Yeah, it’s Friday. Day late. Oh well.
When I started at Sac State, it was 1990, a midterm election year. In California, that means the governor is up for election or re-election. This year, it’s Governor Jerry Brown (D–Oakland), going for his fourth term, thanks to a loophole in the term-limits law which makes him, and George Deukmajian if he wants, the only governors who can run for third and fourth terms. He’s up against Neel Kashkari (R–Laguna Beach). In California’s system, the top two vote-getters in the primary election run against one another in November. The general election seems like kind of a foregone conclusion, considering Brown got 54.3 percent of the vote, and will only get more in the runoff. But you never do know. Brown could always alienate the electorate between now and then. I doubt it; he has won three terms, you know.
Back in 1990 it was then-Senator Pete Wilson (R–San Diego) running against then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein (D–San Francisco). I didn’t care for either of them. As a young knee-jerk conservative, both were too liberal for me. So I drew the above strip.
One of my favorite movies, at the time, was Brewster’s Millions, starring Richard Pryor and John Candy. Channel 40 used to broadcast it all the time. I found out much later it was based on a novel, which wasn’t as funny as the movie. Pryor’s character Monty Brewster stood to inherit $300 million, if he could successfully blow through $30 million in a month, with nothing left to show for it. After a few wacky purchases, he hit upon the perfect way to do it: A political campaign. But in order to have nothing to show for it, he ran a “None of the above” campaign against the other guys.
At the time, the “none of the above” idea really appealed to me. In elections, you’re stuck with the schmucks who run, and for the most part the only viable candidates are the ones endorsed by the two major parties. If you can’t get their endorsement, you’d better be a celebrity like Jesse Ventura, but that’s no guarantee you’ll get anywhere either. And as far as drafting a favorite candidate is concerned, you could try the write-in vote, but that rarely works.
Still, I thought it had merit: If you don’t like anyone, vote “None of the above,” and if it gets a majority, the will of the people has spoken: None of the above. Disqualify ’em all. New election.
Yeah, I realize now that if we had such a thing, it’d constantly win. We’d have election after election after election, and the system would be more defective than usual. In principle, sounds great. In reality, bigger mess. Many of the “reforms” we’ve tried in elections—term limits in particular—have made things worse, not better. We have yet to see what direction California’s non-partisan top-two system will go. So far it looks okay. But that’s only because nobody’s yet figured out how to game it.
You might notice the odd, surrealistic stuff in the background. Few did. I had been reading a lot of old Mad Magazines at the time. In the ’50s, the style in comic books and comic strips was not to simplify, but to be realistic, and put a lot of realistic-looking detail into every panel. And in Mad, they did the same thing, but now the details became little jokes. Some of the artists put all sorts of bizarre little things in the background, just for fun. So I did likewise, just for fun. It beats the pure white minimalist stuff we tend to see.