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# California as Boogeyman
August 13 2012
Written by Ashley Hemkin.
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BLOG SOUP - You want to scare America’s voters? Don’t say if the country stays on its current course it could become like Europe. If you really want to scare them tell them the country might become like California. That’s the word of advice Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan gave to Mitt Romney’s campaign.
[**Here’s what Noonan wrote this weekend.** ](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443404004577579571659026022.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond)
But he (Romney) and his supporters should drop the argument that if we don’t change our ways we’ll wind up like Europe. … What Americans are worried about, take as a warning sign, and are heavily invested in is California—that mythic place where Sutter struck gold, where the movies were invented, where the geniuses of the Internet age planted their flag, built their campuses, changed our world.
We care about California. We read every day of the bankruptcies, the reduced city services, the businesses fleeing. California is going down. How amazing is it that this is happening in the middle of a presidential campaign and our candidates aren’t even talking about it?
Mitt Romney should speak about the states that work and the states that don’t, why they work and why they don’t, and how we have to take the ways that work and apply them nationally.
Barack Obama can’t talk about these things. You can’t question the blue-state model when your whole campaign promises more blue-state thinking.
*(Ashley Hemkin is managing editor of [**Fox and Hounds**](http://foxandhoundsdaily.com) where these comments were first posted.)* –cw
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 65
Pub: Aug 14, 2012
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