The Summer Of Barbie…And Curricular Backlashes

>> Jonathan Movroydis: It's Monday, July 24th, 2023, and you are listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the free world. I'm Jonathan Movroydis, senior writer at the Hoover Institution, and I'm sitting in the chair of Bill Whalan, the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism, so that he can answer questions and provide commentary about California policy and politics in which he's well-versed.

Bill Whalen, in addition to being a Washington Post columnist, writes weekly for Hoover's California on Your Mind web channel. Whalen is joined today, as always, by Lee Ohanian, the Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and Professor of Economics and Director of the Ettinger Family Program on Macroeconomic Research at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ohanian also writes weekly about the policy environment in the Golden State for California on Your Mind. Good day, gentlemen. Let's talk about the latest developments in policy and politics in the Golden State. Gentlemen, this wouldn't be a California podcast if we didn't talk about Hollywood and movies. Hollywood is on strike right now, the first time both actors and writers have been on strike in 60 years.

There are some overlapping concerns and reasons why both groups are on strike, notably concerns that generative AI will replace talent in the future. And they both have demands that they want to be justly compensated for streaming projects. Unions representing talent and studios ultimately could not reach an agreement over a three-year contract.

Gentlemen, what does this fall-out from these negotiations mean for the future of the film industry and California's economy at large?

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, Jonathan, it's a unicorn situation where both the screen actors and the writers are both on strike.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: I believe the last time that happened, you have to go back to the early 1960s.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: And that's an interesting parallel because both of these strikes really are about technology. Both of these events that are 60 years apart really are about technology issues today. Streaming and artificial intelligence are really some of the issues that are preventing an agreement. And back in the day, back to the early 1960s, that was a time when we had Leave it to Beaver, Gunsmoke.

I don't know if Superman was yet part of the genre yet, but that was really the time, I Love Lucy. That was the time of serial television shows really taking off and becoming widespread within the context of people's homes. As post-war America was rapidly buying televisions and entertainment was shifting to sort of a whole new product, which was watching weekly I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke or Leave it to Beaver.

And at that time, residuals and the sharing of the revenue that was being created by the tv shows was at issue. And I think the TV industry just saw how explosive growth was occurring and that they simply couldn't afford to keep the industry shut down for very long.

So they reached an agreement that provided residuals and established labor peace with the industry for an awful long time. So fast forward to today. The business has really been turned upside down by the Internet. What's happened is that the old framework of television shows as we knew them, which was a 22 week season, the show was on once a week.

It was half hour or 1 hour, depending upon the show. That's all gone. What is here now is streaming. And with streaming, what we have are shows. They're no longer 22 weeks. They are six to ten episodes, and within those six to ten episodes, the production is very concentrated within time.

And now we enter the writers and the screen actors. Writers are really upset because their compensation has declined substantially. They no longer have those 22-week CSI or Seinfeld type shows they can work on. They are hustling to write in a very short period of time, the six or eight or ten week series that you see on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon.

And they are really worried about artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, taking over their jobs. We've got the screen actors who now have gone on strike, and there are many more of them. There are about 160,000 of them, compared to about 10,000 in the writers union. So now we have pretty much a complete stoppage of Hollywood.

Screen actors are worried about residuals also. And I think what is going to be more difficult this time around than if we go back to the early 1960s, is that there are some extremely profitable shows within the industry. But what the actors and the writers are not really realizing is that Netflix, and Hulu, and the division of Amazon that's doing streaming, they don't realize that these entities are losing money.

The streaming services haven't really figured out how to become profitable. They can't figure out which shows are gonna be a hit, which shows weren't. I think Netflix is really. Bill, I think you'll have some stuff to add on this, but I think Netflix is really very upset about how much they paid to Meghan and Harry and how that was just a complete lead balloon.

So we've got a brick wall and a car hitting up against that brick wall. Actors and writers, I think, are gonna have to be somewhat more sensitive to the idea that there aren't tons, millions and billions of dollars of profits sitting around. But they understandably are upset about how the industry has changed and how there's not as much revenue for them.

And the studios are saying, hey, you know what? We're not pulling it in. I mean, a few shows are, but most of them simply aren't. There are just, you know, probably too many shows out there. There's not enough. Despite it's a global commodity now, there's not enough of an audience to consume all of those shows.

Just go to your local showtime or Netflix and look to see just how much content there is. There simply just isn't enough. Even in a global market, there just isn't enough demand for all the shows. Bill, I suspect this could go on for a long time, and in the meanwhile, it might be costing the California economy somewhere between 150 million to $200 million per week.

Some estimates the entertainment industry is directly or indirectly associated with about 15% to 20% of California's GDP, so this is a terrible blow to the California economy. The only saving grace is the summertime, tourists are coming to Los Angeles and Hollywood, as is Taylor Swift, who will generate an awful lot of revenue.

So there is that. But this is not good news for the California economy.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, as the resident political hack on this podcast, I'll get into the politics of the strike in a moment. But, Lee, you hit onto something important. A couple months ago, I finally cut the cord, cut the cable in my house.

Yeah, months behind, years behind everybody else on this, and up in front of me was just a world of content like I could not imagine between the likes of YouTube TV, I have a Sony TV, so I get Google TV. And of course, I'm an appaholic. I have way too much stuff to watch, and just not enough time.

So the very crusty cynic in me thinks, okay, if Hollywood goes on strike and there's no new content for six months, whatever figure you wanna put out there, I can play catch up and watch stuff. It does. It does mess with people's viewing habits. For example, if you are addicted to the TV show Yellowstone, Yellowstone has had a very tumultuous past few months with Kevin Costner.

