Posted on 02/09/2006 10:19:46 AM PST by NormsRevenge
SUSAN Kennedy, with her people skills and grasp of policy, can be a terrific chief of staff for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or, with her strategic guile and experience, Kennedy can be a brilliant strategist for the governor's re-election campaign.
But she can't do both jobs at the same time.
Her current hybrid status -- drawing $131,000 as a full-time state employee as the governor's chief of staff, along with a reported $75,000 supplement to perform campaign work -- is ethically shaky on its face. This double-dipping arrangement is inviting a scandal when observers start connecting the dots, fairly or not, between Kennedy's government and campaign work.
The reality of Sacramento is that many of the same special-interest representatives writing checks at campaign events come knocking on the governor's office door during business hours to make their pleas on public-policy issues.
An elected official with any sense of propriety should recognize the need to draw firm boundaries between his or her campaign and his or her taxpayer-funded office. Even former Gov. Gray Davis, as aggressive as they come in fund-raising, made it plain that his office staff should steer clear of fund-raising activities.
If anything, Schwarzenegger and Kennedy should be extra sensitive to the appearance of conflicts of interest. He is the self-proclaimed populist reformer who ran scathing campaign commercials against Davis' obsessive fund-raising and the way "money comes in, favors go out, the people lose." Kennedy is a former high-level Davis aide who felt the pain of working in a Democratic administration that lost the public's confidence in its integrity.
Kennedy has insisted that any campaign work would be done on her "own time," but the fact is, a governor's chief of staff is nearly a 24/7 job.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Just win Baby! Don't sweat the details!
She is getting paid by the campaign AND the government? How exactly is this kosher? It appears that she brought Gray Davis's ethics along with his campaign strategies with her.
That it sprang to life by the direct hand of an electorate frustrated with fiscal mismanagement, constitutional corruption, and the personal enrichment of the governing class, is a startling irony.
I agree and I am sad to have to include how that occured...the CA GOP. I think it'd be very worthwhile to start including the CA GOP in the "Wilsonegger", well, scam process.
Not INHERENTLY the CA GOP, lest my comment be misunderstood, but the current personalities involved who made the Wilsonegger possible, including Susan Kennedy.
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