Dan Walters

By Dan Walters
Published: Friday, Jul. 20, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 3A

Thirty-six years ago, during the early stages of a young Jerry Brown’s first governorship, actor John Travolta starred in a made-for-TV movie called “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”

Existential coincidence?

The film dramatized the true story of a boy born without the capacity to ward off infection who must live in hermetically sealed plastic, yearning for a real life. And it popped into mind as Brown and other politicians acted in ways this week that seemingly reflected lives in a hermetically sealed political bubble, disconnected from reality.

Californians are still struggling with the corrosive effects of a recession that’s been the most severe since the Great Depression.

Officially, recovery has begun, but 2 million California workers are still jobless. To them, as well as at least a million more who have dropped out of the labor force or are underemployed, and their families, the recession is still very real.

Three California cities have moved toward bankruptcy this year. A half-dozen others, at least, are on the brink, and the state budget is billions of dollars out of balance.

It’s no wonder that polls, including a new survey released Thursday by the California Business Roundtable and Pepperdine University, find that by huge margins, voters believe the state is on the wrong track.

Not surprisingly, too, those voters overwhelmingly dislike the performance of the Legislature, and are lukewarm at best on Brown’s second gubernatorial incarnation.

Given that disdain, given that Brown and Democratic legislators are hoping that disaffected voters will approve new sales and income taxes, and given that their tax measure barely breaks 50 percent in the polls, one would think that they’d bend over backward to improve their public standing.

So what did they do this week to earn the public’s trust?

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