Last night was one of those nights where you just feel like tossing your cell phone into the swimming pool, or in this case, my friend Mike Schroeder’s swimming pool. Last night there was an intimate fundraising event for Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona at the home of Mike and Susan Schroeder, but I ended up missing most of the festivities as I hunted for that one spot in the backyard of the Carona Del Mar home where my cell phone could get good signal.
I was on the phone quite a bit as there was talk that Bob Salladay of the Los Angeles Times had "gotten a hold" of an audio tape, or a transcription of an audio tape of the Governor, his Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy, and a couple of others where there is some colorful talk about Assembly Republican Leader George Plescia, his predecessor Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy and Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia.
It took a while but I finally was able to have someone read to me a copy of the transcribed conversation — and when they did, I said to the person, are you kidding me? In the context of what was recorded in a couple of minutes of conversation, I can say this, with deference to my friend Bob Salladay, the Los Angeles Times is making SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING.
You can click here to read Salladay’s story, but I will tell you this — it really shouldn’t surprise anyone as we get close to the end of the campaign season that the Los Angeles Times is turning, once again, into a political attack machine. We saw this during the Recall election when they tripped over themselves to throw out all kinds of personal allegations about Arnold Schwarzenegger in the final days of that campaign.
If memory serves me, it was about this far out from the recall election when the LA Times assembled an attack team of reporters with one mission: dig up dirt on Schwarzenegger. Then, after sitting on a tabloid-style story for weeks, the LA Times published a front-page article just six days before the recall election – accusing the Governor of sexual misconduct 28 years earlier when he was a young actor.
Anyone who has spent any meaningful amount of time with Arnold Schwarzenegger knows that he is the kind of person who can easily be taken out of context because he is a colorful character (the product of the bizarre world of professional bodybuilding and the even more whacky world of the movie industry). I have joked around with the Governor myself, and could only imagine how some of my conversations with him, taken out of context by the Los Angeles Times, could be used to attack the Governor or…me!
I spoke last night at length to two of the people who are ‘talked about’ on this brief recording — George Plescia and Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy shrugged off the tape as not being a big deal. Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, from a read of the Times story, doesn’t think it is a big deal either. Plescia asked me to keep our conversation private as he was not commenting on the tape.
I spoke with an inside source in the Governor’s office this morning who told me that this was a case where the Governor was working with speechwriters, which often are recorded in order to help those writers go back and make sure they understood where the Governor wanted to go with a speech. The snippet that we are reading about was a sidebar conversation on one of those recordings that took place when Kennedy came into the room. No big deal. (This isn’t some "Nixonesque" situation where every meeting with the Governor is recorded for posterity.)
I spoke with a friend who has penned speeches for the President of the United States, and he confirmed that it is often the case that you record your talks with the person for whom you are writing, because you then don’t have to rely on your memory to confirm that you got all of the information for the speech down right.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that as a result of this, there will be more care taken around the Governor’s office about what is said, and about whom, when the speechwriters (and their tape recorders) are around. I’m sure there were some awkward calls made from the Governor to those mentioned to apologize for the situation, but near as I can tell, the only ones interesting in blowing this up into a big deal are the editors at the Los Angeles Times.
I do note that in the Los Angeles Times piece, Salladay does not tell readers from where he obtained this recording. So I am going to put this into the category of being just another in a long line of unsourced attack articles the LA Times has run criticizing Governor Schwarzenegger.
I challenge the Los Angeles Times to reveal the source of this recording. Could it, in fact, be Democrat slimester Bob Mulholland, who was recently bragging about this exact kind of scenario?
Even Joe Mathews, a reporter from inside the Times’ ivory tower walls who covered the Governor and just published a book about him, said there were journalistic questions about when the Times ran the story just before the Recall Election, and how it relied on unnamed sources.
At ten o’clock this morning, the Governor is holding a press availability. We can look for the Star, the Enquirer, and the Los Angeles Times to be asking questions about this tape. Perhaps the other reporters will be more interesting in things like, oh, legislation pending on the Governor’s desk or other meaningful subjects.
If you are a regular reader of this column, then you know that I have no trouble being critical of this Governor when it is warrented — but this is a case where the criticism should largely be aimed at the Los Angeles Times.
So to sum up my take on this:
1) It is not surprising that this unsourced tape is being reported in the L.A. Times – they have always ‘had it in’ for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
2) Speechwriters record conversations with their subjects all of the time, it is not unusual, and it is not a Nixon redux.
3) I myself have had numerous conversations with the Governor that could, if taken out of context, be equally as entertaining (and equally as NOT newsworthy to anyone but the Times).
4) The Main Stream Media will now try to latch onto this as some major issue when it is not.
The only thing that surprises me about this morning’s hit piece in the Times is that it appeared below the fold.
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