Arnold Schwarzenegger’s selection of archliberal Susan Kennedy,
a former Cabinet secretary to Gray Davis, as his new chief of staff
“is the last straw for a lot of grassroots California Republicans,”
says California Republican Assembly president Mike Spence to
TAS. Spence describes the appointment as the equivalent of
“George Bush appointing Howard Dean to be his chief of staff.”
Even the jaw of George Skelton (the Los Angeles Times
columnist who has spent much of his career telling the California
GOP to move left) dropped after the appointment of Kennedy, who is
one of the state’s leading abortion proponents, a high-profile
lesbian activist, and a former aide to many prominent California
Democrats. “There simply is no precedent — at least in any current
political lifetime — for what Schwarzenegger did Wednesday.
Appoint a hard-core, dedicated soldier from the enemy camp as his
chief of staff. Not just an ‘advisor’ or ‘counselor’ — but his No.
1, his alter ego,” Skelton wrote.
The door behind which Schwarzenegger kept his de facto
Democratic ideology has long been ajar and visible, but now he has
kicked it wide open, and not even craven, win-at-all-costs
Republicans can ignore it. Susan Kennedy herself blurted out the
basic truth about Schwarzenegger: “I think a moderate Democrat and
a moderate Republican — there is not a lot of light between
us.”
This point had been made during the Recall, but California GOP
officials, relying on the usual “Big Tent” song-and-dance and
shallow pragmatic arguments, cast it aside. They were given a
choice between a meaningful victory with real Republican Tom
McClintock or a hollow victory with a de facto Democrat, and they
chose the latter. One immediate problem was solved, but multiple
new and longterm ones were created.
A conservative revolt is brewing and will likely upend the
“French wing” of the California Republican Party, says Spence. He
has been bombarded with calls and phone calls from seething
California Republicans. They feel burned and view the Kennedy
appointment as a point of no return. There is talk, he says, of
drafting Tom McClintock to run against Schwarzenegger, and “Mel
Gibson’s name is being floated.”
That a center-left Republican like Schwarzenegger will do more
damage than a liberal Democrat is almost axiomatic at this point,
and rank-and-file Republicans have been burned enough times to
realize it. Because “moderate” Republicans appear less crazy than
liberal Democrats and can neutralize Republican resistance through
false promises and fake appeals to party unity, they can get away
with all sorts of dubious things. Many of Schwarzenegger’s
“accomplishments” — from his billions-for-cloning proposition to
his gun and environmental laws to his routine appointment of
Democrats to judgeships — are moves that would have met stiff
resistance had Gray Davis proposed them.
Schwarzenegger’s selection of a former Gray Davis cabinet
secretary as his chief of staff perfectly illustrates the lost
opportunity of the Recall: instead of ending the Gray Davis agenda,
the Recall extended it, and shrewd Democrats who let Davis twist in
the wind knew it, seeing Schwarzenegger as a Trojan horse for
liberalism and a far more effective proponent of the Davis agenda
than Davis ever was or would be.
The California Republicans had a huge percentage of the Recall
vote to work with, and they squandered it on a celebrity who just
happened to have an R. after his name. Had Schwarzenegger not
parachuted into the race on the Jay Leno show (which was one of
many signs that California Republicans were about to be taken on a
very silly ride) and so easily convinced GOP leaders to back him
despite his obvious indifference to much of their stated platform,
Tom McClintock would have won easily, and the direction of the
state government would have changed substantially. Real debates,
not the me-too debates into which Schwarzenegger has been
consistently drawn, would have occurred, and the party would have
grown through morale-boosting fights.
Schwarzenegger’s chief-of-staff fiasco confirms that when the
Republican Party forfeits its principles in order to win, it has no
principles left once it does, leaving it in tatters, both
philosophically and politically. Even the crassly political
argument for blindly supporting Schwarzenegger — that his glow
would cause the ranks of the California Republican Party to swell
— has proven illusory. The state party is now viewed as a pitiful
arm of the hybrid Schwarzenegger administration, wholly severed
from the conservative movement and useless to propel its
officeholders to victory.
Schwarzenegger hasn’t enlarged or energized the Republican base,
and his blatant giving away of the store is likely to undercut the
chances of Republican officeholders across the board in the next
election. The Kennedy appointment, plus Schwarzenegger’s plan to
give the Democrats much of what they want in the next budget, is
expected to sap morale when the party’s aspirants need it most.
“This is the kind of the thing that can hurt all our state wide
nominees,” says Spence. “This is going to drag down the whole
party.”
