March 18, 2005

Arnold in Wonderland
Looking Glass Image Starts to Crack
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

     On December 7, 2004 Schwarzenegger taunted a group of nurses protesting his emergency order suspending the phase-in of life-saving nurse-patient ratios. “Pay no attention to those voices over there,” Schwarzenegger said. They are the special interests. Special interests don’t like me in Sacramento because I kick their butt.”
     On March 4, the butt-kicking went the other way. Sacramento Superior Court Judge Judy Holzer Hersher ruled—in favor of the California Nurses Association (CNA)—that Schwarzenegger’s order was illegal.
      “It’s really a passionate issue about patients for the nurses,” said Margie Keenan, R.N., a cardiac care nurse at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, and CNA boardmember. “Patients can see the difference,” she said, and it also saves lives, a growing list of studies shows.
     But it’s not just that one battle Schwarzenegger lost. He seems to be losing the larger war—the war to turn California into Wonderland, where words mean what he pays them to mean, and problems are solved by saying, “Off with their heads!” In Schwarzenegger’s Wonderland, “special interests” means nurses, teachers, firefighters, college students, etc. He kicks their butt on behalf of “the people”— meaning the corporate-owned HMOs and the CEOs who run them. Consider:

• His Chief of Staff, Patricia Clarey, was previously a VP for the HMO Health Net, Inc.

• His Deputy Chief of Staff, Garrett Ashley, was previously executive director of Tech Net-Orange County, a network of high-powered corporate executives that lobbies for high tech interests.

• His Deputy Chief of Staff for External Affairs, Cassandra Pye, was previously VP of California Affairs at the Chamber of Commerce (CCC).

• His Legislative Secretary, Richard Costigan, was formerly VP of Governmental Relations and Chief Lobbyist for the CCC.

     Although the corporate media ignores such “details,” preferring to focus on Schwarzenegger’s celebrity, the public is nonetheless catching on. His popularity has slid from the mid-60s to a barely-out-of-trouble 54 percent in the latest Field Poll, with 40 percent saying he favors special interests, compared to just 27 percent last August. Now he’s pushing to gather signatures for a special election this year—costing taxpayers $60 million. It only takes 373,000 signatures to qualify initiative measures for the election, but if his popularity continues falling they could easily fail at the ballot box.
     Schwarzenegger came into office claiming that California’s problems were due to politicians and special interests that he would defeat on behalf of the people. But his special interest fundraising has surpassed that of Gray Davis, and his claim of representing the people is increasingly suspect.
     San Francisco Examiner Columnist Christopher Caen calls it “Diminishing Democracy.” Caen explains: “Gray Davis was elected governor by more than 3,500,000 people. The recall was placed on the ballot with less than 1,500,000 signatures. Less people were able to reverse a decision than made the initial decision. Now we have a state Legislature that was elected by more than 10 million voters but will be drop-kicked out of the political process by a mere 373,000 people.”
     But the numbers only tell part of the story, as State Senator Alan Lowenthal (D- Long Beach) explains, “ It’s not that legislators refused to work with the Governor on his proposed reforms—the proposals were vague, ever-changing and disconnected from facts.” After inching up toward the middle of the pack under Gray Davis, California’s education spending is plummeting back down towards the ranks of Mississippi. But Schwarzenegger remains focused on trying to target individual teachers.
     First, Schwarzenegger trumpeted merit pay. “It’s worth considering,” Lowenthal told Random Lengths in January, “but it has to be done right. If not, it punishes good teachers for working in the schools that need them most, thus doing the opposite of what it promises.”
     “I’m on the Education Committee. We listened to Senator Runner, carrying the merit pay bill,” Lowenthal said. Runner said that, “Government had identified the problem of incompetent teachers.”
     “We asked, ‘Do you have any data?’ They couldn’t identify one teacher.” Lowenthal said.
     “Our real problem is under-performing schools. Who’s going to go to those schools?” Lowenthal asked. “They had no way to answer.”
     As of now, Schwarzenegger has backed off merit pay entirely. “He requested that our committee not vote on the merit pay proposal. He has pulled that proposal off the table,” Lowenthal said.
     Instead, Schwarzenegger is pushing an initiative to lengthen the time it takes schoolteachers to get tenure—from two years to five. Again, there is no data suggesting this will do anything, aside from generating a lot more paperwork by more than doubling the evaluation period.
      Democrats criticized all of Schwarzenegger’s proposals on similar grounds—rather than serious proposals, he only offered vague ones, seemingly calculated to fail, so he could blame them and go the initiative route—where broad claims and poorly-crafted language have been successful, with enough special interest cash.
     On redistricting, a deal might have been possible, Lowenthal said, but Schwarzenegger’s insistence on mid-decade reapportionment was a poison pill. Anything passed in November could not clear court challenges in time for the 2006 primaries, so the soonest they would be in place would be 2008—based on eight-year old data.
     Schwarzenegger’s approach is purely political Lowenthal said. “It’s an attempt to steal the legislature, The way they did in Texas.
     Meanwhile, the budget crisis continues, and legislators like Lowenthal are dealing with tough issues that Schwarzenegger runs away from. In Lowenthal’s case, this includes port security, pollution and congestion, which he has addressed in a series of bills that he promises will be carefully crafted and revised through the normal legislative process. (Schwarzenegger vetoed Lowenthal’s AB 2042 last year, which mandated “no net increase” in port pollution. His new bills reinstate that mandate and provide ways to begin meeting that goal.)
     Schwarzenegger’s attempt to legislate by initiative depends on sound bites and celebrity to circumvent questions about what the measures will really mean. To fuel his efforts, he’s amped up his fundraising even more than ever. But he’s drawing unexpected resistance. His recent big-bucks out-of-state fundraising efforts have been dogged by protests from nurses, teachers, firemen and other workers typical of those hardworking Californians who Schwarzenegger still insists on labeling “special interests.” In addition to angering nurses, his cuts to education have hurt teachers, principles, school boards, parents and kids, while his proposal to shift state retirement funds to a riskier, stingier 401(k) model has drawn broad opposition from all sorts of public employees.
     These are all popular and respected targets. Gallup’s 2004 annual poll assessing “honesty and ethical standards of various professions” placed nurses and grade school teachers in the first and second slots. “More generally,” Gallup said, “This year’s honesty and ethics poll shows that Americans continue to give their highest ratings to the public service professions,” precisely the professions that Schwarzenegger is attacking.
     Underscoring this point, a Santa Clara firefighter, Jeremy Ray, flew to New York to confront Schwarzenegger over the pension plan at a glitzy fundraiser there, the LA Times reported.
     “He said, ‘I’m a friend of the firefighters and I would never take anything away from them,’ “ Ray told the Times. “I said, ‘No, you’re not a friend to us, sir. And what you’re doing is wrong.’”
     Roger Salazar, spokesman for the Education Coalition, which includes teachers, school boards and the PTA said, “The governor is spitting in the wind when he tries to define teachers and principals as special interests.”
     But it’s the nurses—and the CNA in particular—that are the frontline warriors bringing Schwarzenegger’s carefully-polished image down.
     “We were the only ones fighting the Governor at the beginning,” Kennan recalled. “It’s kind of snowballed.”