Harold Meyerson

PERVERSE THOUGH IT MAY SOUND, the one thing that this year's gubernatorial race has confirmed is that to become, or remain, governor of California, you have to come across as a Democrat. Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't a Democrat, of course, but he currently plays one on television, and, as in almost all of his films, while his performance isn't really stellar, the production values may carry the day.

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WHEN THE POSITION OF CHAIRMAN of the Los Angeles Communist Party came open in the late 1940s, the two obvious candidates were Dorothy Healey, then the party's organizational secretary, and Ben Dobbs, the party's labor secretary. Both were smart and affable and had charisma to burn. They were also the best of friends, so - as Dorothy related the story in California Red, her quasi-autobiography cowritten with historian Maurice Isserman - they flipped a coin and it came up on the Dorothy-becomes-chairman side.

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IF THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS HAS a guiding principle, it must be that the government that governs least governs worst.

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HERE IN WASHINGTON, Democrats are engaged in a frenzy of rethinking. Two new magazines have been unveiled this week (in one of which - full disclosure here - I wrote a piece on the nonexistence of Democratic policy toward offshoring in the age of globalization). Major conferences abound. Think tanks are adding staff. To be sure, much of the rethinking amounts to reaffirming support for old ideas that are still good and necessary (such as raising the minimum wage) or to stating a problem for which Democrats don't yet have a solution (such as offshoring in the age of globalization, for which, in fairness, no political tendency in the world has a solution). But even if all this activity amounts to no more than what Kant would have called a Prolegomenon To All Future Democratic Rethinking, it has, at least, reached fever pitch.

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LIKE ANY MAJOR METROPOLIS, Los Angeles has its normal sea of troubles, but there are two fundamental problems that really define the city and the challenges it confronts. The first, with which the Weekly has dealt extensively of late, is the quality of its air. The second, which may be even harder to fix, is the quality of its economy. Over the past quarter century, Los Angeles has been downwardly mobile, with its middle class shrinking to a fraction of its former size. Both these problems - air quality and, even more, the vanishing middle - afflict the nation generally. But Los Angeles has opened such a wide lead on every other city that we're not just quantitatively different; we're qualitatively in a class by ourselves.

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