing California -- education, prisons, transportation, immigration, political reform -- lies the disturbing reality that the grassroots of citizen political involvement are drying up. In recent years, alienation between Californians and their government leaders has burned like a wildfire across the state, melting voter turnout and heating up cynicism toward the political establishment in Sacramento...

read more

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger renews his call for an independent redistricting commission, a new opinion poll finds that California voters overwhelmingly support improvements in the election process, but there's a catch -- it depends on who is proposing them.

For generations, being a big-city mayor was akin to being confined to the political equivalent of Devil’s Island. Even if you escaped imprisonment, it was only with the shirt on your back.

But today, mayors across America are riding an unprecedented wave of upward mobility. Here in California, for example, the men most widely touted to become governor once the Terminator terminates are not any of the myriad of statewide Democratic officeholders, but two high-profile mayors, San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles’ Antonio Villaraigosa.

Imagine that the transportation bond measure on Tuesday’s ballot, Proposition 1B, signifies a return to the golden era of California, when the state’s future was on the drawing board.

This is the dream the measure’s backers, including legislators, local officials and the coterie around Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, would like us to believe. In its endorsement of the proposition, one newspaper crowed that "for the first time in nearly 50 years, California is on the brink of building for the future."

Deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars a year are projected to last for decades; efforts to reform Social Security have fallen flat; and no one is talking about the elephant in the room -- how to fix the nation's health-care system. We do not know what the makeup of Congress will be following the November elections, but there is one thing we know for sure: the state of fiscal affairs will still be a disaster.

Like binge drinkers or fast-food fanatics, American urban leaders have had a tendency to run wild when things appear to be going well. But soon they will find that the good times are coming to end.

The prime culprit this time will be deflation of the residential real estate bubble, which has brought about a surge of tax collections and development.

Predictions of the demise of suburbia, choked to death by high gasoline prices, may be greatly exaggerated.

Conventional wisdom suggests that high prices at the pump mean less driving and, hence, the withering of far-flung suburbs, whose residents must drive to jobs, shopping and recreation.

When President Bush announced his support for an American Competitiveness Initiative in his State of the Union address in January -- including $136 billion over 10 years to boost research funding in the physical sciences and train 70,000 math and science teachers to improve the skills of American students -- many of California's scientists and teachers were stunned. Bush hasn't exactly shown much respect for science during his two terms as president.

As California's first large urbanized region, the Bay Area has a long and compelling history as a center of city life. When Fresno was little more than a couple of shacks and Los Angeles a gunslinger's cow town, San Francisco already saw itself as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city.

In each era of modern American history, California has been at the forefront. It emerged from the Depression and World War II as the nation's archetype of the suburban middle class. It marked the end of government expansion with Ronald Reagan and Proposition 13. And it ushered in the age of technology, as the birthplace of Apple, Intel and Hewlett-Packard.