To understand why most Californians – and other Americans, too – feel so alienated from their representatives in Congress, it helps to observe an old dictum: Follow the money.

The most interesting thing about the New America Foundation think tank’s recent Sacramento seminar on replacing the California state constitution with something unknown and unpredictable was that even the foundation’s designated election law expert had to admit the “Pandora’s Box” problem.

California has a budget crisis as bad as any state’s, and it has a water crisis that’s nearly unique. But no California crisis can match the dropout crisis.

For most of the last 10 years, this column and a very few other news outlets reported that the high school dropout rate in California was about one-third, even while school districts reported much smaller rates. That is, of every nine students who enrolled in middle school in any given fall, about three would disappear before their purported high school graduation day rolled around.

The announcement on the information line of the Pacific Palisades Democratic Club one recent day said a lot more than intended.

Want to know the recipe for cooking up larger and larger hate group memberships? Take the election of a liberal President, add a governor reneging on his “no new taxes” pledge, toss in the highest unemployment in 30 years and oh, yes, make sure that the new President is an African American.

Few state officials or activists have been more vocal during California’s long-running budget battles than Jack O’Connell, the state’s two-term Superintendent of Schools, who hopes to become its next governor.

For many months, Americans have heard politicians from President Obama to Gov. Schwarzenegger and many lesser figures repeat the cliché that “every crisis offers an opportunity.”

The tale of a great exodus from California has traveled from the cover of Newsweek magazine to the opinion pages of the great (if nearly bankrupt) Eastern newspapers. It even has sneaked onto the op-ed pages of some California newspapers and into some so-called news reports on California TV stations.

Maybe California voters have had enough of a celebrity fix for awhile. Back in 2003, they elected Arnold Schwarzenegger governor largely on the strength of his movie stardom. Not even his admitted personal peccadilloes could bother the bulk of the voters who wanted to get rid of the grayest governor this state might ever have seen, Gray Davis.

What happens when ordinary citizens use a newspaper column to expose at least $100 million, and possibly much more, in government waste at a time when critical state services are being cut because of the most serious cash crunch in generations?