California vs. Texas: The Power Struggle

May 20 -- Forget the North and the South. Throw out that East Coast-vs.-West Coast stuff. In the United States, in 2002, there's only one regional rivalry that matters.

California vs. Texas.

It's a head-on collision at the intersection of politics, business and culture, and nothing else in America can match it.

It's Democrat-dominated California, the biggest of the blue states you saw on those election-night maps, pitted against rabidly Republican Texas, largest of the red states. It's President George W. Bush's administration, loaded with Texans, trying to unseat Calif. Gov. Gray Davis in his current re-election campaign while wondering if the president can carry the state in 2004.

It's the year's biggest business story, the Enron scandal — a kind of political proxy battle in the economic world, pitting California's power-hungry consumers against Texas' apparently price-gouging energy traders.

It's former Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling, at the height of the California energy crisis last year, comparing the state, unfavorably, to a sunken ship: "At least the Titanic went down with the lights on." It's Calif. Sen. Barbara Boxer, at a congressional hearing this year about Enron's collapse, telling Skilling he was one of "the robber barons of the 21st century."

It's computer companies from California and Texas — Hewlett-Packard and Compaq — announcing a seemingly straightforward corporate merger, and having it blow up into a bitter public-relations battle and court case, highlighting a schism between contrasting corporate cultures.

Look around, and clashes between Texas and California seem to be everywhere these days — even the basketball court, where the Los Angeles Lakers and the Sacramento Kings tag-teamed to eliminate the San Antonio Spurs and Dallas Mavericks from the NBA playoffs last week.

"You've got these two cultures opposing each other," says Kevin Starr, the state librarian of California. "Wine and cheese against beer and nachos, greenfields vs. brownfields, skeptics against practicing believers, the uprooted and the traditionalists … granola against grits."