I laughed to myself. The Republicans had narrowly solidified their national hold on government in the 2002 elections with WMD lies, but in California Democrats had won every statewide office for the first time since 1882. Attempting a recall of Davis seemed like a desperate tactic that was bound to fail. The recall was passed into law by Progressive governor Hiram Johnson, who enshrined direct democracy as a way of counteracting corporate parasites (mining companies, timber companies, ranch interests, and Southern Pacific Railroad) that had a habit of killing necessary government reforms and elemental legitimacy. Davis's actions were far more timid, and generally benign in intent. Davis hadn't authorized secret bombings of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians, or gone around the public, the press, and Congress to sell arms to terrorists and divert the profits to right-wing counterrevolutionaries in Latin America. Davis hadn't repeatedly lied to the press, the public, and the world about the absolute necessity of sending other people's sons and daughters off to die in foreign lands to win the Senate for the Republicans. Hell, Gray--a squeaky clean, straight and narrow Vietnam vet--was too square to have accepted the advances of an eager young admirer named Cybill Shepherd.
Must be just a way for Sundheim to suck up to the Republican powers that be, I thought. A pat on the back from the boys up top for thinking big.
Deregulation of California's electricity market
This story really begins with the California energy crisis of 2000.
As more and more hucksters jump up on our TV screens singing hosannas to deregulation and privatization, it's good to think back to another era of anything goes economic policy--the 1920's. The invisible hand of the 20's clenched up and delivered a knockout punch that produced the Great Depression, which elected Democrat Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt, whose first order of business was cleaning up the mess left by three consecutive Republican presidents in thrall to laissez-faire.
FDR signed a raft of laws to break up monopolies, halt gouging of consumers, spread public resources widely, and hold business accountable. This flurry of legislation produced the Public Utilities Holding Company Act and the Federal Power Act, which, in league with open accounting standards and bans on campaign contributions from utilities, provided Americans with cheap and steady electricity.
These laws held up more or less in tact until 1996, when California's then-governor, Republican Pete Wilson, facing heavy pressure from energy company lobbyists and steep donations from their bosses, pushed and signed into law a measure deregulating the California energy market. Consumers were told that deregulation would allow greater competition, which would inevitably lead to lower prices (20% reductions, according to the power company pitch) for abundant supplies of energy.
Not everyone bought this one-size-fits all free market model. In 1998 Ralph Nader helped put a proposition on the California ballot that would have re-regulated the energy market. 53 million dollars from the state's energy companies helped defeat the measure and keep deregulation in place. In the same election, California Democrats regained the governor's mansion for the first time in 16 years when Gray Davis walloped Republican opponent Dan Lungren by 20 points.
Governor Davis, meet Enron
For a little over a year Davis cruised in the radical center of California politics. He signed some legislation sent to him by the liberal Democratic state legislature, vetoed some, and consistently maintained Clintonian approval ratings of around 60 percent.
Beginning in the spring of 2000, energy prices soared in California, increasing by as much 7000% by the end of the year. Blackouts swept up and down the coast.
Before departing for private life Bill Clinton put a temporary cap on electricity prices, but incoming President George W. Bush removed the cap within his first week in office, at about the same time that Vice President Dick Cheney met with energy company heads to devise the administration's Energy Bill (Cheney has yet to release the notes of these meetings to the courts or the public).
Gray Davis and other California officials cried foul, but the energy companies said that California was falling victim to overuse and undercapacity. When asked on television about the skyrocketing prices that were hemorrhaging California, Bush administration officials echoed the energy company line, blaming the crisis on California's environmental regulations and unwillingness to build more power plants (decisions made by the power companies, not the governor). Trying to turn grits to gravy, the Bush administration claimed the chaos in California was an endorsement of Bush's Energy Bill, which would not have regulated electricity prices, though it would have increased dirty coal production, exhumed and subsidized nuclear energy, and allowed private interests to drill more, log more, and pollute more, often on publicly-owned lands.
Faced with continually rising rates, extreme volatility, including threats of future blackouts, and little help from the feds, Davis made possibly his most controversial decision, buying long-term energy contracts at high prices to stabilize the market.
