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A Bit Of Unpleasantness - Arnold’s Moonshots
New West Notes ^ | 3/13/06 | Bill Bradley

Posted on 03/13/2006 9:07:06 AM PST by NormsRevenge

A Bit Of Unpleasantness

With Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger moving from this statement of early Saturday morning — “I want to thank Senator Perata, Speaker Nunez, Senator Ackerman and Assemblymember McCarthy for all of their hard work this week. … I am encouraged by the tremendous progress we have made.” — to allowing as how he had differences with the infrastructure bonds bill shot down in the state Senate, and as the governor and fractious legislative Democrats and Republicans try one last gasp at regrouping to make the June California ballot, the minds of many in the Democratic Party turn to potential victory in the fall. And concern about how a destructive gubernatorial primary could wreck it.

Oscar-winning filmmaker/actor Warren Beatty, in a Friday talk billed in some press quarters as a possible gubernatorial campaign announcement, which it was not, addressed a Beverly Hills fundraiser for the liberal Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights, a principal critic of Arnold. In the course of giving an award to his friend Rose Ann DeMoro, director of the Arnold-dogging California Nurses Association, the governor’s Hollywood nemesis of the 2005 special election made some interesting comments, which he recounted in a conversation yesterday.

With the current Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner, state Treasurer Phil Angelides, in the audience, Beatty noted that, for mostly “sad” reasons, Democrats have “a great opportunity this year,” with politics at “a tipping point” here and around the country. Given that, in his view, California’s Democrats should not allow the “narcissism of minor differences” to result in a fragmentation of progressive forces. Because that, he opined, might well allow “the careening careerism” of Governor Schwarzenegger to prevail.

“To resume his meandering administration, he’ll count on petty attacks in our primary. We have two superbly prepared candidates. Each would make a good governor. Like you, I will have to choose who to vote for in June. But like you I should not take cheap shots at the one I’m not voting for.”

(Both the Angelides and Westly campaigns had just taken shots at each other that afternoon. Angelides led off with an attack on Westly, alleging that his joining a unanimous vote of Democrats on a procedural matter in the state Lands Commission showed Westly really favored offshore oil drilling. Westly replied with a missive saying that Angelides is hiding something in his unrevealed tax returns.)

Citing the dictum of “another actor friend, Ronald Reagan” (Beatty is a good friend of former First Lady Nancy Reagan), the movie star who played major roles in the presidential campaigns of Gary Hart, George McGovern, and Robert F. Kennedy as well as the various campaigns of the Brown family and a behind-the-scenes role helping Gray Davis try to hang on to his governorship, urged a slightly amended “Democratic 11th commandment,” that “we not speak ill, or at least not too ill” of another Democrat. He then went on to note that Angelides and his rival, state Controller Steve Westly, both employ as consultants “widely-skilled attack dogs, who we both love and fear.”

Saying to the audience of well-heeled liberal activists, “We should call ourselves the Watch Dogs,” Beatty said “we should hold the candidates responsible for their consultants.” And if things get too out of hand, those consultants should be fired.

Showing an evident sense of humor, Associated Press reporter Michael Blood, covering the Beatty speech, called consultants Bob Mulholland of the Angelides campaign and Garry South of the Westly campaign, both known for scorched earth tactics, as is Angelides himself, for comment, as you see here. Both avowed a preference for positive campaigning, of course.

This is actually a major concern for many Democrats, as well as something that the Schwarzenegger camp is banking on, as it were. That the winner of the Democratic primary emerge bloodied and broke (although it is unlikely that Westly would be broke) to face a governor rejuvenated by months of having no one attacking him. In fact, that was the original scenario I presented in my 2002 profile of Schwarzenegger which predicted that he would be the next governor. Although at that time, the recall was not yet on the horizon and the two projected Democratic combatants were Angelides and state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who later pulled out of the race to run for Treasurer after revealing he voted for Arnold in the recall. (This article is in the LA Weekly archives, but the search function there is malfunctioning so most of the archives are unavailable.)

So, a bit of unpleasantness to contemplate on an otherwise pleasant Sunday, already made fun by a thrilling return of the Formula One world championship racing series (in the form of the extremely closely fought Bahrain Grand Prix, with the current world champ beating the former world champ by one second) very early this morning and tonight’s long-awaited return of The Sopranos. Funny that Tony Soprano and the hardball Bada-Bing boys have some of the same issues as California’s Democrats.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 1:29 pm


TOPICS: Chit/Chat
KEYWORDS: arnolds; california; moonshots; schwarzenegger; unpleasantness
Arnold’s Moonshots

With a “Big Five” meeting said by inside sources to be on tap this morning, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger still has some chance to salvage something of his Big Bang Bond infrastructure package for placement on California’s June ballot, as the game moves deeper into overtime, with virtually no time left to make the ballot. (The so-called Big Five is Capitol parlance for the governor and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the state Senate and Assembly.) We’ll soon see if getting a deal is a matter of meeting Republican demands for more water storage, perhaps even a dam, and somewhat less spending on green projects, as Sunday’s word had it, is enough. Or if changing term limits really is part of the trick. Or if much deeper concessions on environmental regulation, labor law, and the Assembly Republicans’ supposed line-in-the-sand for pay-as-you-go programs are in the deal. We don’t know for sure because only a few do, and the storyline keeps shifting on the making of this gigantic program. Which may not end up being that gigantic.

Whether anything happens or whether this is simply more Capitol wheel-spinning, more than a week of behind closed door 11th hour negotiations on what has been proclaimed for months to be the biggest public policy matter before California state government has made it clear that all the secrecy and last minute planning are a poor substitute for openness and deliberativeness. And that this is another example of the risks of the former action superstar’s grandiloquent politics.

He shoots for the moon but frequently fails to clear the trees at the end of the runway.

We’ve seen it a number of times, with the prisons, the performance review, public employee contracts, Indian casino tribes, etc. We certainly saw it with the “Year of Reform” agenda, a talked-about-for-months, grandly billed set of special election initiatives that turned out when they finally emerged to be thoroughly undercooked and mostly unvetted. Those that did not fall away were shot down after a wasted year. Starting out by making the Big Bang Bonds sound even bigger than they actually are, with a shifting and inevitably slapped together plan, was guaranteed to deeply alarm Republican legislators, some of whose support will always be needed so long as California’s Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of the Legislature.

Perhaps a better approach to this clearly unplanned-in-advance “Year of Building,” even now, since there is always the November ballot, is to determine the very basic agenda that most everyone can agree to, then move out from there, testing the envelope of possibility as you go until it is time to close. Not a new idea, admittedly, just a sound one.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 6:39 am

1 posted on 03/13/2006 9:07:10 AM PST by NormsRevenge
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To: NormsRevenge
liberal Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights

Their raison d'etre is succinctly summed up as, "Pay Up, Sucka!"

2 posted on 03/13/2006 9:10:32 AM PST by martin_fierro (< |:)~)
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