Schwarzenegger has forged his own political pathway
by Lisa Vorderbrueggen, San Jose Mercury News
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

California has never had a more politically perplexing governor than Arnold Schwarzenegger, a movie star Republican who more often sides with Democrats than members of his own party.

For those who ask, and there are many, “What on earth is the governor thinking?” veteran California political journalist Daniel Weintraub has unraveled the governor’s twisted path in “Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter.”

It’s a highly readable and impeccably researched book, as one would expect from one of the state’s most respected political columnists. (Weintraub currently writes for the Sacramento Bee’s opinion pages.)

Weintraub takes readers through the early development of the governor’s political philosophy, the roller-coaster days when his ballot measures tanked at the polls and his landslide 2006 reelection.

The book also chronicles Schwarzenegger’s circuitous route through the political middle of the electorate, popularizing the term “post-partisanship” and transforming himself from a critical outsider to a man who formed alliances with Democrats to advance his policies.

Along the way, Weintraub wrote, Schwarzenegger constantly flummoxed political insiders and angered conservatives.

He teamed up with Democrats to pass a global climate change bill that reduces greenhouse gases. He signed a bill raising the minimum wage. He won bipartisan support for $37 billion worth of bonds for flood control, road and other improvements.

“As the man in the middle in a rigidly partisan system, Schwarzenegger was nearly alone inside the belly of the beast,” Weintraub wrote, “and he realized that he could never achieve his goals without help, without changing the way politics works.”

The governor learned that government and politics don’t respond to rigid timelines, and he cannot dictate policy as he could as the head of a major company, Weintraub wrote.

But this book is no fawning tribute. The governor has done a “terrible job on the biggest issue that prompted his election as governor: managing the state’s budget,” wrote Weintraub.

Schwarzenegger squandered much of his first two years in office and was “neither as bold nor as creative as he had the capacity to be,” Weintraub added.

Yet the governor has succeeded, in part, because he came along at a time when more Cailfornians than ever refuse to identity with a political party, according to the columnist. One in five voters is registered “decline to state,” and those numbers have come largely at the expense of the two major parties.

“If Schwarzenegger hadn’t jumped into politics when he did, someone might have had to invent him,” Weintraub wrote. “He is the ideal politician for this independent, Internet-driven age, for an electorate with little patience for policy details or petty partisanship but a thirst for problem-solving, results-oriented politics.”

In a nation that is fascinated with all things politics in the months leading up to the presidential election, anyone with a thirst for a well-written and concise account of Schwarzenegger’s political maneuvers will enjoy this book.

Lisa Vorderbrueggen covers politics. Read her blog at www.ibabuzz.com/insidepolitics. Reach her at 925-945-4773 or lvorderbrueggen@bayareanewsgroup.com.۩

Link to orignal

Party of One on the bus
posted by John Hughes at RT Rider (rtrider.blogspot.com)
Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Finished Daniel Weintraub’s “Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter.” Weintraub does a fine job of crafting an admiring portrait of Schwarzenegger as governor.

Weintraub is upfront about where he comes from in writing the book:

For the past four years, I’ve watch Schwarzenegger do his job as closely as anyone. And I’ve watched with a special interest. Like Schwarzenegger, I am not wedded to the views of any one political party. I have been a registered Republican and a registered Democrat, and I am currently registered with no party at all. I consider myself to be a fiscal conservative with a bit of libertarian streak. I believe in individual responsibility. When it comes to social policy, I think government should act only as a last resort, and mainly to ensure equal opportunity, not equal results. I am an old-school liberal, a live-and-let-live person who believes government should generally leave people alone to do their own thing. And I am an environmental progressive, because when you blow soot in my lungs or dump toxins into my water, you are no longer just doing your own thing. You’re messing with my life. As it turns out, these beliefs are a pretty good match for Schwarzenegger’s.

And while Weintraub does criticize some of the governor’s actions, his personal disappointment is clear.

Of course, I’m not a disinterested observer any more than Weintraub. I’m a yellow-dog Democrat raised by a woman who was inspired to become politically active by the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaigns. And I’m also a Democrat who was so disappointed by Gov. Gray Davis’ performance in office that I voted for the recall, and I even voted for Schwarzenegger on the off chance that maybe he was something different.

