If I have any complaint with my fellow conservative warriors, it is that they don’t know how to win. Too often, their suspicion, or perhaps the years of oppression, has left them unable to accept good tidings when they arrive. They will, if left to their own devices, look a gift horse in the mouth.
Which leads many of them to criticize Molly Munger. Let’s be honest. If someone truly wishes to direct more money to schools, Proposition 38 really does that. It is the right means to accomplish the goal that Munger wishes to accomplish. If you agree with that policy, you would vote for 38, and vote against Proposition 30. She deserves kudos for a means that actually accomplishes her policy goal.
What is even better, from my perspective, is that she has the intestinal fortitude to look the Governor of the State of California in the eye, and tell him he’s a liar. That requires a lot of strength, strength the business community in this state lacks. True to form, when faced with the truly bad policy of Proposition 30, the business community, for the most part, rolled over on its back and showed the Governor their belly. They, quite frankly, gave up without a fight.
To be clear, Molly Munger is a sort of Meg Whitman-style political socialite. She, like Meg Whitman is naive to the ways of political consultants, and susceptible to their siren song of “Just give me lots of money and I’ll win.” And, like Meg Whitman, the campaign for her Proposition 38 has been poorly run, and the messaging has been inept, but, again just like Meg Whitman, she is funding a couple of political consultant retirements. Her proposition will lose, but not because it doesn’t accomplish what she apparently wanted to accomplish, it is because her consultants have taken her for a ride.
I don’t agree with her policy. I don’t think the schools need more money. I am always intrigued by school superintendents of small and medium size school districts, who make more than the Governor of the state of California, who then claim they need more money for students. They sell their souls to the teacher’s unions (who elect the school boards that hire the superintendents), milk the system for themselves and their political cronies, and then cry about not having enough money to do their core job of educating students. It is a scam, and naive voters (and apparently a few rich folks) fall for it. Arnold Schwarzenegger did when he funded the after school program initiative (also making a couple of consultants rich), and now Molly Munger is doing the same with Proposition 38. If she truly wished to help schools, she would do something to break the the teacher’s unions grip on the schools, and cut off the other pigs who feed at the school funding trough.
However, her naivete aside, she is killing Proposition 30, which is bad on policy, that is, the idea of raising taxes, and false in its premise, that is, that schools get the money. I was concerned about how we, who really love this state, its schools, and want to do the right thing by the students in those schools, were going to show that Governor Brown was little more than a carny huckster, hoping to strip the voters of their money for his tax raising scam. Tax increasers always have deep pockets. Tax fighters always struggle to get their message out. Molly Munger solved that problem for us. She is taking the message of the tax fighters, that Proposition 30 is bad policy, and giving it wings. It is starting to catch on.
So, we should applaud her great work (and vote against her proposition). We should take the advice of Sun Tzu, in the Art of War, and know that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. She is assaulting the Governor’s citadel, and she is breaking it down, something we may not have been able to do. And for that, she deserves our praise. Perhaps, through this process, she will actually learn how politics works, and she will come back with a good idea. In the meantime, we should thank her for the great gift she is giving the people of the state of California, that is, making the case against Proposition 30. I, for one, am thankful she is in the fray.