Contributor

John Campbell

John Campbell (R-Irvine) is an Assemblyman representing the 70th District in Orange County. Mr. Campbell is the Vice-Chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee. He is the only CPA in the California State legislature and recently received a national award as Freshman Republican Legislator of the Year. He represents the cities of Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Irvine, Costa Mesa, Tustin, Aliso Viejo, Laguna Woods and Lake Forest. He can be reached through his Assembly website and through the website for his California Senate campaign. [go to Campbell index]

The Governor Delivers
A lot of good stuff happened last week...
[John Campbell] 1/13/04

Light Stuff: A belated congratulations to the national champion USC Trojan football team. In my pre-holiday e-mail poem, which some of you liked and others felt I should keep my day job, I pointed out that I was a USC graduate. This elicited praise from some of you and distress from some UCLA grads (and one Berkeley grad). For the record, I have a Masters in Business Taxation from USC, and a Bachelors in Economics from UCLA. This enables me to be happy during football season and basketball season.

Heavier Stuff: The Governor's State of the State speech was excellent. There was much to be happy about. But nothing surprising because the Governor continues to deliver on what he promised us all he would do during the election. What was interesting to me was the reaction of the Democrats on the Assembly floor. If you saw the speech, you witnessed the inappropriate speech given by Cruz Bustamante when he was supposed to be introducing the Governor. You saw Republicans stand and applaud on many occasions and Democrats not standing or applauding (not even polite applause) on most occasions. The official Democratic response was unscripted and disjointed. In short, I think they don't really know what to do with this Governor. Because of term limits, only one Democrat member of the Assembly has ever served with a Republican Governor, and that was Mervyn Dymally who served with Governor Ronald Reagan. Even the Senators who served with Wilson or Deukmejian have not experienced a Governor who came into office on a similar overwhelming tide of public sentiment that government is messed up. It seems like Democrats want to oppose the Governor's every move, but fear the public repercussions of doing so . They don't want his agenda to get traction, but they are afraid to openly kill it because they know it is popular. Their ship has no rudder right now. We will see if it gets one and, if so, which way it turns in the next couple of months.

Heaviest Stuff: The Governor released his budget proposal today. It is a balanced proposal that contains no tax increases and deals with the budget problem without decimating anything. Instead, it contains a number of items of real long-term reform and restructuring and it makes some adjustments to virtually every part of the budget. It is a start to fix what the Davis Democrats brought us in the last 5 years. The next step will be to fix the business climate and bring jobs and taxpayers back to California. More on the details of this next week.

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