George Skelton: Governor Resisting Leap From Celebrity to Political Figure

From the Los Angeles Times
Dated Thursday May 5

Capitol Journal:
Governor Resisting Leap From Celebrity to Political Figure
By George Skelton

Three things are striking about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's drive this week to qualify his "reform" initiatives for a special election in November.

• The original political premise for his calling the special election no longer exists. The rationale for not waiting until a regular election next year was that this was a governor so overwhelmingly popular, he should move quickly to capitalize on the unique voter appeal. Such opportunities are rare.

Well, scratch that. The popularity has plummeted.

• In the governor's new TV ad promoting his spending control initiative, he looks squarely at viewers and says: "Do you know that for every dollar the state takes in, the legislators spend one dollar-10?"

First, Schwarzenegger signed this year's budget. Second, legislators don't spend money. They appropriate it. Governors spend. There's shared blame. Ask Gray Davis.

• Mr. Celebrity still is resisting the transformation into political leader, and that's at the heart of his plunging popularity.

One former advisor to Ronald Reagan, both in Sacramento and Washington, told me that every celebrity candidate must make a transition to political leader. Once in office, he's simply forced to make too many decisions that are political and create enemies.

Read more.

I keep seeing that commercial ad nauseum, but he doesn't really say where he got that figure of for every $1 the state takes in, it spends $1.10. I would suspect that those figures come out of his ass just like everything Republicans report as "facts".

His commercials are appropriate for selling hair products, not for selling ideas that a real political leader would need to do.

I just posted another story about Schwarzenegger backing off from another of his "reform" proposals. Piece by piece, he's backed away from his agenda.

What are these ads selling? It looks like they're selling a Hollywood personality. They aren't selling his agenda.

At the moment, there's few if any "reform" proposals to sell. A special election looks unlikely. There's nothing so urgent in what is left of Schwarzenegger's agenda that it can't wait until the spring of 2006 to bring before the voters. Actually, the only thing I could see "urgent" that required a special election sooner was a chance at imposing a Tom DeLay-lite redistricting scheme. That's not going to happen.

Schwarzenegger once said he would rather make movies that make a lot of money than movies that are going to be on a critic's ten best of all time list fifty years later. He seems to be governing the state with the same attitude.

He is wrong to do so. The voters did not take the extraordinary step of throwing out an unpopular (but not particularly crooked) governor mid-term and replacing him with a "citizen-politician" just because Schwarzenegger is an action hero in movies. The voters sensed something was wrong and expected this citizen-politician to act on a reform agenda.

A reform agenda, if enacted, is something that will be around in fifty years. It's a lot more substantive than the summer blockbuster that Schwarzenegger is content in making now.