CA: Another Interview With Arnie Steinberg (Republican Strategist/Analyst)

Last year, FR’s interview with political strategist-analyst Arnold Steinberg caused quite a stir. Since then, I have been getting periodic requests to interview Arnie again. Finally I approached him. Steinberg, an author years back of graduate textbooks in politics and media, also has been widely published as a columnist. He has been appointed to Federal commissions and boards by the Reagan and Bush administrations, and he served on the California Coastal Commission. He is an expert in virtually every phase of electoral politics, including candidate and initiative campaigns, and political advertising, including mail, print and especially broadcast. He has advised law firms on legal strategy and jury selection in major legal cases, and he has been an expert witness numerous times. He has conducted more than fifteen hundred quantitative (polls) and qualitative (focus group) studies, and he continues to consult selectively. Much of what Arnie says is controversial, but I guess that was the fun part for me, as an interviewer. Oh yes, remember, don't shoot me - I'm just the interviewer! :-) Here is the UNEDITED wide-ranging interview.

FR: For a long time, you’ve correctly predicted the winners in statewide elections in California, and the winning margin, even when you’re not involved…

FR: Early on, you called the then-developing special election a “largely foreseeable disaster.” You predicted all four measures would lose, and then said, that the governor’s people after the election would blame their total loss on lack of money. That indeed was their post-election line. But they were outspent.

AS: The gross rating points for the ads were overkill on both sides. The opponents could have run a better campaign and defeated all four measures with a sharper campaign that cost a lot less. But, remember, in fairness to the governor, the opponents could have cut a deal to stop the special election. But the vendors opposing the governor wanted to make money. And the governor’s opponents wanted to defeat the governor. In any case, no statistics support the dubious thesis that repetition at the margin would have impacted. Remember, polling showed the governor’s ads were having little effect. But they just kept coming. Why? It’s like brokerage churning in the old days. I do acknowledge that allowing the other side to frame the issue before the election, however, was a consequence of the unions’ early money advantage. But the governor and his team know, or should have known, this. Moreover, the unions were successful in paid media because the governor was unsuccessful in earned media, for reasons I’ve discussed in great detail before. My views remain the same: the governor erred big-time, strategically, by not moving decisively during his political honeymoon, when he had superb numbers and Democrats were afraid of him. Now, depending on what happens this November, he could go down in history as the one-term accidental governor.

AS: When Cruz Bustamante entered the special election, that clinched the already likely recall of Gray Davis. The press even gave Schwarzenegger a pass, except for the stupid articles by the Times near the end that may have rebounded to Schwarzenegger’s favor. His election provided Republicans with a unique opportunity to reshape and reform California government. Voters were in crisis-mode. So, a governor who had been elected by an accident then had an unprecedented opportunity to educate the electorate and, in the process, revitalize the Republican party in this state. He not only failed to seize the moment, but he did nearly everything incompetently, and people now think he’s a screw-up.

AS: I’m definitely not prepared to say that. Ask me after the June primary. The Democrats remain a party beholden to special interests. They could yet prioritize that huge group of seniors who also are gay, Latino and Catholic who happened to vote for Reagan and now want to become Muslims. Seriously, the Democrats are capable of conspicuous irrelevance. It’s just that the governor has become the Republican Gray Davis – more spending, more government, more deficits, political opportunism, and their shared obsession with raising money, and unnecessary wheeling and dealing that doesn’t pass the smell test. Just sloppy, mess stuff with campaign loans, muscle magazine deals, campaign money on the side to state employees and so forth. It’s all gratuitous. Overall, this governor is a political masochist whose wounds are largely self-inflicted. He also is under the mistaken impression that people elected Maria. She is an intelligent and resourceful woman who is not strategically gifted, at least in politics. It’s unseemly to have one’s spouse involved in the intimate details of governance, and in daily conference calls. Apparently, there is no one she respects with the clout to explain to her that her intervention in personnel will come back to haunt her, and the governor.

