California should be more like Texas: Golden State reforms are overhyped.

• Author: Grieder, Erica
• Position: BOOKS - Narda Zacchino's "California Comeback" - Book review

ALL TEXANS KNOW that Texas is the greatest state in the country. Many national observers would disagree, of course; they often do so for no apparent reason and with what I would describe as an objectively disproportionate degree of hostility. Narda Zacchino, a writer from California, is one such example. Her new book, California Comeback, sets out to explain how the state, which suffered more than most during the Great Recession, has turned things around.

Her goal, actually, is even more ambitious than that. "California," she writes, "has become the economic, social, and political model of the twenty-first century, which stands in contrast to the alternative examples of Texas, Kansas, Florida, and others hobbled by right-wing ideology."

As recently as a few years ago, California was the functional equivalent of a clown stepping on a rake and then bursting into flames, but matters appear to have improved somewhat since then. There seems to be an intriguing story to be told about the state's recent history, and the sheer swagger of Zacchino's opening salvo raised my hopes that it would be one with a happy ending.

It's not easy to wrap your head around a state as large, complex, and dynamic as California. It has 38 million people. If it were a standalone country, its economy would rank as the seventh largest in the world. Its politics are incomprehensible. California is a blue state, but it had a Republican governor as recently as 2010 and, furthermore, that governor was The Terminator.

Zacchino's resume includes 31 years at the Los Angeles Times followed by six as deputy editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. She has amassed nearly four decades' worth of expertise on a substantively interesting circus, and she uses it to relitigate the relative merits of Texas vs. California. Zacchino claims that this is a "grudge match, manufactured in large part by the media and politicians."

To be fair, there are a lot of Texans who talk about California as a rival. Former Gov. Rick Perry has done so many times, and he capers through her book with the rambunctious vim that recently dazzled viewers of Dancing with the Stars. I understand what Zacchino is getting at when she says that people like me, including me specifically (I wrote a book on Texas in 2013), were "piling onto the meme" that Texas and California represent a study in contrasts between what one pro-Texas partisan summarized as "two opposing versions of the American dream, one based on...