Washington Post - By George F. Will - Sunday, July 5, 2009
A California Comeback?
SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- California's campaigns introduce candidates not only to the state's voters but also to its immensity. In Bakersfield, Meg Whitman, 52, the former CEO of eBay who is campaigning for the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination, learned about carrots.
In 1968, the Grimm brothers were selling vegetables at a roadside stand in Anaheim. They moved to Bakersfield, and today Grimmway Farms and one rival provide 80 percent of the nation's carrots, partly because the brothers figured out how to make the vegetables pleasingly uniform in shape.
Who knew? Whitman didn't, and the story, which she tells enthusiastically and at length, delights her because it confirms her conviction that California "was built by intellectual capital" and not just the Hollywood and Silicon Valley sort.
California's cascading crises prefigure America's future unless Washington reverses the growth of government subservient to organized labor. The state cannot pay its bills and poorly educates its young, and its taxation punishes whatever success that its suffocating regulatory regime does not prevent.
Whitman, a Roman candle of facts and ideas, insists, (continues...)
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