FR: Should the California Republican Party retract its pre-primary endorsement of the governor.

AS: Of course not. The party should unite behind the governor. Politics in this state is often governor-driven. Reagan upstaged the party, Deukmejian was aloof from it, and Wilson was conflicted. Oddly, the governor wants right-wing attacks, because he believes it makes him look more centrist. His conservative critics are implausible, because they are blamed (unfairly) for the outcome of special election, which was Schwarzenegger’s idea. It occurred because he didn’t hang tough in his first months in office, because he followed the advice of Maria and other Democrats to compromise. His political gullibility is further illustrated by his donating millions of his own money in the closing days of his campaign. He was taken to the cleaners by his own team. I guess it’s easier for him and, especially, Maria to believe he went, quote, “too far to the right.” His political analysis is schizophrenic: he runs in the recall as a reformist, populist Republican, but really preps to be an unoriginal, chamber of commerce Republican, but soon acts like a Gray Davis Democrat while driving his own Republican party into the ground. After making a fool of himself with on-again, off-again ballot measures, he acts like Milton Friedman on steroids and is all over the map on the implausible theme of “paycheck protection,” a weird Grover Norquist slogan – I don’t know what he was smoking, and the obsessively pro-choice Schwarzenegger is suddenly embracing parental notification (not unreasonable, at all, but far out for him)… Anyway, he raises tens of millions for a boondoggle and, in the process, ends up very weak while making his opponents stronger, and really discrediting needed policy reforms. And now, his chief of staff and his wife’s chief of staff are both from the Davis administration, and his spending and borrowing put Davis to shame. He still doesn’t understand that no matter what he spends on education, the education lobby will say it’s too little. And he is a lightning rod for Democrats

AS: It should have been dedicated to the cement companies and construction unions. And these folks will probably fund the infrastructure bonds. And, then there are the bond underwriters. You know, Schwarzenegger’s politics oscillate like a pendulum. He’s not pragmatic, he’s erratic. We truly need infrastructure, but he doesn’t have a clue how to go about it. It’s a reckless approach. Whatever is done eventually be highly modified, and the Democrats will get credit. Schwarzenegger looks silly saying “Build it…build it…build it.” He comes across like a kid in a candy shop. . It’s not like he made infrastructure a campaign issue in the recall. Look, I know where he’s coming from. When I was a young man, I encountered Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in his 1970 reelection campaign in New York. Gov. Schwarzenegger thinks he’s the Norman Vincent Peale of infrastructure. And Rockefeller had thought the Albany mall would be his pyramid. Arnold Schwarzenegger is happy when he talks about doing things. He’s high energy. It’s dangerous to have a guy like him in office, because the only way he can get his adrenalin going now is to spend taxpayer money. Free market people liked some of the English rulers during the Industrial Revolution precisely because they so were preoccupied with their sexual affairs, they didn’t govern. So we had monumental economic progress that lifted people from poverty. Anyway, there is little passion in the California Republican party for this governor, but who or what else does the party have?

FR: What kind of reaction did you get from last FR interview, where you ridiculed the special election campaign as a nonstarter, doomed to failure?

AS: I received email and telephone calls from prominent, very substantial Republican donors who privately agreed with me and said they had been taken for a ride. And I promised never to reveal their names. I’ve had inquiries from individuals and corporations for possible future consulting to evaluate political requests for major contributions, or to sign off on whether supposedly optimistic surveys are valid, accurate, and meaningful.

AS: I don’t know, and I’m so glad it’s not my problem. And there are many very solid Republican campaign professionals in this state who are doing first class work product for their clients. On the big picture, nothing is happening in the U.S. Senate race. The legislative districts remain drawn against Republicans; and last year’s redistricting ballot proposition was, in my judgment, for show, because it would not have been implemented until the 2008 elections and then ripe for challenge as based on old (2000) census data. I guess the party can try to develop candidates for nonpartisan office and let them graduate into legislative and congressional candidates down the line. But on the governorship, it’s tough going. If he wins, we basically have four years that likely are barely distinguishable from a Gray Davis tenure, and maybe they are worse. And if he loses, Republicans face statewide demographic trends that further marginalize them. He could have been the first in a line of several Republican governors, because he had a unique chance to educate voters. Instead, he could be the last Republican governor.

