As dismay grows in his own party and among many observers over Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s seemingly surprising embrace and defense of left-liberal Democrat Rob Reiner and his tenure as chairman of the California Children and Families Commission, it is becoming evident that some of Schwarzenegger’s highest ranking appointees and advisors have long been involved with the controversial commission and the movie director/initiative promoter himself and have played key roles in the direction the program has taken.
“The First 5 Commission,” says one Schwarzenegger friend using the Reiner commission’s nickname, “and Reiner himself have been much closer to the governor than people think.”
Former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, a close Arnold friend and top political advisor who pushed the appointment of controversial Schwarzenegger chief of staff Susan Kennedy, former Schwarzenegger Secretary of Education Richard Riordan and his wife, Nancy Daly Riordan, both longtime friends of the First Couple, and Schwarzenegger’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kimberly Belshe, have all been deeply involved with the Reiner commission and its drive for universal preschool.
Reiner had wanted the highly funded First 5 LA Commission, which operates under the umbrella of his state commission and is funded by the tobacco tax enacted by his 1998 Proposition 10 initiative, and over which he is said by sources to be very influential, to establish a universal preschool program. To that end, an advisory council chaired by Hertzberg (who was Arnold’s first choice to serve as his chief of staff, prior to Hertzberg running for mayor of L.A.) and Nancy Daly Riordan was established in 2002 to work on developing a “10-year Master Plan,” as documents call it, for First 5 LA’s “Universal Preschool initiative.” (Prior to becoming involved with Riordan, L.A.’s very wealthy former mayor, Nancy Daly Riordan was long married to Warner Brothers chairman Bob Daly, in which context she first met Schwarzenegger.)
THE PLAN WAS TO USE THE PROP 10 MONEY to institute in Los Angeles County what Reiner is trying to do now statewide with his Proposition 82 universal preschool on California’s June ballot. On February 12, 2004, First 5 LA formally adopted the master plan developed with guidance from Schwarzenegger’s associates, Hertzberg and Riordan.
But there was a problem. The program was very expensive. It was taking a lot of time to get up and running. More funds would be needed. In what Reiner would probably describe as a coincidence if he acknowledged knowing about it at all, which last week he did not, the state commission on June 28, 2004 signed a $67.5 million contract for advertising, largely to stimulate public demand for preschool programs. $23 million of that was used to promote “Preschool For All” after Reiner launched his universal preschool initiative last year and sent operatives into the field to gather signatures so it would qualify for this year’s primary election.
Nancy Daly Riordan, meanwhile, resigned later in 2004 from the Los Angeles Universal Preschool Board, citing, according to First 5 officials, concern about having to file economic conflict of interest forms.
Her husband, former Education Secretary and LA Mayor Dick Riordan, has long been associated with Reiner and the state and LA commissions. He was an early endorser of Prop 10 in 1998, and campaigned for its passage with Reiner. When criticism of the Reiner Commission – centering on slowness to act and flaky projects – emerged in the year following the passage of Prop 10, Riordan appeared publicly with Reiner to praise the commission and its work and was very supportive of Reiner’s less than successful plan to implement universal preschool in L.A. He is one of the drafters of Reiner’s latest initiative, Proposition 82 for universal preschool.
Arnold introduced Riordan at the former mayor’s campaign kick-off event when he ran for governor in 2002. When the recall came around, the two men agreed to support each other should either run for governor to replace Gray Davis. Arnold and wife Maria Shriver huddled at length with the Riordans in Malibu a few days before the former action superstar’s stunning Tonight Show announcement of his candidacy. Riordan held “the education portfolio” in Arnold’s campaign, dominating the candidate’s highly touted “Education Summit.” After the election, when Schwarzenegger made him secretary of education, Riordan served as an ex officio commissioner of First 5, during which the commission’s fateful advertising plans to stimulate public demand for preschool were drawn up.
Also there as an ex officio commissioner was another member of Arnold’s Cabinet, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kimberly Belshe. Neither she nor Riordan raised any alarms about the commission.
Former Pete Wilson official Kimberly Belshe was a founding commissioner when it was formed in 1998 following the passage of Reiner’s Proposition 10 tobacco tax initiative. She had been director of the state Department of Health Services. Asked what appointment she wanted from departing Governor Wilson, she picked the new Reiner-created commission. She served as vice chair of the commission. While she was there, Reiner’s media consultants developed their initial plans, revealed in a 2002 memorandum, to use state funding to promote Reiner’s “Preschool For All” theme of stimulating public demand for state preschool services.
Then in the fall of 2003, Belshe became a member of the Schwarzenegger Cabinet as secretary of the Health and Human Services Agency. After joining the Arnold Administration, she became an ex officio member of the Reiner Commission.
WHILE SERVING AS REINER’S VICE CHAIR on the commission, Belshe approved an earlier use of state funds for an arguable political purpose. That was the spending of $14 million on advertising touting the commission’s then very thin activities while Reiner political opponents attempted to have the commission abolished in the March 2000 primary. The measure, Proposition 28, was defeated. I’ll have more about that another time.
Belshe opposed the reorganization recommendations of Arnold’s highly touted California Performance Review (CPR). One of those recommendations would have placed the lone wolf Reiner agency under a state agency framework, bringing a new level of scrutiny and oversight to its operations. Schwarzenegger shelved most of the recommendations, including this one.
Top associates of Schwarzenegger’s have been intimately involved with the Reiner operation for years. The two men have supported one another’s causes, Reiner’s Prop 10 in 1998 and Schwarzenegger’s Prop 49 after school programs initiative in 2002. Reiner, behind the scenes, was a special guest at the Arnold Inaugural. Knowing this, it is not so surprising that the governor would take the seemingly curious stance he has.
