Political Disillusionment

BERKELEY – There’s an election coming up. It seems to be of great importance nationally, but in California it seems awfully hard to get excited about. This is a very solidly Democratic region in a somewhat solidly Democratic state, so nothing is particularly contested. The Democrats are going to win just about everything except Governor, arguably the most important state office. In that race, they’ve responded to the Republican incumbent’s waning popularity by barely bothering to put up a candidate. The Democrats, the good guys, are going to win almost everything again. Why is this disappointing? It’s because the candidates all seem so uninspired.

I wonder if this can be blamed on term limits. The promise of the proponents of term limits was that it would get rid of the entrenched career politicians (those with experience), and gives others a chance to serve. What it seems to do in California is cause the career politicians to be shuffled – moved from obscure offices where they have experience to whatever office happens to be available. Thus we have the Insurance Commissioner becoming Lieutenant Governor, and the Lieutenant Governor becoming Insurance Commissioner. We have the Attorney General becoming the Treasurer. And, continuing the shuffle, the Treasurer, Phil Angelides, has become the candidate for Governor.

The Democratic establishment fought hard in the Gubernatorial Primary, when another candidate dared to try to disrupt the natural order of things by running against Angeledes. Indeed, the establishment seemed more excited about their chosen candidate than they had about anybody since former Governor Gray Davis, who they refused to put up a replacement candidate for long after his complete failure had become apparent, paving the way for Schwarzenegger’s election the first time. But it was an entirely negative, visionless, campaign (on both sides). Having won the primary, and having declared themselves in control of their party’s nomination process, the campaigning stopped, and Angelides disappeared for months. Some press reports have suggested this was a result of having spent all his money on the primary and not having anything less, rather than of not having anything to say. Either way, whether he has nothing to say, or can’t figure out how to budget for a campaign, it’s not encouraging.

So, who to vote for Governor? I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life. I may well vote Democratic on principle, but I can’t say I’d be happy if the Democratic candidate won. Schwarzenegger has seemed somewhat destructive when not running for reelection. He’s done some great things in the last few months, but I’m skeptical about whether it will continue. Still, he’s going to win, and given the circumstances it may be for the best.


There are also a bunch of ballot proposals, some of which are scary, and some of which seem like good ideas that it would be better to have go through the legislative process. Al Gore gave an impassioned speech in Berkeley on behalf of one of them on Monday, and drew a huge crowd. That was neat to watch. Too bad we can't find somebody of his caliber willing to be Governor.


In other news, there’s a neat website we were playing with a couple of days ago (yet another Google product). Gapminder lets you graph a whole bunch of demographic factors for a large number of countries, looking at how they relate and change over time. One stat that I found kind of interesting from a telecom development perspective is that while income level in a country has a huge impact on phones or Internet users per capita, percentage of the population that’s urban appears have had less and less of an impact over time. For the current data, that correlation is visible at all only for the poorest countries. Of course, this all assumes an accurate source of data, and it doesn’t say where it’s getting its data from.

Travel burnout and travel redemption

“There’s no glamour in business travel.” People used to tell me that – people heading off to exotic destinations I only dreamed of seeing – and I didn’t believe a word of it. I’d go to interesting places. I’d always give myself extra time to look around. People who didn’t like it just weren’t doing it right. I believed it fervently for a few years after I started traveling a lot, and I still do to an extent. But now and then I have my doubts. For a while, each trip had to top a previous one, but that wasn’t sustainable. As my reaction to exotic foreign cities becomes a groan of, “oh, another city…” and as spending time at home starts to seem like a great luxury, I start to wonder why I don’t just stay home. But often, something happens to remind me.

So it was with my most recent trip, one that involved going to Europe for less than a week. I know not to go to another continent for a week. I’ve done it before. It’s painful. Every time I do it, I swear I won’t do it again. But life intervened, my planned week in France ended up being a week in Berkeley and Minneapolis, and there was something immovable the next week. So I spent five days plus a few hours in Amsterdam, a beautiful city of picturesque canals, which I’ve seen before. I really do like Amsterdam, but I was burned out before I even got there. Even when it wasn’t raining, even when I wasn’t in a windowless meeting room, even when I was wandering around and watching the crowds of cyclists glide by, my mood was often one of “oh, another city.”

I gave a talk at a conference. I saw some other interesting talks. I talked to lots of nice people about various interesting things. It was certainly well worth going, just a little hard to get excited about.

I went on from there to St. Louis, to another conference including lots of the same people. I was far more exhausted and burned out than when I had gotten to Amsterdam. What is there to do in St. Louis, people kept asking. The common response seemed to be that there’s an arch. And there’s an arch. And there’s an arch. As a native Midwesterner, I find it hard to conjure up the distaste for Midwestern towns that seems to be expected of the globe trotting elite, and I saw early on that the walk along the Mississippi River was quite beautiful, but it’s still hard to escape the feeling of, “we went from Amsterdam to this?” I met some very nice relatives I hadn’t met before, which would have made the trip worthwhile by itself. But on my last evening there I stumbled into two totally unexpected experiences that even after glamorous Amsterdam were the highlight of the trip.

The first was a party at the City Museum, an amazing three story space full of multi-story slides, bizarre wire tubes between floors to crawl through, and a network of fake caves big enough to get thoroughly lost in. It was clearly a place intended for ten year olds, and those of us adults who tried to take full advantage of it ended up pretty bruised, but it was amazingly fun. After a bus ride back to the hotel, we were given directions to a blues club a few blocks away, BB's Jazz, Blues, and Soups, and started walking towards it. We walked out of the downtown area, under some elevated freeways, and into a seedy seeming area that had several members of our group threatening to turn around. The bar we were looking for certainly didn’t look like much from the outside, but we went in. It was dark and a little smoky, as a blues club should stereotypically be. There were maybe twenty of us, and probably three or four other people in the place. Then the band started to play, and we watched and listened in awe. They were really good, and seemed as surprised and thrilled to have an audience as we were to find them. It was the sort of place I expect to find in movies, not in the real world. Having an early flight the next morning, it was hard to drag myself away sometime after midnight.