What really happened in the energy crisis
In the 2000 presidential election California went for Al Gore 54-42. Having spent $10,000,000 in California, $10,000,000 more than Democrat Al Gore, Bush was a little sore, so he and his cabal decided to give up on California, and moreover, to punish California for stepping out of line, in the tradition of Bush's brutally brilliant strategist, Karl Rove. During the energy crisis, Gray Davis publicly accused the energy suppliers--who included Bush's number one contributor, Enron, as well as many other major Bush supporters, including Reliant and Dynegy--of rigging the system and gouging California consumers. Most Californians at the time supported this hunch, only to be ridiculed as "goofy" by Vice President Dick Cheney.
But the fall of Enron in 2001--and the return of Democratic control of the Senate with the defection of Republican Jim Jeffords--lifted the lid on the whole episode, bringing much new information to light. The rapaciousness of the energy suppliers was found to be so blatant that even Bush's serf-like Republican appointees on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission admitted that energy companies had in fact gouged California consumers with a complex series of scams: buying capped energy in California, then selling it back to California at a higher price from a different state; overloading energy lines, so that operators would be forced to make highly expensive emergency purchases; and shutting down plants during peak hours, under the guise of doing repairs, again to raise rates. The accusations of increased use and overcapacity were shown to have been fictitious: California had plenty of power plant capacity to meet their increased usage of 5% from the year previous, which still left California with one of the lowest levels of per capita energy consumption in the nation.
The profits earned at California's expense were so excessive (Enron's profits in the last quarter of 2000 rose 34% from their profits in the last quarter of 1999) that many energy company executives socked away big portions of their windfall in hidden reserves to avoid scrutiny and to pull out later if the bottom line began to sag, as a way of fooling shareholders. At the same time, executives at many of the same companies aggressively exercised their stock options, buying shares at low insider prices, selling high, and pocketing millions in capital gains. During the period under focus, Ken Lay, chairman of Enron and good personal friend of George W. Bush (who has bestowed on Lay the affectionate name "Kenny Boy") racked up 27 million dollars, while Peter Cartwright, chief executive of Calpine in San Jose, waggled almost ten million dollars over just a six-day span.
When all was said and done, California had been fleeced for tens of billions of dollars and voters had found a scapegoat in Governor Gray Davis.
2002 gubernatorial election
The dynamic of the 2002 California gubernatorial campaign was very similar to the 2000 presidential election. Democrats chose Davis, a competent, boring, highly knowledgeable candidate with policies supported by the majority of his constituency, while Republicans picked Bill Simon, a wholesome-appearing intellectual lightweight with no government experience and views to the right of the majority of Californians. Richard Riordan, a centrist Republican and the former mayor of Los Angeles, had lost handily to Simon in the primaries after Davis ran ten million dollars of negative ads against Riordan, who was considered the most electable Republican.
Into and through the 2002 campaign season, most Californians blamed the energy crisis on Gray Davis, taking his approval ratings down into the low forties, from which they never recovered. However, Simon was such an uninspiring and conservative candidate that Davis won by five points--but not without a price. Faced with an opponent with higher qualifications and far more popular--and populist--positions, the Republicans did what they could to make the 2002 election a referendum on Davis's perceived character by constantly blaming him for the power crisis and criticizing him for raising huge amounts of campaign cash (unacceptable behavior in a Democrat) and thus "lacking vision." The focus on Davis's perceived public persona took hold with many California voters, even among many Democrats who pulled clothespins off their noses as they emerged from voting booths.
Petitions are circulated
In early 2003, when petitions first went out supporting the recall, the signatures did not come. This lack of momentum, and the knowledge that only one governor had been recalled in American history, left many commentators predicting that the recall would never get the signatures required in the allotted time.