Weintraub explains the Schwarzenegger’s difference, how his ideas are not limited by partisan ideology. Weintraub argues that Schwarzenegger’s success, at least in terms of popularity among voters, derives from this nonpartisan focus. This, Weintraub says, meshes well with the desires of Californians to have government officials working to fix problems rather than scoring ideological points.

Unfortunately, Weintraub has written the book before the story is over. Substantial portions of the book deal with issues — health care, school reform and legislative redistricting — that have since fallen victim to the economic downturn that has struck California. While his criticism of the governor for failing to attack the structural budget issues is prescient, it doesn’t compensate for the way the book leaves these issues hanging.

Weintraub explains in the introduction:

I hope this book serves as a guide to readers of all political persuasions who want to better understand the Schwarzenegger phenomenon, its effect on California, and its potential application to the rest of the nation.

This he has done. Writing the book a year later — or, better yet, when the governor left office — might have provided the opportunity to hammer home the tragedy of the governor’s failure to get a handle on budget reform. Still, Weintraub has written a valuable book. I imagine it will be one of several contemporary works used by future historians as original source material.

Link to original

December 15, 2007
From Instapundit.com

A FISCAL CRISIS IN CALIFORNIA? Ed Morrissey notes that the inability to restrain spending has made this inevitable, and suggests that the likely outcome is a tax increase justified by the crisis.

I’ve just been reading Daniel Weintraub’s excellent Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter, which comes out in a couple of weeks, and you can certainly see how Schwarzenegger’s compassionate-conservative approach, coupled with the inbred, gerrymandered lack of accountability in the California legislature, made this inevitable. I predict that Schwarzenegger will announce a “compromise” tax increase based on the “emergency,” with some cosmetic budget cuts that won’t really amount to much. But I could be wrong — as Weintraub’s book notes, Schwarzenegger is a canny politician in many ways. However, his budget approach seems to have been based on kicking the can down the road, and that only works for so long. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of Poul Anderson’s statement that “compassionate government” is a code phrase meaning that there will be absolutely no compassion for the taxpayer.

Link to the article

December 13, 2007
From Capitol Morning Report, Sacramento

BOOK REVIEW: WEINTRAUB DOES SCHWARZENEGGER

By Tony Quinn, political analyst

No governor since Ronald Reagan has had as many books written about him as Arnold Schwarzenegger. With the publication next month of “Party of One,” by the Sacramento Bee’s Daniel Weintraub there will be three different but very interesting Schwarzenegger biographies.

The first was “Fantastic,” by Laurence Leamer that covers the “Hollywood Arnold,” his life up to the 2003 recall that made him governor, an event Leamer treats as another Hollywood extravaganza.

Second, is “The People’s Machine” by Joe Mathews of the Los Angeles Times that chronicles the “political Arnold,” an almost day-by-day account of his election as governor, the successful first year, and his disastrous 2005 special election. Mathews finished his book just as the 2006 re-election campaign was getting underway. Weintraub brings us forward through 2007.

Mathews makes Schwarzenegger a phenomenon of direct democracy. No governor mastered going to the people as well as the “political Arnold” in 2004. But living by direct democracy can mean dying by it as well, which Arnold did in the special election of 2005. Weintraub looks at a much different aspect of the Arnold persona, his rejection of the structures of politics, first his own party then partisan politics in general in search of the amorphous independent voter and a vague “post partisan” centrist politics where the independent is supposed to reside.

Nonetheless, Weintraub’s book deals primarily with the “policy Arnold,” how successful, or unsuccessful Schwarzenegger has been at turning his promises into action, action, action. The answer, Weintraub finds, is mixed. “I think he has done a terrible job on the biggest issue that prompted his election as governor, managing the state’s budget. I also think that for much of his first two years in office, he was neither as bold nor as creative as he had the capacity to be. At first he adapted all too well to the Capitol culture he had so harshly criticized, and when he decided to confront it, he did so clumsily and with such lousy execution that he offended both his friends and his foes and he accomplished nothing,” Weintraub writes in his introduction.

This is refreshing and will find many Capitol observers in agreement who are tired of both the Hollywood and the political Arnold.

