Is California beyond repair? A sizable number of Golden State citizens have concluded that it is. Incessant budget crises plus a government paralyzed by partisan gridlock have led to demands for reform, even a constitutional convention. But what, exactly, is wrong and how can we fix it? In California Crackup, Joe Mathews and Mark Paul provide clear and informed answers. Their fast-paced and often humorous narrative deftly exposes the constitutional origins of our current political and economic problems and furnishes a uniquely California fix: innovative solutions that allow Californians to debate their choices, settle on the best ones, hold elected officials accountable for results, and choose anew if something doesn’t work.
Joe Mathews is Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation as well as a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion, Arizona State University. He is the author of The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy, a columnist for The Daily Beast, a freelance journalist, and associate editor of Zócalo Public Square Mark Paul is senior scholar and deputy director of the California program at the New America Foundation. He was formerly deputy treasurer of California and deputy editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. Mathews and Paul are authors of the article "How to Fix a Broken State" in the March 2011 issue of Boom: A Journal of California.
"California Crackup is brilliant. It cuts through the familiar tangle of diagnoses and quick-fix solutions to provide a comprehensive and persuasive analysis of California's dysfunctional governmental system. Paul and Mathews have coolly laid out a complicated story, made it readable, sometimes even comedic. It is the best discussion of the issue I've seen in over three decades."—Peter Schrag, author of California: America's High-Stakes Experiment
"I know of no other work that combines so succinctly and enjoyably a historical summary of California's existing problems with such a sweeping and provocative program of reform."—Ethan Rarick, University of California, Berkeley
"Mark Paul and Joe Mathews have produced an indispensable guide to California's crisis of governance—and they have done so with humor, scholarship, fairness and storytelling verve. Every Californian should read this book."—Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars
"Mark Paul... has a talent for presenting California Big Think stuff in an easily accessible and always readable way...[offering] clear and creative insights on the subject of California's collapse."—CalBuzz
"Joe Mathews has done an artful, fascinating, and convincing job of connecting the California of today's Schwarzenegger era to the long history that made his rise possible.—James Fallows,The Atlantic Monthly on Mathews' book, The People's Machine
240 pp.6 x 9Illus: 6 line illustrations
9780520266568$29.95|£25.00Paper
Aug 2010