Enter Darryl Issa. Backed by a small clique of right-wing fundraisers and tacticians with notorious reputations in California, Issa stepped up to revive the recall, naming his effort "Rescue California." A perfect example of California's possibilities for self-reinvention, Issa had left behind a youth in which he was arrested for weapons charges and grand theft auto to become a wildly successful car alarm magnate and conservative congressman representing a district in Southern California. Thinking that a recall vote--where a candidate could win with as little as 15 percent of the vote--would be his one shot at the governor's mansion, or at least a great opportunity for notoriety within the party, Issa poured more than a million dollars of his own money into the recall, hiring signature gatherers and paying them a dollar for each signature. Davis took Issa's campaign to court, claiming that Rescue California had hired people from outside the state who did not have the right to vote in California, but the charges didn't stick. The signatures (3/4ths of which were collected in the gated community-heavy region of Orange County) came in on time and the recall was on for October 7. The first part of the recall ballot would be an up or down vote on whether to keep Davis as governor. The second part of the ballot listed all the replacement candidates; if Davis's removal were approved by more than 50% of voters, the candidate with the most votes on the second part of the ballot would become the new governor.
(California voters) "are unfamiliar with the recall process ... this uncertainty means voters can be easily swayed in either direction"
-Recall strategist Frank Luntz, in a memo to his clients
Details, schmetails
The recall presented financial and logistical nightmares for California counties, who were already deep in the red because of the recession and the starving off of money from the federal and thus state governments. Many counties faced an uphill battle just getting already-scheduled local elections ready for November.
The Republican strategy was to downplay these concerns, and concerns about removing a democratically-elected governor less than a year into his second term--concerns voiced much more vocally in the San Francisco Bay area than anywhere else in the state--by hammering on the purported risks of leaving Gray Davis in office.
The game plan for Issa's "Rescue California" campaign was shaped in a memo by the nationally known Frank Luntz, a high-caliber Republican strategist and former pollster for Enron and Newt Gingrich. Echoing the GOP strategy in the impeachment battle and 2000 presidential election, the memo said that the recall campaign should avoid discussion of the global, life-shaping decisions public executives make in favor of a withering focus on the perceived weakness of Davis's character. As Luntz put it in the memo: "Issues are less important than attributes and character traits in your recall effort."
Policy specifics were to be avoided, because Davis had signed and was in the process of signing a stunning amount of popular, forward-thinking legislation:
-the nation's first paid family leave law
-domestic partner benefits for gays and lesbians
-a host of environmental protection measures, including the strengthening of wetland protections, the banning of the flame retardant perchlorate, Co2 emissions reduction laws (challenged in court by the Bush administration and the auto companies), and a bill requiring 20% renewable energy by 2017
-the strongest pro-choice protections in the country
-a revolutionary stem cell research bill
-measures on behalf of the working class such as a bill that will bring healthcare to a million uninsured workers, reinstatement of overtime pay for more than 8 hours worked in a day, a raise in the minimum wage, increases in funding for affordable housing, and a groundbreaking law forcing agriculture companies to arbitrate stalemates with underpaid migrant workers
-a bill cracking down on predatory lending
-the appointment of qualified judges from all genders, races, and backgrounds (including 9 openly gay and lesbian judges, 9 more than Davis's two Republican predecessors appointed in 16 years)
-the strongest HMO reform and gun control laws in the country
-the establishment of solid nursing home staffing mandates
-legislation strengthening tenants' rights
-the toughest anti-spam and financial privacy bills in the country
-a law protecting 1,500 American Indian religious sites from development
"A riot of millionaires masquerading as a 'revolt of the people'"
-bedrock conservative columnist George Will, on the recall
Let the games begin
Anyone with $1,500 to blow and 350 signatures could jump in the fray, so the process degraded quickly, growing to a field of over 200 candidates, among them a well-known and artificially well-endowed Los Angeles porn star, adult entertainment magnate Larry Flynt, and so-early-eighties actor Gary Coleman.
Meanwhile, the state legislature was engaged in the serious business of passing a state budget, an insufferable task ever since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. Proposition 13 was so radical that it was opposed by former California governor and future president Ronald Reagan, the embodiment of Republican conservatism. Proposition 13 capped property taxes at 2%, which choked the revenue windpipe of 25% of its air. Within less than two decades California's roads, schools, and healthcare went from among the best in the country to among the worst.