Weintraub’s concentration on policy traces Schwarzenegger’s opportunity to become governor not to Hollywood but to March 10, 2000, the day the NASDAQ hit its high and the dot-com bust began. This led to the budget mess, the collapse of former Gov. Gray Davis and Schwarzenegger’s emergence as the “governator.” Weintraub is more critical than other authors of the “governator” years. His most damning indictment of Schwarzenegger’s first term may be his observation that “by the time he was re-elected in November 2006, the state was spending more per capita and more as a percentage of the economy than it ever had before.”

Weintraub’s title, “Party of One,” accurately describes Schwarzenegger’s post partisan world in which he is really his own political party, but we could have used more on the partisan consequences of this fact. Weintraub notes that “It seemed at times as if the working definition of bipartisanship was 41 Democrats in the Assembly and 21 in the Senate.” In other words, was Schwarzenegger’s post partisanship just giving in to the Democrats? More needs to be said on how this destroyed his relationship with his own Republican party.

Weintraub is at his best when he deals with Schwarzenegger’s appeal to California’s growing independent electorate, an issue Weintraub understands very well. He dissects the independent voter and notes that the rejection of the two major parties parallels the information age, where “the Internet is helping break up large institutions that have dominated society for generations.” New voters, he points out, are rejecting the two major parties they same way they are rejecting staid institutions in the world of commerce. Schwarzenegger has benefited from this New Age politics more than any politician in America and, as Weintraub points out, is really a captive of the independent voter. “Once in office, Schwarzenegger’s standing rose and fell and rose again as independents warmed to him, went cold, and then came back to his camp.”

The latter part of Party of One” deals with some of the individual issues Schwarzenegger has confronted, with interesting chapters on health care, immigration, prisons and education. Weintraub is weakest in dealing with redistricting, Schwarzenegger’s favorite political reform.

Like Schwarzenegger, he shows little understanding of the twisted history of this issue, writing that, “Until about 1980, the process remained fairly crude…. The computer changed everything, with the advent of digital data, the game grew far more sophisticated.” This is simply not true; the computer is simply a tool in a fiercely partisan political process. California pioneered partisan gerrymandering in 1951; in 1961, an Assemblyman named Jess Unruh used the process to make himself Assembly Speaker. The partisan wrangle over lines lasted three years in the 1970s. And the fight in the 1980s eventually brought down the then liberal California Supreme Court and indirectly gave us term limits.

Weintraub does a good job dissecting the failure of Schwarzenegger’s redistricting reform, Proposition 77, in 2005 but he treats redistricting, and that campaign, as a mechanical process. It is not. For incumbent legislators it is the most personal issue they face while it is incomprehensible for most voters. This is a lethal combination - partisans want to kill reform and the voters don’t know what it is - that has led to nine straight voter rejections of redistricting reform since 1930.

Weintraub does hold out hope that, with his appeal above partisanship, Schwarzenegger may yet reverse that pattern. “Voters should choose the politicians rather than the politicians choosing their voters. That’s the message that Schwarzenegger keeps trying to hammer home. If he ever succeeds, he just might leave his state, and the rest of the country, a legacy that would begin to reverse the polarization that has characterized legislative and congressional politics in the twenty first century.”

“Party of One’s” most important contribution is that it looks to Schwarzenegger’s long-term political impact in light of the changing demographics of the California electorate. It is a good read and a sound contribution to the Schwarzenegger-era literature.

November 26, 2007
From Sign On San Diego NewsBlog (San Diego Union Tribune)

New Arnold book

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has become a worldwide symbol of the fight against global warming, but his re-election last year was opposed by leading environmental groups.

The Republican governor opposes tax increases and gets solid support from business groups, but Senate Republicans would not give him the single vote needed to pass a state budget during a lengthy deadlock last summer.

In a Legislature deeply divided between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, the former bodybuilder and movie star often operates as a “Party of One,” says a new book by Daniel Weintraub, a Sacramento Bee political columnist.

The theme of the book, subtitled “Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter,” is that the governor’s self-proclaimed “post-partisanship” reflects the view of a growing number of Americans.

Weintraub says Schwarzenegger has tapped into a disgust with partisan stalemate and a desire to cross party lines, getting the best from left and right, to work on schools, health care, the environment and other issues.

“His approach, if successful, could ultimately redefine what it means to be a Republican,” writes Weintraub. “But it could also change the nature of American politics itself.”

The sweeping theme, sure to spark argument if not outright derision in some quarters, should not overshadow the fact that the book also is a first-rate analysis of Schwarzenegger’s first four years in office.

More…