The Governator Caves.

"Team Schwarzenegger" sent the following email to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's supporters after his electoral defeat on Tuesday. It's sad. The Terminator has gone from Kindergarten Cop to Kindergarten Kid. This is a politician humbled.

-tdr

Here's the governor's letter:

I want to thank the people of California.

Whether you voted for our reforms or against them, I thank you for your conscientious consideration. We have fought the good fight.

We did not lose anything we already had; we simply did not gain anything new except a lesson or two. The lesson of this campaign is that the people want us to reform government by fighting less and working together more.

The voters have said, Arnold, go back to Sacramento and solve the problems by working with the legislature. I hear you. So, that is what I intend to do. I will carry out the will of the people. Because the people of California have always been my partners. They are the reason I am here. And when they speak, I listen.

The campaign is now behind us. The Democratic and Republican leadership and I will meet together Thursday to find a common ground. We are going to talk about reforms and how to move the state forward. I ask them to bring to the meeting new ideas for making California better. As I always say the bigger, the more radical the idea the better I like it.

After the meeting I will leave for China on a trade mission. China is the largest growing market in the world, and I want to increase California's business with China, because it will mean jobs for our people and revenues for our state.

And when I return from Asia, we will get down to business. We have so much to do in rebuilding our infrastructure. We need more roads, more schools, more hospitals, more teachers, more police, more energy and more water.

And I recognize we also need more bipartisan cooperation to make it all happen. Californians believe the state is on the wrong track. They want reform. They want change. But it is clear they are tired of the fighting and the ads.

I feel the same today as that night two years ago when I was elected.

With all my heart, I want to do the right thing for the people of California. I feel so honored and privileged to be your governor. I feel so honored and privileged to serve you. I will continue to work as hard as I can to make you proud of me.

Thank you for your warm support.

Sincerely,


Arnold Schwarzenegger

Big Union Money Buys California Election

The election in California is not looking good for Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger. If these results hold up (website here) every one of the governor's propositions will go down to defeat. If it happens, it will be because the public employee unions who run this state successfully demonized the governor with a series of extremely negative television ads unanswered by the governor for months and paid for by money taken from their members regardless of their consent. (For an example of the coercive political fund raising practiced by unions, see this story here about employees who went to court and lost in an effort to have their dues returned to them because they objected to the union using their dues on politics.)

The election results prove that big money can buy an election for Democrats, that outrageous and false negative attack ads work, and that public employee unions are the most powerful special interest in California. It's a shame that the governor ran such an incompetent campaign in support of his reform agenda. The election results show that his reforms are necessary. But his weakened political position makes reform in California politics almost impossible.

-tdr

The Gorilla In California Politics

Government employee unions in California are not only a special interest they are probably the most powerful special interest in the state. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been criticized since he came to office for describing the unions as special interests but recent events have shown he was right.

California appeared headed for its annual budget catastrophe when the Democrats reversed their usual obstructionist course and agreed to a budget close to the one propose by Arnold. Differences still remain between the parties so the GOP is holding up the budget this time (click here for story) but the Democrats are generally going along with Arnold's budget this year. Buried in this story in the Los Angeles Times (click here) is the reason why. The teacher's union told them to. As the Times reports:

We are not going to hold up the budget and have a protracted budget battle," said Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles). "We want to send the message to voters of this state that we are serious about getting things done."

A month ago, Nuñez called Schwarzenegger's budget proposal a "sham," saying the governor "simply doesn't get it" and is "not listening to the people."

Several lawmakers said Tuesday that the Democrats changed strategy at the urging of the politically powerful California Teachers Assn. "No such decision was going to be made without them," said Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla (D-Pittsburg).

The teachers group is gearing up for its own fight against a measure on the fall ballot that could clip the ability of state employee unions to fund political campaigns. The unions are among Democrats' biggest backers.

