In California, the Winners Aren’t Apologizing To God For Being Liberal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6-YVFvtFQ

While Barack Obama celebrated his re-election with a wooden victory speech that was more about Christian American God than the human beings who stood in lines to keep him in the White House, in California nobody is apologizing for big liberal wins. Governor Jerry Brown worked his Proposition 30 tax increase hard, constantly flying up and down the state on Southwest, speaking Latin and Greek to the delight and confusion of media people, and making it very clear (in English) that the rival Proposition 38 was a scam funded by a multimillionaire wingnut. Brown’s tax on the very rich won, by eight points, and Brown claimed victory with another phlegmball about “Kool-Aid of the market ideologues.” (The scam proposition, 38, was rejected by 72% of voters.)

Throughout the state, Democrats crushed entrenched Republicans, and even entrenched suburban right-wingers like Congressman Howard Berman (a registered Democrat and hawk), who lost a $13 million campaign to keep his long-safe seat in San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, the Democrats got a little bit closer to the fearsome Sacramento Super Majority that will finally stop the rural Republicans from blocking budget and tax measures. (This is all the miserable legacy of Proposition 13, the proto-Tea Party anti-tax voter initiative that gutted the state’s once-great public schools and infrastructure.)

Why, in the nation’s most populous state, is it okay to be a liberal again?