Wanting to leave the show. Now they have to figure out how to bring the thing to an abrupt halt. Now, because of the writers strike, they can't do it. So that show is just gonna dangle out to 2024. But Lee, what I keep falling back to is really the question of what this means to California's economy.

I look back and then the Hollywood strike of 2007, 2008 reportedly was a $2 billion hit to the California economy. Now, $2 billion is a lot of money to the three of us, but we're talking about a global economy that is California, what, the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world, depending who you're talking to.

How much does really 2 or $3 billion lost in the California economy really matter, Lee? Or is this more of a matter of just kind of prestige since we are talking Hollywood and one of the showcase features of the California economy?

>> Lee Ohanian: Right, Bill, yeah, there's truth to both of those statements.

It certainly is a prestige issue, because California for a long time has laid claim to the home of the world's entertainment industry. And California has lost a little bit of that luster over time, is some productions have moved to other locations, not only just because of the need for those locations.

But also because other areas, particularly Canada, are competing for those production by offering a lot of tax breaks that California either is not willing to cave into. But Bill, the estimates or the losses should be treated with some variance because no one really knows just how far the reach of the California entertainment economy goes.

It's an interesting industry in that so much of that is outsourced, and that ranges from the people who cater those shows up to auditors who are looking at the books. Up to the people who are building the sets. Those are all separate industries that are getting employed. And the estimates that we see, such as, hey, 2 billion was lost in 07, 08.

What happens? Could it go to 4 billion this time? Yeah, I suspect that easily we'll go to 4 billion. But what becomes really the sticking point is, will those caterers who were on the set previously, will they find other work to replace what they lost? And that's just much harder to say.

So, I suspect that the estimates of anything might be a little bit on the low side, and it leaves the California economy vulnerable.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, now, one thing I've learned about the strike, Lee, is I don't know how many Bernie Sanders supporters there are in Hollywood, and here's why I mentioned this.

Dwayne Johnson, the Rock, just signed a contract with Amazon, speaking of streaming services who spent a lot of money. He got a $50 million deal. That's 10 million more than Robert Downey got for his last Captain America role. You see celebrities on the picket line going along with these long suffering riders.

I don't hear anybody, Lee and Jonathan, talking about wage sharing or equality or anything like that. So, it'll be fun, kind of just to talk to the audience, say, okay, you're willing to take a big hit in wages, so the runners make more. But the politics here are interesting in this regard.

There are two people who could step into this if they wanted to. One is the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, and the other is the governor of California, Gavin Newsom. Mayor Bass has headaches to deal with, primarily homelessness, which is what she ran on, what she needs to clean up.

As we talked about in a lot of this podcast, it's just there in front of her. She has to deal with that. I'm not sure if she has the bandwidth to take on the strike. Newsom does have the bandwidth to take it on. He never shies away from an opportunity to get in front of the cameras.

But maybe Lee and Jonathan, Newsom is looking at what happened to Bill Clinton when he got involved in the baseball strike back in 1994 and 1995. Somebody in Clinton's White House thought it would be a great idea for the president to step in as the arbitrator, the mediator, and sit the two side down and scold them.

And tell them to get back to work for the better of America. And both those sides had a two word response from the president, and those two words were not Merry Christmas. And Clinton looked just very weak and ineffective as a result and was one of the many reasons why he and his party got kicked to the curb in the midterm elections that year.

So, maybe Newsom and Bass are thinking about Clinton's experience. I think more the case, Lee and Jonathan, is this, that if you're a California Democrat, the last thing you ever do is rattle Hollywood's cage. If you're a California Democrat, the last thing you do is you try to avoid rattling the cage of high end donors.

And here in the strike, Lee and Jonathan, we have the two sides against each other, unions on one side and high end donors on the other. And just for aspiring politician, a natural politician like Newsom, you don't wanna get caught in the middle of this.

>> Lee Ohanian: Now, Bill, 100%, it's a perfect storm for the Democratic party because they're the party of unions and they're also the party of Hollywood.

So, you've got your two benefactors duking it out. And what can they do? All they can do is they don't wanna be seen as playing a favorite. And I think at some level, the fundamentals of the strike are ones that I don't think they could, even if they wanted to, they would have very much ability to influence.

So, yeah, it seems like be a lose lose situation for the Democratic Party. The longer it goes on, the worse is gonna look for California. The worst is gonna look for or the governor. When you mentioned Clinton, that was really interesting. I think he was trying to channel, of all people, Richard Nixon, who had been dispatched by Eisenhower back in the day when he was vice president.

To bring the two sides together in the country's steel strike, when the United States had a steel industry. We don't have much of the steel industry anymore, but I believe about three or 400,000 people were on strike back in the 1950s when Nixon was vice president. And he ended up by having some phones, again, the two sides together.

But that looks to be very unlikely now. And it doesn't look good. It certainly doesn't look good for California. Bill, do you think there's any chance Newsom will weighed in if this thing lasts much longer?

>> Bill Whalen: He's made it very clearly that he will engage when he is asked to engage, and that is exactly the kind of out he wants.

He does not wanna get into this because he doesn't want looking effective. But again, he doesn't wanna get in the business of winners and losers. He does not wanna get unions upset with him. And also, a lot of the people on the west side of Los Angeles who run studios or in the industry, they give a lot.

They could potentially give a lot to him if you ran for president. I just wanna get on the wrong side of them. So he's gonna stay out of it. You know who else is not involved in this? Interestingly enough, is the first partner of California, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who is, of course, a film documentarian and a former actress.

