Trendsetter legacy fades in California

The Chicago Tribune reports on California fading:

There was a time in American politics when California was ... California.

It was the state that clinched Woodrow Wilson's re-election, nudging the nation toward world war and global power. It gave us environmentalism and the initiative petition; Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; Berkeley and Manson and The Doors; two movements in the 1960s — one counterculture, one countergovernment — that divided the country and set the course of two political parties for a generation.

Now it is a cash machine for candidates, a delegate trove and ... what?

Republican presidential hopefuls gathered at Reagan's ranch last week, then proceeded to shred their hero's hallowed coalition of social and fiscal conservatism. A concrete bunker and three bleached-blue letters on a crumbling pillar are all that remain of the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy celebrated a critical 1968 victory, then lay dying.

The last California politician to mount a serious presidential bid lost the 1992 primaries to the governor of Arkansas.

When that governor left the White House and Little Rock behind in 2001, he settled not here, the state where he sent his daughter to college and where he found comfort in the darkest days of his administration, but in New York.

'Where people play'

California remains a giant of culture and agriculture, the world's sixth largest economy, the land of iPods and IPOs. But politically, "California is a stage where people play," said Joel Kotkin, an author, professor and futurist who has spent 35 years writing on the state's politics. "It no longer sets the stage."

Is your state going to have Santa Monica style real estate prices?