TEAM ARNOLD: THE GANG THAT COULDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT
politicsus.com
18 AUGUST 2003
By Bill Pascoe
Four personnel decisions. Four disasters-in-waiting. The Schwarzenegger campaign’s best day was the day he announced, and it’s been all downhill since.
Casting decision number one came last weekend, just 72 hours into Schwarzenegger’s candidacy, when his team announced that former California Governor Pete Wilson would serve as campaign co-chairman. Despite long and able service to his party and his state – as advance man for Richard Nixon, mayor of San Diego, U.S. Senator, and Governor – Wilson is, of course (and, unfortunately), best remembered for his buoyant support for Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative which sought to deny public education and health services to illegal immigrants.
Not coincidentally, Wilson is the last Republican to win a top-of-the-ticket statewide election in California. Also not coincidentally, he happens to be the former employer of virtually everyone in a paid position on Team Arnold, so his unveiling as campaign chairman should have surprised no one.
No one, that is, except for Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd – President Bush’s senior political strategists – who see the growing Hispanic electorate as the swing vote that will decide national and key state elections for decades to come. The two strategists have spoken openly for years about the GOP’s need to refashion its image among Hispanic voters, or risk seeing its candidates consigned to perpetual also-ran status. (The argument was, in fact, one of the underlying themes of the Bush primary campaign in 2000 – who better to put the GOP back on the right track with Hispanics across the country than the twice-elected-Governor-of-Texas Bush, who had captured 49 percent of the Hispanic vote in his last Texas election? Alas, the 2000 election didn’t work out that way; Bush didn’t capture anywhere near 49 percent of the Hispanic vote.)
So these two men, who were said to be enthralled by the actor’s decision to enter the race (as was much of official Republicandom), must have wondered what the heck was happening to the script. Schwarzenegger, an up-from-his-boot-straps, self-made immigrant success story – Horatio Alger with an Austrian accent – was supposed to be THE GUY who was going to single-handedly refashion the Republicans’ image with Hispanic voters; how could he, of all people, be so politically tone-deaf as to appoint as his campaign chairman the one man who, more than anyone else on the face of the earth, personifies precisely the image they’re trying so hard to overcome?
It would be as if Jimmy Carter, trying to establish his credentials as a leader of the New South in his first run for Governor of Georgia, had announced the appointment of Lester Maddox as campaign chairman. A single word comes to mind: ugh.
So much for the Hispanic vote.
But as it turns out, the appointment of Wilson wasn’t even the worst mistake of the week – that appointment was followed by three others in rapid succession, each of which raises serious questions about the political judgment of an untested candidate trying to establish himself and his credentials through the endorsements of others.
Casting decision number two, on Wednesday of last week, was the appointment of billionaire investor Warren Buffett to head an economic advisory group that would seek input from business leaders as to possible solutions for California’s systemic fiscal crisis.
Within literally moments of the Buffett announcement, this web site posted a list of Buffett’s previous political contributions – almost all to Democrats, almost all of whom are of the garden variety liberal stripe, almost all of whom vote reflexively for higher taxes and more government spending: Senators Hillary Clinton, Tom Harkin, Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold, Dick Durbin, and U.S. Rep. John Dingell among them.
But as if that weren’t bad enough, a day after Buffett’s appointment was announced, he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he suggested California’s fiscal crisis was the result of too-low property taxes – the legacy of Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that limited property tax increases to no more than two percent per year – a ballot initiative revered among Republicans and conservatives 25 years later as the harbinger of the conservative tide that swept Ronald Reagan at long last into the White House two years later.
So much for the economic conservative vote.
Casting decision number three, on Thursday of last week, was seen as an effort to balance the Buffett appointment: because Buffett was a known Democrat, and Team Arnold couldn’t afford to so blithely alienate large segments of the conservative Republican electorate, a known and respected Republican would have to be appointed co-chairman of the economic advisory council. And the name they came up with? George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s former Secretary of State, now in residence at The Hoover Institution, one of the preeminent think tanks of the right. Surely, that would assuage skeptical conservatives, no?
No. A thousand times no. During the Reagan years, Shultz was the leader of a band of senior Administration officials who did everything they could to undermine President Reagan’s strong anti-communist foreign policy. It was because of Shultz and his ilk that conservatives in Washington took to wearing buttons emblazoned “Let Reagan Be Reagan.” Shultz pushed Reagan hard to bargain away the Strategic Defense Initiative in arms control talks with the Soviets; at the press conference following the Reykjavik Summit in October 1987, as he announced The Deal That Almost Happened But Didn’t, Because Ronald Reagan Had Brass Cojones – an agreement that would have led to the total elimination of nuclear weapons on both sides, if the U.S. would just agree to jettison research and development of SDI – Shultz literally cried on camera. Reagan’s decision to reject Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s ploy was hailed by conservatives as “Reagan’s finest hour;” to Shultz, it was cause for tears.
Crying on camera at a lost arms control agreement, of course, was no surprise to conservatives who had followed Shultz’s actions as Secretary of State; Shultz had earlier been the man who interpreted Ronald Reagan’s stunning 1984 49-state landslide reelection victory as a mandate to turn LEFT – less than six weeks after that historic reelection, Shultz purged every known conservative in the State Department, firing 29 U.S. Ambassadors simultaneously, in what came to be known as “The Christmas Massacre.” Old California Reaganauts Ed Meese and Bill Clark had to go explain to Shultz the facts of life on that one; one at a time, new places were found for the fired conservatives.
But questions about Shultz’s commitment to Republican principles are not limited to the foreign policy sphere – rather, there are serious doubts about his approach to race relations and even economics, too. In 1969, serving as Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Labor, Shultz approved the implementation of the “Philadelphia Plan,” to integrate the building trades unions with explicit racial quotas; in August 1971, as Nixon’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, he went along with Nixon’s institution of wage and price controls; in May 1972 he became Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, and maintained those wage and price controls, which represented a greater leap toward state control of the economy than anything done by any President since Roosevelt.
So much for the votes of Ward Connerly and Milton Friedman.
By Friday of last week, Team Arnold must have recognized the need to change the subject. Hence, casting decision number four: the appointment of actor Rob Lowe to head an “Entertainers for Arnold” coalition.
Here’s how the Reuters dispatch of Saturday afternoon regarding the Lowe appointment reads:
“Actor Rob Lowe, who played a top White House aide on television, has joined the real-life gubernatorial campaign of fellow star Arnold Schwarzenegger, a campaign spokeswoman said on Friday.
“Lowe, a longtime Democratic activist whose attendance at the party's 1988 national convention led to a sex scandal, has accepted a volunteer post to organize celebrity supporters for Schwarzenegger … In real life, Lowe has long been active in Democratic Party circles, supporting the failed 1988 presidential bid of then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Attending the Democratic National Convention that year in Atlanta, Lowe videotaped himself cavorting with two young women, one of whom turned out to be under age, in a hotel room. The sexual encounter made headlines months later when the explicit video surfaced publicly, and Lowe ended up performing community service to avoid criminal charges.”
So much for the social conservative vote.
Twelve days ago, when Schwarzenegger announced his entry into the California gubernatorial recall election on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” it appeared he would be producing and starring in a sequel to one of his hit movies – perhaps “Terminator Four,” or “Total Recall Two.” Who could have guessed his campaign WOULD be a movie sequel – but that that the movie would be a follow up to “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight?” |