I assume she probably has a SAG card, or maybe she doesn't by now, but she certainly knows. You don't see her talking much about this. You just don't wanna pick sides because you're rightly, it's the perfect storm for the California democratic existence.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Gentlemen, staying on the topic of motion pictures, two movies opened this weekend that received a fair amount of news buzz.

And those were the live action Barbie film and Oppenheimer, the biopic of the World War II era physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, who invented the atomic bomb. The fact that these two films were released together generated a fair amount of attention. A viral Internet meme known as Barbenheimer, whereby users joked about how these two movies catered to diametrically different audiences, boosted interest in both the films.

Barbie made $162 million at the box office and Oppenheimer made 82 million. Gentlemen, first, did you see any of the two movies of the weekend? And second, both movies have a California angle, a Barbie's depicted in Venice beach and from what I understand, Mattel's headquarters in El Segundo.

And Oppenheimer recounts the University of California's role on the Manhattan project. Gentlemen, do you care to share any thoughts about how these moves reflect California's culture and politics?

>> Bill Whalen: I tried to see Oppenheimer last Friday when I was out of town and they were showing on one screen where I was.

And it was sold out in advance because I suspect every elderly person, there's a very hot climate I was in. I suspect every retiree with an interest in history who wouldn't go to a cool theater lined up for Oppenheimer and I was not gonna sit in the front row of the theater and- Get a neck injury looking at the screen for three hours and it's a three-hour long film.

It's formidable, nor did I go for Barbie. I'm saving that for when Lee comes up to Palo Alto to visit me. Lee, I don't know if you have a blonde wig or not, but we could get that for you. I don't any pink heels. You're on your own for that, Lee.

But Barbie was a phenomenon in this theater complex that I went to, there were six screens devoted to Barbie, one screen to Oppenheimer. So maybe it's not entirely a fair fight in that regard, but I did notice how Barbie has just kind of become a thing not just with women at the movies, but also politicians jumping onto this.

I'm gonna read to you guys a tweet put out by the governor's office, Gavin Newsom's office on last Friday, an opening day for Barbie. And tell me if this is not a bit of overkill, but here we go. The governor's office wrote the following quote. Here are four ways Barbie embraces California values.

One, Barbie is proof that you, quote, can be anything. California is more scientists, researchers, professional sports teams, engineers, Nobel laureates. In any other state, Barbie has had over 200 jobs and like her, Californians are free to be themselves and pursue their dreams. Point two, it's no secret that California is leading the fight against climate change.

But did you know Barbie is also a climate champion, hitting the roads in her electric vehicle. Point three, surfs up. Barbie is a proud champion of California state sports surfing. Point four, California is taking action to make sure that every Californian is supported and has access to mental health resources.

Barbie is also an advocate for mental health and has been vocal about normalizing mental health struggles and why reaching out for help is so important. So kudos to Barbie, who, by the way, I think was introduced in 1959. So she is 64 to 65 years of age. But there's a flip side of looking at Barbie.

Point number one would be that the film's been accused of using the homelessness in a bad way. If you watch the film, I'm Told, there's a scene in Santa Monica where they use the homeless population as a backdrop. People thought that was tacky. They also reportedly paid extras to dress up as homelessness and homeless people and scenes shot next to Santa Monica City Hall.

So yikes, the second thing which I noticed here, Lee, and I wanna get your thoughts on this. There is a real life Barbie Dollhouse of Malibu in honest of goodness house. It has a pool and a water slide, a big old dance floor, plenty of pink all over it.

And Lee, it's along the Pacific Coast highway right on the beach and it's yours for anywhere up to $10 million. So this is the fantasy world of Barbie, where you can hold 200 jobs in the course of 59 years and live at a 10 million, $10 million house and life is good.

I think reality in California, at least speaks otherwise.

>> Lee Ohanian: Barbie was a success. Bill, was there any chance that Barbie wouldn't be driving an EV?

>> Bill Whalen: Well, there you go.

>> Lee Ohanian: I mean, my daughter's grown now. But when I lived down i near the Santa Monica area, we used to drive past what she would call the Barbie house every day going to school.

And I used to speculate, gosh, I wonder what that would sell for. It's on an area where there's really no setbacks between the houses. You were literally on top of your neighbors, but it is right on top of the sand, but there's a lot of pink and pastel green and blue right out there.

And this was a time when my daughter was really into barbies and she saw one look at that house and she said, look, daddy, it's the Barbie house. It's just that obvious. So I haven't seen either movie, but there's an interesting sidebar regarding the Oppenheimer movie and that University of California system was very involved with the development of the bomb in the Manhattan project.

Oppenheimer's faculty at Berkeley and kind of interesting side story, Bill, at that time. Well, if we go back a few decades before the 1940s, University of California system was a pretty sleepy system, was primarily a teaching university system. And then around 1930, there's a big push to expand its research capacity and in particular, in the sciences.

And Berkeley had the good idea to go out and hire Oppenheimer from Europe, which is where physics was really much more advanced than it was in the United States. So Oppenheimer comes over to the United States, brand new young faculty member. He goes to Berkeley. He hooks up with Ernest Lawrence.

The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is named partially after him and a chemist named, Seaborg and that was really kind of the place for doing theoretical physics. Plutonium was discovered somewhat by accident by one of their colleagues, a young fellow named, Edwin McMillan. So the University of California system in California more broadly played a big role in the development of this.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Interestingly, if you look up the Nobel physics laureates, Berkeley went through a Nobel drought in physics from 1968 to 2006. It's done well since in this century they've had three laureates. The question, Lee, is since you, since you teach in the UC system, is the UC system in your estimation still on the vanguard of national security and these cutting edge applications as it was back in Oppenheimer's day with the Manhattan project?