AS: Perhaps, because I had high expectations, because he was elected as a populist-reformist, not a business-as-usual Republican. There was no reason for him to raise big bucks, especially from Republican donors, to fund a Gray Davis fiscal bailout scheme packaged as a California recovery. Who funds an operating deficit with bonds, especially if you do not make structural reforms? He could have gone over the heads of the recalcitrant legislators when they were in awe of him; but when he sold out so early, they realized that he’s not really so macho. That said, it’s more than policy and missed opportunities like pension reform, which he now discredited. And my guess is that county and city governments throughout the state are threatened with bankruptcies within a decade, maybe less, unless they reform. So, reform will come, but not because of this governor, but in spite of him and how he set back the issue. But it’s not really this issue, or that issue, it’s whether voters feel that he was going to make significant change, without being power-hungry or autocratic. I’ve said in other places in far more detail how he squandered his time raising money and appearing at staged events, rather than governing and communicating. He and Susan Kennedy and others around him obviously do not understand that he is viewed now, and deservedly, as just another politician. Schwarzenegger’s campaign committee received $25,000 from PUC-regulated AT&T (for whose merger she, as PUC Commissioner, voted four days later) three weeks before she received the same amount from the governor’s committee. She is a political disaster. Look, it’s only a matter of time before she renounces taking money from his political committee. In other words, she’ll flip-flop. By that time, it will be too late. Apparently, she was a point person for fundraising for Gray Davis. What about her recent absurd suggestion she might have trouble making her mortgage payment without supplements from Schwarzenegger’s campaign committee? Hardly. Did she even disclose to Schwarzenegger her consulting last year for water-tycoon Keith Brackpool, who with his companies had given Gray Davis $345,000 and was involved, under Davis, in water policy and now stands to benefit from the governor’s proposals? All of this will be, shall we say, slow water torture, in the state’s newspapers.

"How else can one explain the party's continuous push to support a big-spending, big-borrowing, land-grabbing, pro-gun control, pro-GLBT, pro-abortion, pro-minimum wage liberal who promotes subsidizing taxpayers for the likes of stem-cell research, hydrogen highways, solar roofs, and global warming?"

That's just about the whole danged dumb deal from the CAGOP so-called "leadership!" I'm getting to where I simply don't care who wins anymore cause it's little different between tax and squander, or borrow and squander!!!

I went to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse tonight and celebrated the fact that I'm looking forward to a Conservative Republican sweep in 2010!!! I won't have to buy cases of Malox while either the dork or the dems create the strongest possible object lesson why CA cannot function without a return to Conservative Republican PRINCIPLES!!!

I hear ya! I did read some posts from you folks opposing the recall and they did make me think about it. I struggled with the voting choice but, at the time, didn't have your vision. Looking back, it's clear as mud.

Well, it's a little easier for me to see. I think it's easier to see things from a distance. I lived in CA for about 20 years but now happily reside in flyover country. I left in the middle of Gray Davis and the dems trashing a once great state by turning it finances over to the public employee unions and its social policy over to the hard left.

The problem in CA is really so simple--between 55 and 60% of voting Californians think their current democrat legislator is a good legislator. Until that changes, there is no hope for reform. The only way that will change is for things to get a lot worse and for the blame for the mess to be clearly attributable to the dems. Only in that way will the people be ready to make a political earthquake and throw dems out of gerrymandered districts--the way we did nationally in 1994.

But having Arnold in there has let the LAT and the Chronicle blame the Republicans and diffuse the blame, forestalling the day when the earthquake arrives.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.