Enough Already!

An election reform created in 1911 for the admirable purpose of giving people direct power to pass laws at the ballot box ran wild this year in California -- and the voters rebelled. Faced with 28 ballot initiatives, some with deliberately similar titles but with opposite intentions, Californians threw up their hands and rejected 22 of them.

They not only snubbed Big Green, the most sweeping attack on environmental problems ever put before voters, but they also turned back a flurry of special interest-backed proposals that would have negated Big Green's impact had it passed. In the blur of clashing TV commercials, citizens turned negative, killing everything from a nickel-a-drink surtax on alcoholic beverages to a sales tax to fund antidrug measures.

One proposition the angry Californians did pass limits members of the state assembly to three terms, while state senators and other state officers will be confined to two terms. The voters' overall message, sums up Larry Berg, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, was bitter and crotchety: "We don't trust you."