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, Bill, so that's a little bit of a yes or no answer. Yes in the sense that Berkeley remains very highly ranked among american universities within the areas of sciences. In physics, they're number three. Now in chemistry, they're ranked first. I believe engineering, they're ranked very highly.

Typically in the top five. Earth sciences, they're inside the top five. So those types of rankings suggest that Berkeley remains just a giant in the world of science. But a couple of things to note, those rankings change very slowly over time. There's a sense in which I think the excitement that was present in the 40s and 50s and 60s of Berkeley just completely taking off and being able to hire so many preeminent scientists that Bloom is off the road, so to speak.

The University of California system is in my opinion, investing enough in the science programs at the UC campuses. Berkeley has lost some very famous scientists over the last 20 years who have received offers to go to other universities where. And the issue really ends up not being something so mundane, a salary, but rather the research facilities that these people have at their disposal to carry out the research they have.

So things like accelerators and laboratories that are expensive, they cost millions of dollars. And as far back as 20 years ago, there's a Los Angeles Times article that interviewed a number of Berkeley scientists who said that either they were thinking of leaving Berkeley or that they had left Berkeley and they left simply because they went places such as Cornell, Caltech.

They went to universities in Europe because these other universities were offering them just much, much better research facilities. And as a backdrop, that's really kind of a story about the UC today. California's bemoan the fact that tuition has become so high, even for in state students. There's a lot of complaining about why the UC doesn't admit more high achieving Californians according to the master plan if you go back to 1960.

But you walk around any UC campus including my campus of UCLA, we can put it politely, there's a lot of Deferred maintenance, there's a lot of areas where there's enormous needs for investment just to replace decaying plant and equipment. Much less creating brand spanking new, sparkling linear accelerators to attract the top physicists.

There's still a lot of scientific strength within the University of California community, but it's at risk if UC doesn't decide to invest more to keep those people in place.

>> Bill Whalen: So having chastised the governor's office for reading too much into Barbie. I'm gonna commit something of the same sin here and offer this thought that Barbie and Oppenheimer kinda represent bad aspects of California in this regard.

With Barbie, it's just this tendency to wanna delve into California nostalgia. Lee, you mentioned the UC system of the 1960s. California politicians constantly evoke Pat Brown's era and the free UC tuition and the building of roads and the building of universities and waterways and so forth. And they neglect the fact that that was a California 15 million people, not the current mess of almost 40 million people it is now.

But if you look at Barbie, it's based on for it appeals to people who grew up on Barbie's, as I mentioned, going back to 1959, so it ties into that. Just as the top gun sequel that came out last year tied into 1980s nostalgia, Indiana Jones, which I ended up seeing last Friday, that ties in nostalgia as well.

An 80 year old Harrison Ford running around with a Fedora bullwhip, still getting it done. So there's the nostalgia side, but then you go to Oppenheimer. That's a morality place. Something else which California, especially Gavin Newsom, love to get into. It all points morality. So here we have in Oppenheimer what the morality of oppressed Robert Oppenheimer, picked upon apart because he is Jewish.

Oppenheimer being used by the government. There are scenes in which he and Einstein talk about this. The idea of building the atomic weapon, Oppenheimer talking about being the destroyer of worlds and so forth. So it's 3 hours of morality thrust upon you. So unfortunately, way too many California politicians are guilty of the same crime.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, absolutely, Bill. Just my little trivial but hopefully interesting factoid of the day. Back when I was an undergrad at UC Santa Barbara, two of the gals in the dorm, well, one had a Barbie connection. Her name was Cathy, and her dad had been the inventor of the Chatty Cathy doll.

 

>> Bill Whalen: My sister had that growing up.

>> Lee Ohanian: And Cathy was definitely chatty. So that's my one connection to the world of Barbie and where all that stuff was produced, near Palos Verdes and Florence and El Segundo.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Jonathan, tell your colleagues to stop playing with their dolls.

 

>> Jonathan Movroydis: You guys made comments about education so we can stay on that topic. Lee, your column for California on your mind on Friday sheds light on California's new math curriculum and failing student achievement across the state. The state is set to spend 128 billion on education this year, which, as you know, exceeds the entire budget of all states except for New York and Texas.

You explain that now that the state is spending $120 billion per year, education leaders can no longer make excuses about the so called paucity of funding. They have found a new scapegoat, however, in the state's curricula. In particular, they have found, they have made reforming math curricula a priority and last week published a 1,000 word framework for a new approach to mathematics.

Lee, what does that new framework entail?

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, Jonathan, California has been struggling with k-12 student achievement, for decades. It goes back to the 1980s and Iran Corporation report that identified that California education system, which at one point had really been the best in the country and the US was the best in the world.

So California was way out in front that it had been slipping. And so now it's not just slipping, but we're to the point where three out of four California k-12 kids are below federal standards in mathematics. There's only 30% who test at standard or above in English according to federal standards.

If you just think about that for a moment, what does that mean for the future of California for these kids individually, it's just off? We need high achieving, high performing new workers who are going to understand. Not only understand new technologies, but develop new technologies who can become leaders across the field of industries.

And these kids are just remarkably struggling. I'll give you an example of just how bad it is. Remember the old number lines we had in school? It's a flat line and there's zero and there's one and there's two and there's three. Well, 8th graders were given a problem of looking at the number line and trying to figure out what the halfway mark was between the numbers 0.8 and 1.4.

There's a bunch of ways one could figure this out. Probably the easiest way is just take your pencil, go to the number line and kinda put it down in the middle, and then you'll see that between 0.8 and 1.4, halfway in between is 1.1. This is not a complicated mathematics problem.