The law also dictated that no state budget or tax increase could pass with less than a 2/3rds vote of the legislature. Eight California Republicans used the 2/3rds law to hold the 2003 budget hostage, and while doing so blamed Davis for the delay, feeding the notion that Davis's incompetence was getting in the way of a budget deal. The California Eight offered few alternatives and refused to deal until the Democrats agreed to cuts in healthcare for the poor, 10% hikes on college student fees, as well as a tripling of the vehicle registration fee (to the same rate it had been before it was lowered during the Dot.com boom).
The great California deficit
When the budget was inked, California had an $8 billion deficit. Even while protecting to what extent he could popular public priorities (healthcare and education), Davis became the scapegoat for painful budget cuts, which were being felt nationwide in states and localities who had seen federal dollars shrink while W poured tens of billions of dollars into the war in Iraq and the pockets of his biggest contributors.
When appearing on television, Republicans hit their mark and referred to a "$38 billion deficit," which no longer existed, due to the budget deal. Often Democrats present would correct the error, only to see the same Republican official repeat the $38 billion figure the next night on TV. The charge was so nifty that it was picked up and frequently repeated by the media, including the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and Chris Matthews of Hardball, who kept mentioning the number after clearly being told that it was inaccurate.
Inevitably, this familiar hijacking of the dialogue convinced many voters that Davis was guilty of gross negligence, though 47 states were in the red, and California's per capita deficit is significantly lower than the $500 billion dollar-whopper Bush will drop on us next year.
"I know Arnold personally. He is in no way qualified to govern anybody or anything."
-Howard Koch, executive producer of Schwarzenegger's latest movie, Terminator 3, in an e-mail to friends and associates
The Terminator: "Man of the People"
Unable to find any statewide candidates who were attractive, media-savvy, and not right-wing Neanderthals, California's Republicans turned to the land of make believe, Hollywood. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his campaign for governor of California on the Tonight Show, and revealed the strategy he would rigidly adhere to for the next three months: visit good friends with major media outlets, chat amiably while tossing weightless pseudo-populist darts at Davis's character, juke and jive when asked how he would specifically do better or wave his hand in the air and laugh it off as an irrelevant question (pressed at one point about his lack of specificity, Arnold said "the public doesn't care about the details.")
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in 2001 spent $383,000 on nannies for his kids, ran as the latest sunny-faced multi millionaire Republican Everyman doing his political internship as governor of a state with the 5th largest economy in the world. He had not even bothered to vote in five of the past 11 elections, including the presidential elections of 1996 and 2000, but he would better steer a state through tough times than the most experienced public official in the state.
Convenient myths, continued
While Arnold did his thing, his surrogates fed a handful of messages over and over to the media, all in a chorus. Two of the biggest interrelated lines were that the California economy was in a major slump, and that a big part of the reason for the slump was California's--and thus, by extension, Gray Davis's--hostile attitude toward business. Helped along by the stock market crash, low revenues, 9/11, Bush's unfunded mandates on education, welfare, and homeland security, and the 82 cents California gets for every dollar it gives the federal government, California was and is in tough times, but its dive was no bigger than average in the United States: housing prices continue to rise, the jobless rate is right around the national average, personal income has remained level, and start ups continue to balance out businesses that leave for lower taxes.
