Arnold gets his butt kicked

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger accepts Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

But you need to charge at least $10,000 and funnel it through one of his “initiative committees” to gain the personal access you’re bound to tell the public you’re not seeking. And if you want to take three friends to sup with the Gov, that’ll cost your American Express card $100,000.

You can give more. You can give all you like. There’s no limit on giving to what’s amusingly called independent committees that also happen to support the governor’s agenda, so Arnold can skirt California’s campaign finance laws that otherwise limit him to a paltry $22,300 per donor.

The combined fundraising totals of Schwarzenegger’s administration have many Californians wondering why they held such a disdainful opinion of Gray Davis’s fundraising proclivities. In Arnold’s first year in office he raked in more than $26 million; since he first announced his candidacy he’s pulled in almost $50 million; and he has said he’s after another $50 million in 2005 alone to accomplish his factious goals, which had included such Bushian weirdness as privatizing the state employees pension plan.

Not exactly a “populist” record, as the governor is so fond of promoting his political tenure. Rather, it’s the same old bait-and-switch big-business scam that the GOP has shoved down the gullible little guy’s throat since at least the days of Ronald Reagan’s folksiness and Newt Gingrich’s Contract.

Notwithstanding all the dunning for all that cash, Arnold is taking his hits these days -- having plummeted from last year’s approval rating of 60 percent to 49 percent. He has not accomplished this remarkable feat on his own. He’s had plenty of help, and I’m delighted to say it has come from progressives -- that usually unraveled coalition of the hopelessly hapless whom many believe are as ancient history as Hiram Johnson.

Yep, I said progressives. Namely, organized progressives. Namely, organized-labor progressives. And namely, the self-styled progressive California Nurses Association -- a 60,000-member union that upended national unionization trends by tripling its numbers in a dozen years. It can be done.

The brief background on this is that Arnold, siding with hospitals and insurance companies, had tried overturning a state law limiting a hospital’s patient-nurse ratio -- something that anyone gasping for air while buzzing the nurses’ station would be rather displeased with. Anyway, the nurses let Arnold have it through organized protests, through airplane banners flying over his home-patio parties, and through newspaper and television information campaigns.

Needless to say, Arnold didn’t like any of this. And he only exacerbated his sorry predicament by blathering last December that the nurses “don’t like me in Sacramento because I am always kicking their butts.” Hence Mr. Public Relations emerged as a cross between a besieged barbarian and a bit of a girlie-man himself by sniffling about folks not liking him.

Thanks in huge part to the California Nurses Association, in league with other organized labor groups representing teachers, firefighters and police officers, Arnold’s popularity has experienced freefall ever since. This, despite all the image-polishing cash he’s raked in. “We take extreme credit for his poll numbers dropping like a rock,” said CNA’s executive director, Rose Ann DeMoro. Likewise, as the Sacramento Bee noted just a few days ago, gone are the days when “the national news media gushed that he was a born leader who might be destined for the White House.”

He pushed. The nurses pushed back. The nurses won. It’s really not as difficult as we make it seem.

Golden state progressives in hospital scrubs are brilliantly strutting their stuff. Let’s hope it’s a lesson to others that it can, after all, be done -- if we’ll just start doing it.

Oh, by the way. If you live in California and prefer fewer attending nurses when you’re hospitalized, Arnold accepts cash, too.

Comments

[Sister Mary Beak]

Is anyone keeping up with the Austrian's signature-gathering caper? Is he buying the needed number of signatures to allow him to circumvent normal elections and buy another special one like the recall election he used to buy the California governership?

[erpowers]

Although this is great news progressives should not celebrate too much at this point. Progressive must continue to put pressure on Schwarzeggner and giving an alturnative to his agenda. Progessives should wait until Schwarzeggner is defeated to celebrate. That is the time to celebrate.

[tom]

thank u 4 exposing this union -buster

[Maezeppa]

Arnold has gotten enough signatures to put redistricting on the ballot but he had to up the rate to over $5 per sig.

By the way, only 27% of votes requiring a 'yes' ever pass. This may be different as advertising will be heavy but for now, there's no reason not to be hopeful.

Note: California is like a blue-red state. Draw a vertical line down Calif. and the East side of that line might as well be Oklahoma. The West side of that line is like... well, California.