A new public opinion poll is out showing that The Governator's popularity numbers have plummeted to 37 percent favorable versus 53 percent unfavorable. (Click here for story.) Arnold was riding high when he came into office after the recall election. Since progress began to stall in Sacramento after an unchanged Democratic legislature was returned to office last November, Arnold has been threatening to go around the legislature and hold a special election on his agenda. Last week he made good on his threat and set an election for November. In response the teachers and prison guards unions raised dues on their members to raise $68 million. (Click here for story.)

Preparing the battlefield, the powerful unions who run the Democrats in this state went on the attack. Television viewers in California have been treated to very well made and hard hitting commercials accusing Arnold of breaking promises to fund schools and to protect Californians from crime. Two of the ads can be seen at the website (click here) of the so-called Alliance for a Better California, which is a special interest group bringing together 11 unions. A more accurate name would be the Alliance for the Status Quo in California. The union attack ads have done their job and currently a majority of Californians disapprove of the governor and a majority oppose the his special election.

Now, according to this story (click here) the governor is reaching out for a compromise.

In California, when the unions talk, people listen, whether they want to or not. Hold on to your wallets, everybody.

-tdr

Arnold's Judges And The Ethnic Diversity Fallacy

This story by Bill Ainsworth of the San Diego Union-Tribune (click here) about Governor Schwarzenegger's judicial picks reveals the benefits of having a non-establishment politician who is outside the traditional right-left axis picking judges.

The governor is picking people who never had a chance to become judges during the Gray Davis administration: defense attorneys. (An encouraging fact to this criminal appellate defense attorney, by the way.) Davis was compelled by politics to pick prosecutors for judges. As an establishment Democrat he had to protect his right flank from Republican attacks of being soft on crime. He did so by ignoring defense attorneys and picking prosecutors. Arnold's political career puts him outside the traditional left-right axis and frees him to pick defense attorneys to sit as judges.

In another sign of the freedom he has by coming from outside traditional politics, out of 70 judicial picks 37 have been Republicans and 25 Democrats.

What's telling about politics in this country, however, is the focus in the article on the ethnic diversity of the candidates. The Governator's judicial picks are not as ethnically diverse as Davis's picks were. Although Arnold's picks apparently reflect the ethnic percentages of the state bar, those percentages are less than Davis's and less than the percentages of California's population.

Naturally, Arnold is criticized for failing the diversity test. A past-president of the California Women Lawyers calls the lower percentage of female appointees under Arnold "worrisome." And as Chris Arriola of La Raza Lawyers of California puts it, "If the bench is not reflective of the community, it loses credibility. People need to feel they can participate and their voices will be heard."

There you see the problem with the racial diversity advocates. Here we have a governor who is promoting true diversity on California's bench by appointing defense attorneys not just prosecutors, men and women from both political parties, and a mix of races, yet he is criticized because he is not picking enough people with the right skin color or sex organs.

The criticisms reveal the shallowness of diversity advocates. For them, skin color and sex say more about the qualifications to be judge than the type of law the judge practiced before rising to the bench.

Thus, at the end of the article, speculation about who will replace departing Justice Janice Rogers Brown is all about whether her replacement will be African-American or Latina. Arriola, the advocate from La Raza, pushes a specific Latina, who used to be a prosecutor and is now a Court of Appeal justice, saying "If he (Arnold) wants to blow up boxes, how about appointing the first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court." Brown among them, six of the seven justices on California's Supreme Court were prosecutors at one time in their careers. (Click here for bios on Supreme Court's website.) Thus, the irony is that Arriola, by focusing on race and sex, fails to see that he is not promoting true diversity on the Supreme Court because his favored candidate is, yet again, a former prosecutor.

-tdr

How To Make A Republican Majority In California

California Democrats on the Assembly Judiciary Committee have cleared a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in California. This story (click here) predicts that there is enough political support for it to pass both houses of the legislature and make it to the governor's desk.

There may be support for such a bill among legislative Democrats in Sacramento but opposition to same-sex marriage remains high among voters. Advocates for same-sex marriages overreached last year and got burned. California Democrats might want to tread with caution about pushing this issue. Unless they are tired of being the majority party in California.

-tdr