Not unlike other high tech areas of the country, there was a huge exodus of jobs overseas after the Dot.com bust, but the business environment had little to do with this; Texas, a state with very little regulation and low taxes, had even bigger tech job losses than California. Healthcare, electricity, and real estate/land prices make California the 13th most expensive place to do business in the United States, but considered against the comically lax regulation and tax burdens in much of the United States, this is hardly extraordinary. To many business owners, the climate, landscape, and physical beauty compensate in quality of life, which is why California still leads the world in innovation and entrepreneurship. Complaints of government strangulation of the private sector were also big in the early '90s recession, just a couple years before California had its biggest boom ever. Nonetheless, after zombie-like repetition, the charges that Davis was strangling business stuck, just like the purported link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
Arnold's silver bullet(s)
While blaming the electricity crisis and the state of the California economy on Davis's lack of character, Republicans pulled out their silver bullet, the "car tax." In the early '90s California recession, Republican Governor Pete Wilson signed a bill that tripled the vehicle registration fee. In 1997, when the economy soared, Wilson lowered the fee back down to its original rate. In 2003, after Republicans refused a minimal tax increase on the very richest Californians, the California legislature was forced to raise the registration fee back to its pre-boom cost. To the majority of Southern Californians, the vehicle tax was a major assault on their sense of entitlement to drive cheaply, global warming ozone depletion and the fate of the rest of the world be damned. As So Cal suburbanites got stuck in regular traffic jams in the most overdeveloped artificial environment on earth, right-wing shock jocks wailed on about the vehicle registration fee.
And, as if raising the cost of driving weren't bad enough, the shock jocks hit the jackpot of white nativism when Gray Davis signed a bill to allow illegal aliens to legally drive back and forth from jobs that no one else wanted. While much of the world likes to see California as a sunny paradise, nothing raises the hackles on the backs of So Cal's vanilla suburbs than "special treatment" for foreigners.
Cruise control
Arnold's shady, handsomely-compensated handlers used donations from real estate developers and Silicon Valley to run populist-tinged ads wherein Arnold said he would stop special interests ("it's time to return government to the people") while motivational music trailed in the background. And as the other major gubernatorial candidates held several diplomatic, informative debates, Arnold's handlers made sure to keep him at least a mile away from any potentially unscripted moment, gliding him through the co-ed softball circuit--Oprah, Howard Stern, right-dial talk radio--where he would be certain to get pitches slow and perfectly deflectable with spoonfed one-liners from his movies, like "Hasta la vista, baby." Arnold only stepped outside the bubble twice: once for a press conference, and once to do a debate, which he agreed to only after he was told he would get the questions in advance.
One of Arnold's central messages was his embodiment of the American dream. Many times he told enthusiastic audiences how he had come to the country with little English and 50 cents in his pocket. The reality was that Arnold (at the time Mr. Europe and Mr. Universe) first entered the United States on an elite visa exclusively extended to athletes, entertainers, and religious figures, under the sponsorship of Joe Wieder, a world famous bodybuilding magnate who set Arnold up with a car, an apartment, a stipend, and later, contacts who would help make Arnold rich in Hollywood and California real estate.
In the fictional world of Southern California, where myths refuse to die, Arnold's tall tale added moral ballast to his vehement opposition to driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, supposedly reflecting a strict sense of fair play. Oddly enough, Arnold was alleged to have broken his visa agreement before he became a citizen by making money off of a bricklaying business. Arnold's spokesman swore his client hadn't done anything illegal, but refused to release Arnold's immigration records.
Down the stretch
As the race neared the finish line Davis's popularity remained dismally low, weighed down by lies, half-truths, and Davis's unique breed of boring, while Arnold solidified his lead, refusing Davis's debate offers and attending heated rallies where Arnold yelled the famous line from "Network" ("We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore") to huge crowds of Southern Californians who'd roughed years of federally subsidized water, roads, and defense jobs. Arnold looked on approvingly as big wrecking balls showed what Arnold had in mind for the vehicle registration fee.
In the last week of the election a lot of dirt came Arnold's way, including the revelation that Arnold had admired Hitler (for his ability to control large numbers of people, among other things). This was unsurprising to those who knew that Arnold's dad was a German stormtrooper during World War II, or those who knew that Arnold was a good friend of Austrian war criminal Kurt Waldheim, to whom Arnold raised a toast when he married Maria Shriver. It was alleged that outtakes from Arnold's first major movie, "Pumping Iron," revealed many other unsavory ruminations, but the media could not investigate because Arnold had bought rights to the movie stills for $1.25 million dollars. Later the director's partners sued, claiming they had not been privy to the sale. Arnold eventually settled for $400,000 and sealed the evidence forever.