Just 27% of kids could do that in the 8th grade. Even worse was that only 7% of kids could take two geometric figures and then put them together and then recognize among a set of six possible figures, which one was correct. Okay, now, if you guess blindly, one out of six is roughly 17% correct answer.

So if kids were just blindly guessing, they would get about one out of six, which would be 17% proficiency. The actual proficiency rate was just 7%. Now, this problem was a little bit harder than trying to figure out what lies halfway between two numbers. But still, it just illustrates just the horrendous outcomes we're seeing in California for education.

Now, for the last 30 years, California has been trying to figure out how to teach math. We dance from one math curriculum or one guidance or one framework to another. And the Department of Education just approved quote, new and improved framework for teaching mathematics. And what's ironic about this is that the people who implemented and develop these programs and criticize the ones that are being replaced.

They're the same ones that implemented and adopted the previous program, and they're the ones that adopted the ones before that. So there's not a problem in that. We don't know how to teach math. We know how to teach math. We've been teaching math successfully for hundreds and hundreds of years, and not just we in the United States, all over the world, people have been teaching math successfully.

We don't need a new framework. But a new framework is what we have. And the framework is based very heavily on themes of social justice, which today, of course, is very, very topical. Racial inequities, LGBTQ+, that is all in there. And 6,000 STEM teachers and leaders signed a joint letter condemning this new framework.

Indicating that it was not going to be successful and it was going to substantially harm high achieving students. Students with a high level of mathematical ability because of this overwhelming focus on equity and making sure that everybody ends up being the same. Jonathan, what really troubles me about this is that I looked at the framework and it's 1000 pages long.

Do we really need 1000 pages to figure out how to teach math between K through 12? And within this 1000 pages, there's lots and lots of references to scientific studies that purportedly demonstrate the benefits of the teaching methods and practices that have been implemented within this document. It turns out that the references that are within that document that supposedly support this new framework do nothing of the sort.

There's a Professor in mathematics at Stanford who specializes in education, who has won a number of teaching awards in teaching mathematics at the college level. He reviewed the document closely and found just many, instances of references that did no such thing in terms of supporting the teaching methods, ones that were erroneously cited.

There were references that were in the document that were not even anything closely about what they were supposedly supporting. So the development of this product was not professionally done. And the idea that this is suddenly gonna turn around the sinking ship that we're gonna create not one in four kids proficient, but two out of four, three out of four, I think, is just laughable.

The real problem in teaching math in California is that we have a body of teachers that I think just don't know enough mathematics to teach mathematics. When you look at the countries that are successfully teaching mathematics, such as those in Shanghai, such as those in some of the Scandinavian countries, the common denominator is that the teachers are very highly advanced in mathematics training.

It doesn't mean they knew the level of mathematics that Oppenheimer knew, but they really understand the nuts and bolts of arithmetic, of multiplication, of rational numbers, of algebra. They really understand that. And it's really difficult to teach stuff if you don't have a good knowledge base, we just don't have enough teachers in California with an adequate knowledge base.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Lee, go ahead.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah and just what is ironic and so depressing about all of this is that, as we know, the state's run by the Democratic party. This is not a partisan statement. But the Democratic party, time and again comes out of Gavin Newsom's office, comes out of Attorney General Rob Bonta`s office, you name it.

The leading democrats will talk about DEI until the cows come home and guess what? In this new framework, black kids and Hispanic kids and some girls are encouraged to take watered down mathematics classes rather than the classes that other kids are taking. Why is that? I think it's just to simply cover the tracks of a failed educational system because blacks and Hispanics, only about one out of ten.

One out of ten of those kids are proficient at national standard levels.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, so Leo, I'll be curious to see what happens with the math curriculum when it hits the school district level. And I mention that because it's not just the summer Barbie, but it's also been the summer of fights over curricula here in California.

Elsewhere, Connelly Harris, for example, has been involved in the Florida and the history curriculum there. We'll get to that in a minute. But here in California, we had a backlash just a few days ago which involved California's new social studies curriculum. The issue here was that the Temecula Valley University school districts had rejected the curriculum because some board members had issues with Harvey Milk, the slain San Francisco supervisor, being part of it.

Gavin Newsom gets very personally involved in here. He threatens the districts with a one and a half million dollar fine, and the district quickly flip flops and goes along with the program. We also have Tony Thurmond getting involved here and Lee, you mentioned Newsom and Bonta. Tony Thurmond would be the third leg on this stool, he'd be the third side of this pyramid, if you will.

He's the California's superintendent of public instruction. He attended a meeting last week at the Chino Valley Unified School District. This is in San Bernardino county, so it's a redder part of California. He was given a minute to defend a policy to actually speak against, a policy that requires administrators to inform parents if their child decides to identify as transgender.

He spoke over a minute and was shouted down and hustled out of the place. The board promptly voted four to one against Thurmond and the policy that he wanted to change. And here's what one board member said to Thurmond during the meeting, quote, I appreciate you being here tremendously, but here's the problem.

We're here because of people like you, you're in Sacramento proposing things that pervert children. Pervert's a very strong word here, I'm not sure I'd agree with that or not, but the point is that Sacramento is doing things that parents, administrators don't care for. And keep an eye on this as we move forward in California, especially in political races.

Tony Thurmond has gubernatorial aspirations which we're gonna talk about next. He is maybe gonna run for governor in 2026 as our other democrats lead. Do they dare speak against the education establishment and take a side against a math curriculum, a social studies studies curriculum. It would seem a very tempting target for a Democrat who wants to finish at least second in a primary and pick off independent votes because parents out there, they're getting rather tired of this.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Parents are enormously tired. And, Bill, actually, my column for this week for our California and mine product is gonna be talking exactly about, Tony Thurmond's not so pleasant day in Chino Hills. And, so just a little bit of a preview for what I'll be talking about. So Chino Hills put in place a policy that requires teachers, other school staff to notify parents if a student says they're transgender, if they discuss sexual DS4 type issues.

