Poverty and Paradise in the 2 States of Upper Mexico

The good news for the national Republican party is that, 45 electoral votes or not, rabidly blue California is no longer necessary to put together the 270 votes needed to win the White House. This is due in part to the South, once the keystone of a Democratic campaign, becoming the Solid South once more, this time for the Republicans. It's a conservative counterweight to the left and right coasts.

There are two Californias, too. In fact, argues Victor Davis Hanson, the columnist, historian and classics scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, "California" is a misnomer. There is no such state, but two cultures, each dysfunctional in different ways. "Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster."

Coastal California, outwardly prosperous, carefree and where the dreamy lotus of Greek legend grows in utopian abundance, runs north along the Pacific from San Diego to San Francisco. Crippling regulations that curb timber, oil, gas and farm production have turned an inland empire into a vast hinterland of poverty and despair. While the state 's population grew by 10 million in the two decades after 1980, the number of Californians on Medicaid grew by 7 million. A third of all Americans on welfare now live in California. Unemployment has soared above 15 percent. If you would see the future, come to California 's Central Valley. If coastal California is the south of France, interior California is impoverished Greece.

"In the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood and the wine country," says Mr. Hanson, "millions live in idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about trivia - and so their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects in order to save the three-inch Delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents. .. coastal utopians have little idea where the fuel for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil and pasta."

The coastal elites are not only drunk on their feel-good good life, but they 're reaching for a little hair of the dog. Gov. Jerry Brown, the "Governor Moonbeam" of yesteryear, is popular along the coast because he prescribes more of what has sickened interior California. He 's pushing a fanciful high-speed train that will cost the state trillions of dollars, along a route already served by bankrupt Amtrak.

If you were running for president, you wouldn 't want to campaign here, either. Just take the money and run, to somewhere else.