Her husband Steve English and the Advancement Project fuel her toughness
By Patrick Range McDonald and Jill Stewart
(From LA Weekly, Oct. 25th, 2012)
Molly Munger, whose Proposition 38 tax increase is up against Gov. Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30 tax increase on the Nov. 6 ballot, was sitting in her beautiful Pasadena home one fall day last year when her private pollster emailed her some fresh survey results. To her great surprise, they showed a major shift in the state’s anti-tax zeitgeist, with 57 percent of California voters willing to back a tax hike to fund schools.
For months, Munger had been quietly working with her close friend, Los Angeles civil rights attorney Connie Rice, and the Advancement Project, a 14-year-old civil rights advocacy group that Munger and Rice co-founded, on ideas to raise new money for California’s troubled schools. They drew up a “mock” ballot initiative and tried it out on focus groups in cities like San Diego, Riverside and San Jose, and the detail-oriented Munger watched the discussions live from her home via a computer feed.
The Advancement Project group became convinced they had a winning idea: Modestly increase state income taxes for all Californians on a sliding scale so that everyone has skin in the game, then funnel those billions of dollars directly to classrooms — explicitly bypassing the widely distrusted California Legislature, whose approval rating hovers at 21 percent.
Munger was an utter unknown on the California political scene, but her mock initiative wasn’t just a dreamy exercise in “what-ifs.” The self-assured, 64-year-old lawyer, who looks far younger and sports a platinum-blond coif, is fantastically rich; her billionaire father, Charles T. Munger Sr., is billionaire Warren Buffett’s business partner.
If multimillionaire Molly Munger felt like it, she could take that mock ballot before voters. She could be the first woman in California history to underwrite a key statewide ballot measure, a longtime tradition among the state’s very rich.
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