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By Pete Schrag
California Progress Report Columnist

Unless the weak array of other candidates sucks Dianne Feinstein into the race for governor – you can take that verb in several ways, all descriptive – the most important decision for voters next year may not be the Tweedle-dee vs. Tweedle-dum run for governor.

It could be the contest over one or several of the 76 initiatives – yes 76 -- that may appear on the same ballot. Some are promising. Some are awful. Some are initiatives voters have rejected before, in some cases not long ago, that seem to be designed largely to harass and force opponents to spend resources they could otherwise spend in other ways.

Feinstein told Channel 5 in San Francisco earlier this month that her decision on the governor’s race will depend on “what precise programs are put forward by various candidates to handle what is a very serious structural budget deficit in this state…It's of major consequence and California is in considerable distress, and there have to be reforms."

Given what we know now about the candidates, she’s in.

Still, it can’t be an easy choice. If she ran, Feinstein would probably win, but except for the commute to and from Washington, her seat in the Senate would be hard to give up. For the first time in years, she chairs a key committee and is a member of a majority with a president of her own party pursuing an important program.

Yet she’ll be 77 next year, meaning that if she’s elected, it would almost certainly be her last major public office, and given the fiscal and governmental mess that California has worked itself into, not a promising way to end a great career.

The very things that would almost certainly make her far and away the best candidate for the job – perhaps the only candidate with a chance of changing California’s self-destructive course – are also the things that would make any reasonable person think twice before asking for it.

This is California’s Catch-22: any person big enough for the job would have to be crazy to take it.

At the same time, the mess that might bring Feinstein into governor’s race is also spawning what may yet be a record number of ballot proposals. Many of the 76, among them 33 that have been cleared for circulation and 43 still being reviewed for title and summary by the attorney general’s office, will never make it to the ballot. But some will.

Some, as always, are silly or utopian, vanity ventures for people with a cause – or maybe just a grim sense of humor - and $200 to spare for a filing fee.

On this year’s list of marginalia: putting an end to divorce; mandatory drug and alcohol testing for members of the legislature; requiring schools to offer Christmas music during the holiday season; the creation of “special constitutional rule for speech based on the Bible; the creation of a huge “wealth tax” on the rich.

The wealth tax, in the words of the straight-faced official analysis, could result in a “one-time increase in state revenues potentially in the low hundreds of billions of dollars…and ongoing increase in state revenues potentially in the tens of billions of dollars from imposition of the tax on certain people dying or leaving the state.”

But beyond the deciduous marginalia, there’s a near-bumper crop of reform proposals and other substantive measures, some promising, some really ugly stuff.

In the first category, several initiatives rolling back the corporate tax give-aways that Sacramento’s much-too-compliant Democratic leaders agreed to as part of one of the recent budget deals; a redundancy of marijuana legalization and taxation measures of which presumably no more than one will get to the ballot, and a similar multiplicity of initiatives granting same-sex couples the right to marry.

Also: a measure reducing the legislative margins required to pass a budget or raise taxes from the current two-thirds to a simple majority; another that would change the margin from two-thirds to three-fifths; a measure replacing the current legislative term limits, now six years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate to 12 years total, which may be served in either house or in a combination of the two. It would not apply to any current legislator.

Also a measure amending Proposition 13 to restore more control to local city, county and school district voters who could, subject to strict accounting and other conditions, enact certain taxes on real property by a 55 percent margin.

On the list of uglies: An initiative that would deny a regular birth certificate to the U.S. born child of an illegal immigrant and effectively deny all public benefits to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, which may well be unconstitutional; another that would require voters to show a government issued photo ID and on mail ballots provide a driver’s license or Social Security number; also. two measures creating a half-time legislature.

Also: at least two initiatives that voters have rejected several times before and that seem primarily designed to harass opposing groups by forcing them to spend money that they could spend more usefully for other purposes.

One is yet another anti-abortion measure requiring physicians to notify the parents of minors before they can perform an abortion. The other is yet another run at a  “paycheck protection act” similar to several similar likewise previously rejected by voters, that would require public sector unions to get the annual consent of every member before the member’s dues could be used for political purposes. 

How many of those proposals, or many others, will appear on the ballot depends almost entirely on the amount their proponents have to spend. A legislative committee is now holding hearings on various governmental reforms.

One that it’s considering is some provision to reduce the endless re-submission of virtually identical ballot measures. If anything deserves to be enacted, if only to reduce the nuisance, this is it.

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Peter Schrag, whose exclusive weekly column appears every Wednesday for the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His new book, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism, Eugenics, Immigration will be published early in 2010.