And Thurmond went to push back on that. Bill, what's interesting is then doing the research for this column, what I found is that if current statistics hold four out of five kids who are having these feelings, they will revert back once they become adults. So for a party that says we're gonna follow the science, I never see those types of statistics ever discussed.

And, Bill, when you ask for all the parents, for all the families, for all the independents who are just completely fed up, I mean, we're spending $128 billion on educating about 5.9 million kids. That budget, is about the same as the combined budgets of believe it was. I put this together in my column for last week, Lake Tennessee, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Those states have 33 million people compared to our 39 million people. It's laughable that we're spending so much money and kids are just getting left behind. So, yeah, it seems like that would be the point to make and try to push back a little bit from the party line.

But, Bill, I think back to 2018 when Tony Thurmond, was. First elected. What was the, gosh, that election was close, do you recall what the numbers were there?

>> Bill Whalen: I don't have them in front of me, I can look them up. But it was a close race, certainly by modern California standards.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, a very close race. I think it was something that probably about 50.4 to 49.6, something along those lines. And Thurmond ran against a Democrat, a Democrat who went up against the teachers unions and the educational establishment. And, my goodness, I think the funding on his opponent's side, I'm not sure he got anything above the minimum from the state's democratic party.

And it was the point where at the state, and now I'm blanking on, do you happen to have his opponent's name in front of-.

>> Bill Whalen: Marshall Tuck.

>> Lee Ohanian: Marshall Tuck, so this was an intriguing race in '18, because Tuck had a background of educational success. He had taken over several failing schools in the Los Angeles area, and he had done that in coordination with then Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles.

They were like four or five schools, primarily with hispanic kids, that were failing horribly. Within a couple of years after Tuck had taken those over, college readiness graduation rates, test scores had skyrocketed. This seemed to be the obvious solution. Marshall Tuck for skate school superintendent rather than Tony Thurmond.

At the end of the day, can you win without the blessing of the party and the encumbus? And that's one data point that says you can't, no matter how good of a job you did beforehand.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, California's superintendent public instruction, SPI politics are fascinating. It's a non partisan race, technically, you do not run as a Democrat or Republican.

But yet $60 million, Lee and Jonathan were spent on that race in 2018. This is the education establishment making sure they could kill Marshall Tuck because he was a charter school champion. He'd been thinking outside the box in Los Angeles, and that has been bad news if you're the California Teachers Association.

They spent what it took to get Tony Thurmond on finish line. Lee, it was about a 1.6% margin of victory, about 150,000 votes. So that's too scary by democratic standards. But the question here, Lee and Jonathan, we can move on next topic after this. Do you think Thurmond was doing this because he honestly hated the policy trying to be invoked by that local school board in Temecula Valley?

Or do you think that, excuse me, Chino Valley. Or do you think this is simply just a very public showing of kinda doing his master's bidding, kind of saying, in effect, that look, I know you, I owe you guys, I'm your guy and so here I am carrying your water, if you will.

In other words, a very public Daniel and Lions den moment for him. Good publicity, I suppose, for him, a democratic base. But do you think he was doing this out of conviction or just political necessity at the moment?

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, I'm inclined to think political necessity. I've seen him speak a couple of times.

He seems to be a person who genuinely does care about the students in California, but he is tethered his horse to a party which is on the wrong side of creating learning outcomes. Bill, I'll give you this, he was much more civil and professional during his one minute of discussion at Chino hills than Gavin Newsom has been with the people in Temecula.

Where he has called people ignorant and offensive-

>> Bill Whalen: Extremists.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, extremists. So Thurman appears to be much more professional than that and civil. And he strikes me as a guy with his heart in the right place. But he does have these gubernatorial aspirations and, yeah, I think if he's gonna advance along those lines, I think he's gotta go show the flag.

And he did that for his one minute in front of that parent school board council. Hardly seems worth it to go from Sacramento down to Chino hills to have one minute.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, that tells me he was looking for something else, which was to get into a fight and get noticed.

 

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Bill, let's talk about your upcoming column for this week in California On Your Mind, and would you talk about the prospects of Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis' run for a governor of the state? You also talked about in the column that there's not a SoCal Democrat in the mix for this race we can talk about that in a minute.

But talk about Lieutenant Governor Kounalakis, how does her campaign differ from previous governors, in particular, Gavin Newsom, who served as lieutenant governor under Governor Brown and Ray Davis back in the 1990s,.

>> Bill Whalen: Before anybody writes to me angrily and says, you idiot, this race is not for another 34 months, why are we talking about this?

Don't blame me, folks, people have already announced for this office and they're running. Lieutenant governor is, and so is the former state controller Betty Yee. There are two others looking at that, Tony Thurmond, who we just talked about, and the state attorney general, Rob Bontis. So, Lee, here we are again with the education group out in the running, if you will.

What's interesting about Eleni Kounalakis and full disclosure, her husband, Markos Kounalakis, is a physician fellow at the Hoover Institution, good guy. She has a different background from the two previous lieutenant governors who won the job. That would be Newsom in 2018 and Gray Davis, back in 1998. Davis was a former state assemblyman and former state controller Lieutenant governor had a pretty good political resume.

And Newsom was a former San Francisco mayor and lieutenant governor, also a deeper resume than Kounalakis, this is the only public office she has held. And both Davis and Newsom had very different approaches to this job than Kounalakis, I shouldn't say actually that job, but the strategy for trying to be elected governor.