A much larger irritant for Arnold was a blockbuster story the Thursday morning before the election in the Los Angeles Times that included allegations of sexual harassment against Arnold from more than a dozen different women. In 1993 Wendy Leigh had written a book called "Arnold, an Unauthorized Biography" which told much the same story (in addition to alleged incidences of racism and anti-Semitism), but Arnold's full court press helped slam the lid on Leigh's book.
Faced with the Times's story, Arnold's campaign coordinator Sean Walsh forwarded a URL to carefully-chosen media that linked to a woman with the same name as the 16th harassment accuser, Rhonda Miller. According to the site, Rhonda had been charged with prostitution, narcotics, and forgery. Surely this woman couldn't have any credibility, could she? Quickly this piece of news made it to Fox, the Drudge Report ("ARNOLD ACCUSER'S STORY FALLS APART"), Rush Limbaugh, and other talk radio barkers, where it circled and swelled among the cannibals in the right-wing media echo chamber.
After the election it came out that Rhonda Miller the alleged prostitute was not Rhonda Miller the 16th Schwarzenegger accuser, but Arnold had already won comfortably, 55-45, despite getting less than 50% of the vote in Los Angeles and a weak showing in the Bay Area.
The hangover
In the days after the recall, articles popped up in the press about California's improving economy, and a report came out that showed that test scores had improved for the fifth year in a row and 90% of the state's public schools were improving under Gray Davis's laser-like focus on education.
As the drama from the recall had barely subsided, arsonists set off what has become the largest fire in California in possibly a century. Virtually overnight many of the areas who had voiced the strongest antipathy for Gray Davis's "big government spending habits" were sending Arnold with hat in hand to Washington to get hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal aid for people who had typically built or bought homes in unsustainable, fire-prone ecosystems, in canyons, mountains, on hillsides.
After four years of drought, in April of 2003, Gray Davis wrote FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Association) asking for $430 million dollars to help thin underbrush and cut down dead, highly flammable trees to avoid a major catastrophe in three counties--San Diego, San Bernardino and Riverside--which turned out to be the backbone of Arnold's electoral map. The situation was so dire that within a couple weeks, a bipartisan group of eight California federal officials wrote a follow-up letter reminding FEMA of the importance of aid.
Though the amount sought was less than 1% of what Bush recently asked for in the latest installment of his colonial venture in Iraq, Bush's friends at FEMA kept W's record of screwing California perfect, waiting six months to issue a rejection, which was received less than 24 hours before the fires began. Instinctively, some on the right blamed the fires on Gray Davis, but even Republican Mary Bono, whose district was victimized by the fire, told reporters "FEMA's decision was wrong" and "the timing couldn't be worse...we knew this disaster was going to happen with certainty."
San Diego could have helped itself, but it didn't have its own fire department. Every time bond measures came up to increase money for firefighting, the anti-tax majority rose up in opposition. Mike Davis, author of two of the most definitive books on California's runaway development and its attendant battle with nature (City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear) told LA Weekly of the free lunch libertarianism in his place of residence, San Diego: "It's a form of parasitism, really...this is a culture that wants to live in a known fire ecology but not pay for fire protection."
To ransom California for aid, the Republican Congress is now trying to push their irony-doused Healthy Forests Bill. Republicans claim that unloosing restrictions on Big Timber's felling of thousands of stands of old growth timber is a fair exchange for thinning limited amounts of underbrush on public lands, which will do little to stop fires in California, two-thirds of which have been on private land.
While refusing to designate more than half the funds in the bill for thinning forests around residences (the stated aim of the legislation), Republican plans to limit judicial and public oversight of logging of old growth timber on federally-owned lands could very well lead to the type of clear cutting followed by uniformly planted stands that cause more fires by leaving open spaces that let the sun in to dry out the forest floor. California is so desperate to get the aid that Senate Democrats might just fold and go along with a bad bill.
