Governor pretends his contributors have no agenda
Ventura County Star (California)
In his remarks after being sworn in as California’s 38th governor Monday, Arnold Schwarzenegger invoked the words of Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy.
In his actions immediately after, he invoked the memory of Charles Erwin Wilson, the former auto company president who said what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.
The new governor appears to believe that whatever is good for business interests is good for the public’s interest and that there can never be a conflict.
Moments after taking office, Schwarzenegger signed an executive order to freeze all pending state regulations and to review all regulations developed over the last five years.
That means regulations to implement such laws as those creating oversight of HMOs and implementing safe drinking water standards for arsenic and perchlorates will now get a second look.
Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, called the action “a special interest coup d’etat.”
The regulatory process, Court noted, “is where a governor can slow and stop legislation that his contributors do not like.”
Were it not for one thing, such comments could be seen as predictable rhetoric from a group that’s positioning itself to become the new governor’s No. 1 critic.
But there is this one thing: Gov. Schwarzenegger steadfastly denies that his biggest financial supporters have self-interested reasons to support him, and he continues to pretend he is immune from the influence of those who lavished his campaign with money.
If that’s the case, is it just coindence that he picked an HMO executive as his chief of staff and the state Chamber of Commerce‘s lead lobbyist as his legislative secretary?
Tuesday, at his first news conference as governor, Schwarzenegger was asked again about his peculiar definition of “special interest.”
As during the campaign, he insisted that the definition applies only to Indian tribes that operate casinos and public employee unions.
During the campaign, he was quite blunt about the effect of special-interest contributions on governance. “Money comes in,” he said. “Favors go out.”
It’s the way the system works, he said, in a theme that voters clearly warmed to.
So how is it that Indian tribes and unions are special interests and the financial services industry that contributed more than $2.5 million to his campaign is not?
Schwarzenegger says it’s because as governor he will have to negotiate with tribes and unions.
Well, Schwarzenegger will also soon be negotiating the details of a workers’ compensation reform plan. Last Monday, he accepted a $100,000 contribution from AIG, the state’s largest private workers’ compensation insurance company.
Will not insurance companies be part of the negotiations?
His second-largest group of contributors were real estate developers. Doesn’t the administration intend to negotiate state housing policies and the rules for conducting environmental impact reports?
If you suggest to the new governor that large contributions from manufacturers and insurance companies have the taint of special-interest influence, the man who says he’s attuned to the people’s call for an end to “politics as usual” becomes tone deaf.
Asked about the issue Tuesday, Schwarzenegger said 90 percent of his contributions came from small donors.
“Money from a small company or a shoe store, that’s not a special interest,” he said.
Schwarzenegger has scheduled a Dec. 3 fund-raiser in Sacramento and a Dec. 4 fund-raiser at Staples Center in Los Angeles. At each, he will be seeking donations of $21,500 in an effort to pay off the $4.5 million in personal bank loans he took out to help pay for his own campaign.
If Schwarzenegger wants to be seen as the people’s governor — and he clearly does, because it is from that perception that he draws his political power — he needs at the very least to acknowledge that the folks giving him most of his campaign money do indeed have narrow interests that occasionally conflict with the public good.
He could then promise voters that he will stand up to these special interests when they push too far.
Californians will believe him. What they won’t believe is that all these insurance company executives and business barons are just shoe salesmen in disguise.
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Timm Herdt is chief of The Star’s state bureau. His e-mail address is [email protected]