Davis was in a very contentious primary in 1998. Two very wealthy, self-funding candidates fighting against each other, Jane Harmon, a congresswoman at the time. And Al Checky, the airline executive, who got the nickname Al Checkbook because he spent so much money on his own race. And those two were just kind of throwing rocks at each other.

And so Davis people decided the best strategy was to lay low, act as kind of the dignified, experienced guy, and it paid off for him. Newsom, on the other hand, Newsom paved his way to the governor's office by latching onto issues of great interest to democratic primary voters.

He got behind gun control initiative form, he got behind legalization and marijuana initiative form, and that kind of buoyed him up. Kounalakis has not been involved in initiatives as far as I know. Maybe her strategy will be, if it's a kind of democratic field, she'll try to lay low.

But we'll see how she tries to use a job, and it's one of the great ironies of California politics. Lee and Jonathan, Lieutenant governor of California, just doesn't have much in the way of responsibilities. They sit on a couple of boards, they get to vote Lee on UC issues cuz they're a member of the board of regents.

But the joke in Sacramento is you wake up in the morning, see if the governor has died, if he or she hasn't, you go back to sleep, the day is over. But yet with voters, it's just the opposite, people hear the title lieutenant governor and they think, whoo, this is a person of great standing, they must be the governor's sidekick and best friend in Sacramento, and it tends to give the job a lot of heft.

So be very interesting to see how she crafts herself in this because she still has 34 months or so to go until the June 2026 primary, and she has to raise her profile. And if you look at her press releases so far, it's been pretty light in terms of her just she's doing a lot of meetings, a lot of tours and things like that.

So you don't find much in the way of policy, so she probably needs to step up on that front.

>> Lee Ohanian: Bill, it's interesting, Kounalakis comes from a family of housing developers and builders. And a few years ago, I did a friendly debate with her about California economic policy issues.

And when it comes to things such as the California Environmental Quality Act and how it's been weaponized to block development and prevent development, delay development, she's been upfront and close and personal with that. So I think she's much more sympathetic, modifying regulations within the state that make housing so difficult to build and so expensive.

So that strikes me as something that's a big plus on her. You also mentioned Betty Yee, who is fiscally much more conservative than a lot of people are in her party. So I think those are two candidates that could potentially be, possibly be productive candidates for California. We can just, I mean, I hate to say this in advance, cause you like to see political competition, but I, it's probably gonna be a Democrat.

I'll take really long odds on Republican. But those are two that I think could have some attractive features in terms of running the state compared to some of the others who've announced.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, I think you've latched on something important here, Lee, in a kinda democratic field, it's the question of what lane you get into that phrase we like to use in politics.

What lane are you swimming in? And in that regard, the California gubernatorial primary for Democrats at least could look a bit like a San Francisco mayor's race in this regard. Historically, mayor's race in San Francisco has come down to a choice of one person who is just really almost crazily progressive versus the other person who occupies the so called Sane Lane.

He or she is a champion of business, and you trust that person to kinda keep the city together. And that might be Eleni Kounalakis ticket to ride here and that she just might make herself the pro business, kinda pragmatic Democrat in the field. Cuz Tony Thurmond's gonna latch on to education as we see it'd be very welcome in that regard.

Ron Bhat, as an attorney general, he's very much in the civil rights, so again, he's gonna be terribly woke. So maybe Eleni Kounalakis will be the one who just tries to say, I'm really kinda concerned about California's economic well being. It sounds kinda a little stage for Democrats, but that just might be the smartest thing for her to do.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, an unintentional benefit of being in an office that doesn't have a whole lot of specific responsibilities is that you don't necessarily have to be the person who goes to Chino Hills and argues for some policy that parents just don't like. Sit aside and wait for the dust to clear and then say, hey, you know what?

If you're somewhere in the middle and you don't like a lot of stuff which go on to Sacramento, yeah, maybe listen to hear what I have to say. I think maybe my proposals will resonate with you.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Bill, in your column, you talk about three possible names that could shake things up in the California race for governor in 2024, and that's La mayor Karen Bass, US Senator Alex Padilla, and Kamala Harris, which is an intriguing thought.

Back in February, Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Babarik, writing about Kamala Harris future prospects, explained that the office of vice president almost always diminishes the occupant. There are some exceptions, including Dick Cheney, but look at where Mike Pence is today at the bottom, the GOP primary PAC pulling around 4%, and Kamala Harris has dismal polling ratings and a rocky relationship with Biden's staff.

And that's led to speculation that Biden may cut her loose for his next presidential run, but she hasn't done that yet. She is seen as a drag on Biden. Should a Biden Harris ticket win or lose in 2024, and then if she were to run in 2028, that her pathway to the democratic nomination would likely be narrow.

She probably wouldn't want her old seat in the US Senate absent a socal candidate. As you mentioned, she could try and run for governor of California when Gavin Newsom moves on. That is precisely what Richard Nixon did in 1962. And I was thinking about that based on my previous career at the Nixon foundation.

Some interesting parallels between her and Richard Nixon six years prior to Nixon's run in 62. In 1956, President Eisenhower was ambivalent about Nixon being on his ticket when campaigning for a second term and his age showed him polling data from Gallup that Nixon was a drag to the ticket.

IKE even told Nixon to consider taking up a cabinet post like secretary of defense to gain requisite executive experience. This suggestion went public to the press in March of 1956, when IKE was pressing from a member of the media. He said, quote, the only thing I've asked Nixon to do is chart his own course and tell me what he would like to do.