Arnold's agenda
After being defiantly vague through the whole of the three-month election, Arnold's grand vision has begun to take hold. Not a week after Arnold had won the recall, it came out that Arnold was planning on settling Davis's lawsuits against the power companies (now that they'd done their job of getting him into office). Arnold's press spokesman said that making any connection between this slap on the wrist and Arnold's meeting in May 2001 with Enron head Kenneth Lay was preposterous; Arnold said he couldn't even remember meeting Lay. For good measure, Arnold will be floating another electricity deregulation proposal to get California moving again.
Education is considered the most important issue to California voters. Arnold has chosen former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, someone who had a thorny relationship with those in the trenches, California's teachers, as his education secretary. The situation is further exacerbated by Riordan's support for diverting public money to religious schools ("vouchers" in common parlance.)
Arnold also will play to his base in Southern California by massaging them with federal dollars, trying to end the "car tax" (which funds firefighters, police, and libraries), and asking for a vote--or ballot measure, if necessary--to repeal the driver's license for illegal immigrants.
Pulling the drawbridge up behind you has long precedence in American politics. In California politics, it's an unwritten rule that Southern California must bash immigrants and/or people of color at least every couple election seasons, as if they need to get it out of their system. In just the last decade California has had divisive ballot measures on medical care and education for children of illegal immigrants, Affirmative Action, and bilingual education. Following the generally effective national Republican strategy of hiding the likes of Cheney, Tom Delay, Dick Armey, and other nasty white men behind Bush's plastic Colgate smile, Arnold preached inclusion to the ends of the earth only to make his staff a virtual ideological carbon copy of former Republican governor Pete Wilson's. Though invisible during the campaign (because his name is mud among the growing, emerging ranks of Hispanic voters in California), Pete Wilson has contributed a vast swath of Arnold's administration, including chief of staff Patricia Clarey, deputy to Wilson's chief of staff, and Jessie Knight, a Wilson appointee to the Public Utilities Commission who was a big booster of energy deregulation. Along with the Wilson graduates Arnold has brought aboard many Reagan, Bush, and Bush II folks, such as Viet Dinh, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, as well as several economic advisers from the Hoover Institution, the only economic institution in the country named after a president who had a worse job growth record than George W. Bush.
W's brother, Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, is loaning California Donna Arduin, who has served as Florida's budget director. Arduin is often referred to as Jeb Bush's "hatchet woman" for her full steam ahead tight-lipped approach to enacting cravenly elitist economic policies under the guise of "trimming the fat." To keep the budget balanced she has raided trust funds, fought lower class sizes, pushed huge cuts on underfunded universities, and allowed waiting lists for health insurance for poor children and eldercare to balloon. She has also trimmed the fat by lopping Medicaid-funded dental work from 26,000 adults and dropping coverage of eyeglasses and hearing aids. Arduin's tactics are so extreme that even some Florida Republicans are concerned. The president of Florida's Republican Senate, Tom Lee, said "We've created a game of hot potato for future elected officials with our budget...The music is going to stop soon, and someone is going to be left with a big problem." Ken Pruitt, the Republican head of the Florida Senate Appropriations Committee, has traveled has traveled around the state in a yellow bus in protest of what he says is Jeb Bush's lack of commitment to education. The School Boards Association agrees, giving Florida a D- for school funding. Fortunately for California's children, there is a liberal Democratic majority in the state legislature that has no plans of Floridating California.
(Americans) "like violence, power, revenge, riches, success and fame, and they don't know the difference between real life and fantasy, between real people and characters in an action movie."
-Larry Derfner, writing in The Jerusalem Post
Arnold's amendment
For those who believed this movie within reality couldn't get any more surreal, there is one last, lingering twist: currently the U.S. Constitution does not allow foreign-born citizens to run for president. Taking a sudden interest in immigrant rights, Senator Orrin Hatch (the Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican from the pure vanilla state of Utah) recently conducted a hearing proposing a 28th amendment to the Constitution, which would allow American immigrants with twenty years of citizenship status to run for the presidency. Schwarzenegger, coincidentally, has been a U.S. citizen for twenty years.
So don't be completely surprised if at some time in the future (after all, California is about the future, right?) American voters pick an action hero to save the country from big spenders, business killers, and if we're real lucky, terrorists.
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