Props go to William Bradley for e-mailing out the news a couple of hours before me. Ironically, I didn’t know it because I wasn’t on his email list. I am now. Perhaps, if you want to be in the loop, you should be… To get on it, email Bill. Bill gets all of the credit/blame if you do or don’t like what he says in his columns. But he gets an "A" for aggressive reporting.
NEW WEST NEWS
November 29, 2005
SHAKING OUT ARNOLD’S BIG SHAKEUP
If one stands on the moon and looks down at Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s big moves after the debacle of his special election agenda — his call for a $50 billion infrastructure bond measure and impending appointment of Democrat Susan Kennedy as his chief of staff — they look good. They signal that he gets that his partisan Republican course was leading him to, at best, a dispirited re-election in a a nasty, tactical campaign. And that he needs to at least appear to return to the bipartisan/non-partisan centrist ways which led to his dramatic 2003 election and record popularity in his first year as governor.
Closer up, the moves look more problematic.
The Kennedy appointment has its dicey sides. A longtime liberal activist before becoming a moderate, pro-business member of the Public Utilities Commission, the capable Kennedy is best known for working with big-time Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Gray Davis (for whom she was cabinet secretary) and for serving as executive director of the California Democratic Party. The party chairman then? One Phil Angelides, now Democratic frontrunner for governor. That should make for interesting meetings during Arnold’s re-election campaign. It’s already making for plenty of hard feelings among Kennedy’s Democratic friends.
Will the Republican base accept Schwarzenegger bringing in a chief of staff who is a lifelong advocate of lesbian/gay rights and abortion rights, who served as a top official in the regime of the Democratic governor they thought they’d just gotten rid of? How will they feel as they see their fellow partisans departing Team Schwarzenegger, or having their influence lessened? (Strategist Mike Murphy had a key alliance with chief of staff Pat Clarey, who helped diminish other voices in the Arnold circle.)
The Big Bang Bond idea is not fleshed out. (Is it a good idea for the governor himself to float a trial balloon, with gigantic dollar numbers attached? Isn’t that what you have a staff and a cadre of appointees and associates for?) Big James Bond fan Arnold’s very big bond is too shaky to be stirring at the moment and may be too expensive for the state to undertake now. It’s not clear what, if any, revenue sources it would have. It’s not clear that the right list of projects would be put together with every interest in the state seeing it as a political Gold Rush. It’s not at all clear that the governor can get fellow Republicans to go along.
Yet if, and it is a large if, Schwarzenegger can work all these things to some satisfactory resolutions, he will be in markedly better shape. These moves will go a substantial way to dealing with one of his meta-problems; namely that a year and a half of empty campaigning has left him looking disturbingly like a celebrity who happens to be governor. Then he can hope that his other meta-problem, over which he has much less control — the one named George W. Bush — doesn’t do him in.
Copyright 2005 by William Bradley and N2. All rights reserved.
November 29, 2005
SHAKING OUT ARNOLD’S BIG SHAKEUP
If one stands on the moon and looks down at Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s big moves after the debacle of his special election agenda — his call for a $50 billion infrastructure bond measure and impending appointment of Democrat Susan Kennedy as his chief of staff — they look good. They signal that he gets that his partisan Republican course was leading him to, at best, a dispirited re-election in a a nasty, tactical campaign. And that he needs to at least appear to return to the bipartisan/non-partisan centrist ways which led to his dramatic 2003 election and record popularity in his first year as governor.
Closer up, the moves look more problematic.
The Kennedy appointment has its dicey sides. A longtime liberal activist before becoming a moderate, pro-business member of the Public Utilities Commission, the capable Kennedy is best known for working with big-time Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Gray Davis (for whom she was cabinet secretary) and for serving as executive director of the California Democratic Party. The party chairman then? One Phil Angelides, now Democratic frontrunner for governor. That should make for interesting meetings during Arnold’s re-election campaign. It’s already making for plenty of hard feelings among Kennedy’s Democratic friends.
Will the Republican base accept Schwarzenegger bringing in a chief of staff who is a lifelong advocate of lesbian/gay rights and abortion rights, who served as a top official in the regime of the Democratic governor they thought they’d just gotten rid of? How will they feel as they see their fellow partisans departing Team Schwarzenegger, or having their influence lessened? (Strategist Mike Murphy had a key alliance with chief of staff Pat Clarey, who helped diminish other voices in the Arnold circle.)
The Big Bang Bond idea is not fleshed out. (Is it a good idea for the governor himself to float a trial balloon, with gigantic dollar numbers attached? Isn’t that what you have a staff and a cadre of appointees and associates for?) Big James Bond fan Arnold’s very big bond is too shaky to be stirring at the moment and may be too expensive for the state to undertake now. It’s not clear what, if any, revenue sources it would have. It’s not clear that the right list of projects would be put together with every interest in the state seeing it as a political Gold Rush. It’s not at all clear that the governor can get fellow Republicans to go along.
Yet if, and it is a large if, Schwarzenegger can work all these things to some satisfactory resolutions, he will be in markedly better shape. These moves will go a substantial way to dealing with one of his meta-problems; namely that a year and a half of empty campaigning has left him looking disturbingly like a celebrity who happens to be governor. Then he can hope that his other meta-problem, over which he has much less control — the one named George W. Bush — doesn’t do him in.
Copyright 2005 by William Bradley and N2. All rights reserved.