Nixon was, of course, incensed that his boss was insinuating that he should voluntarily step aside. And Nixon called Ike's bluff and eventually won a sizable amount of votes in the New Hampshire primary. This is all to say that 1962, after his loss to JFK, Nixon tried his hand at running for governor.

He thought he could gain executive experience in that role. He also felt as if that he had never lost in California as a Congressman and a senator. But unfortunately, he was dogged by Conservatives on his right and that he wasn't Conservative enough. And the Democrats also gained momentum from JFK's performance during the Cuban missile crisis.

In November, he explored, as you note in your article in November, he exploded to the press at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles. I leave you gentlemen now, and you will write it, you will interpret, that's your right. But as I leave you, I want you to know, just think how much you're going to be missing.

You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference. Harris, like Nixon, never lost in California but before running for governor. But could she be successful if she were to throw her hat in the ring?

>> Bill Whalen: Well, so I mentioned three Southern California Democrats, let's eliminate the other two quickly.

One is Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, we talked about earlier, Los Angeles being the mayor of Los Angeles is a graveyard for higher aspirations. Tom Bradley ran for governor and failed, so did Dick Riordan. So did Antonio Villaraigosa against Newsom in 2018, so let's eliminate her from the group.

The other one is Alex Padilla, currently California's junior senator. I worked for Pete Wilson, he was governor in the 1990s in California. He ran and won the office in 1990 as a sitting senator, so there's a precedent there. And if you look at pity, his media feed, it's a lot of California stuff.

He's not a senator who's in love with international issues or anything like that, he's a very kinda parochial senator. So maybe he could, but I wouldn't bet on that either. But it's Kamala who intrigues in this regard, and this is kinda, it's far fetched in this regard. First of all, she'd have to stay on the ticket, which I think she will.

Lee, it's hard to see a Democrat party that's obsessed with identity politics dumping the first female vice president of mixed racial heritage. I just can't see that happening. So she'd have to lose the 2024 election, then decide that she wants to come back like Nixon and decide it's going to happen in California in 2026.

A great quote, by the way, that Nixon gave and this kinda sums up Nixon's attitude toward California being governor. He was on his way to the podium for that press conference, Jonathan and Lee, where he made the comment, when I have Nixon to kick around. And he supposedly turned an aide and said the following, quote, losing California after losing the presidency, well, it's like being bitten by a mosquito after being bitten by a rattlesnake.

I'm sure that he was as traumatized by that as he was a 1960 election. But no, it would be hard to see Kamala Harris to come out to California and run for governor because of two things. Number one, if she and Biden lose the presidential race, especially if they lose it to Donald Trump, my God, she's gonna get pilloried by Democrats, especially back here in California.

How could you lose to that guy? And she'll be seen as part of the problem. But then, secondly, she would have to pivot and show that she is a person of heft gravitas. Getting back to what we talked about, Lady Kounalakis, and that's the missing ingredient in the secret sauce that is Kamala Harris at all times.

She is a champion of wort salads. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein famously said about Oakland. So how she could transform from a failed candidate in early 2025 to a successful gubernatorial candidate in 2026, really hard to see.

>> Lee Ohanian: Really hard to see, she doesn't strike me as a person with a natural subs constituency within the Democratic.

Democratic Party, I just don't know who that would be. You might say would be among blacks, black voters. Black voters make up, I think, about 7% of California's electorate. So that's just not gonna be quantitatively important. Bill, there is a poll, I believe it was about five months ago, in the spring, done by LA Times and UC Berkeley.

So legitimate polling methodologies were used. She only had 37% favorable rating, and that was among about 7000 voters. So the statistical sampling margin variation is gonna be small there. I just don't see how she does it. And what she really hit on there is, where's the content? What's the level of competency?

My goodness, if she can't handle what she's been given so far, how is she gonna be able to manage a state with nearly 40 million people with the fifth largest economy? I just have to kind of close my eyes and keep my fingers crossed if that ever came to be.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, by the way, to close the loop on this, Nixon's remarks, Jonathan, 1962, he gave them at the Beverly Hilton, which up till last week was going to be the site of the Democratic Governors Association summer policy conference. But then the DGA discovered, to its horror, that there's a strike going on at the Beverly Hilton, Democrats in California leaves laughing and shaking and said, Democrats don't cross picket lines.

If you go to Sacramento, the downtown Hyatt Regency, they don't. Democrats never do events in that hotel, even though it's across the street from the Capitol because it's a non union hotel. Newsom had said that he was not gonna cross the picket line. And so you had the spectacle of a California governor not being able to go to the Democratic Governors Association's policy meeting because of strike.

Mercifully, perhaps, they moved the location to, I think, the Bonaventure downtown. But there you go, running for office for governor. California is very complicated on a lot of fronts, which I'm not sure these hopefuls quite understand yet. This has been very interesting and timely analysis.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Thank you, gentlemen, for your time.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Thank you.

>> Lee Ohanian: Thanks, fellas, always fun.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, the Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the free world. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast, wherever you might hear it.

And if you don't mind, please spread the word. Get your friends to have a listen. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, instagram, and Twitter feeds. Our Twitter handle is @hooverinst, that's @hoover I-N-S-T. Bill Whalen is on Twitter, his handle is @billwhalenca, and Lee Ohanian is also on Twitter, his handle is @lee_ohanian.

Please visit the Hoover website@hoover.org and sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, where you can access the latest scholarship and analysis from our fellows. Also, check out California on Your Mind, where Bill Whalen and Lee Ohanian write every week. Again, this is Jonathan Movroydis sitting in Bill Whalen's chair for this week.

He'll be back for another episode of Matters of Policy and Politics. Thank you for listening.

>> Speaker 4: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work, or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.