A very reliable source tells me that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign, fresh from its cash infusion Monday night in Beverly Hills, plans to go on the air with a TV spot promoting the governor next week. He has reportedly placed a broadcast buy for March 27th and 28th in the Sacramento and Bakersfield markets.
He will also do what his people are billing as his first unscripted town hall on Friday in San Diego, focusing on education.
And at this hour, a little after 5 PM, he is convening the first “Big Five” meeting with Democratic and Republican legislative leaders to discuss next steps on the infrastructure bond package that last week fell short of making California’s June ballot.
Meanwhile, following the unsealing of bids to earthquake proof the Bay Bridge, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides released a statement criticizing the governor for holding up the process, noting the bids received today are no better than the one Schwarzenegger rejected in 2004 and two more years have been wasted with the job left undone.
** The Angelides campaign finance report is out and it shows that his decision to try and match rival Democratic candidate Steve Westly in his early television advertising is cutting into his resources. At the beginning of the year, Westly had a $7 million advantage in cash on hand, $24 million to $17 million. Now, while showing significant movement in the polls, Westly’s cash advantage is up to $8.5 million, with $23 million cash on hand to Angelides’ $14.5 million. And Westly, of course, can increase that edge with the stroke of a pen.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has made the Rob Reiner mess his own. After weeks of avoiding questions on the matter, Schwarzenegger told the Fresno Bee editorial board yesterday afternoon he will not replace the controversial chairman of the California Children and Families Commission, who he described as “a friend.”
It was previously revealed here that Reiner, although a very liberal Democrat who considered running for governor this year, was a special guest at private parties during the Arnold Inaugural festivities in November 2003. He was on the “Friends and Family” list for inaugural gala activities.
The former action superstar might as well embrace Reiner and his woes. Although Reiner’s term in office ended long ago, back in 2004, the governor never moved to appoint his replacement. Nor did he reappoint him. But Schwarzenegger’s inaction served to empower Reiner. Consider:
** Under Reiner’s leadership during the Schwarzenegger Administration, the commission undertook highly questionable activities, using taxpayer money to promote Reiner’s political agenda of stimulating demand for more state spending on preschool. This includes a state contract for $67.5 million in advertising signed on June 28, 2004. Which Reiner told me last week during his disastrous appearance at the Sacramento Press Club that he didn’t know about. That was only one of a number of telling points he said he didn’t know about.
** Top officials in the Schwarzenegger Cabinet were involved with the Reiner Commission but raised no alarms about practices that even the governor has said, long after the fact, look bad.
** The governor rejected the recommendation of his highly touted California Performance Review that the commission — which currently exists as an independent agency sorely in need of oversight — be brought under the department of health and human services.
The Fresno Bee’s Jim Boren tells me that the Reiner mess was only one topic during a 30-minute session with the governor. With a lot on their plate and a limited period of access to Schwarzenegger, the editorial board, which has not been focused on the scandal, didn’t get much beyond the basics. But they did finally flush the governor out.
This is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mess now.
2 PM UPDATE: Sac Bee columnist Dan Weintraub speculates that Schwarzenegger and Reiner cut a deal. Reiner could keep his commission chairmanship and in exchange promised not to run for governor. It’s an interesting theory but I don’t think so.
Reiner seriously explored the race last year before finally announcing a couple months ago that he would not run. He has school age children to think of and I hear he had real doubts about his chances. On the Arnold side, I don’t recall hearing from any version of Team Schwarzenegger any alarm at the prospect of a Reiner gubernatorial candidacy.
Multiple sources have been telling me that Governor Schwarzenegger told the Fresno Bee editorial board today that he will not appoint someone to fill the 15-months expired term of controversial ultraliberal California Children and Families Commission chairman Rob Reiner because he is “a friend” and because “there needs to be more evidence.”
I find this very amusing.
UPDATE: … I just spoke with Fresno Bee editorial board editor Jim Boren, who described the former action superstar as cool, calm, and collected on this and other points in a 30-minute group session, and here is the link to their site.
I’ve placed calls to the governor’s home and private office numbers on this.
So, what do we think it would take for Schwarzenegger to appoint someone else to fill the term which expired for Reiner the year before last? Footage of Rob Reiner running out of a bank with cash falling out of his pockets? Or perhaps … more about members of his own administration and their roles in what the Reiner Commission became.
Informed sources say that, flush from his big Beverly Hills fundraiser last night, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign has requested television broadcast rates in the Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and Bakersfield markets. This comes on the heels of a mostly wasted independent expenditure campaign on his behalf by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose advertising was largely rendered moot by the governor’s failure to get his Big Bang Bonds infrastructure package onto California’s June ballot.
Meanwhile, the clever sniping which has irritated many Democrats and made the party’s would-be governors look juvenile has resumed in the gubernatorial primary. This morning, Treasurer Phil Angelides sent out a nasty missive about Controller Steve Westly’s personal finances.
“To: Political Reporters
“Re: Steve Westly’s “Flaxseed Oil” Defense
“Steve Westly is resorting to the Barry Bonds “flaxseed oil” defense …”
You see how clever these things are.
NOON UPDATE: Angelides press secretary Brian Brokaw sent along this correction: “Correction, Bill: I sent that out. Not Phil Angelides.”
Of course, the reality is that Brother Brokaw is not a Democratic candidate for Governor of California. He is the mouthpiece for a Democratic candidate for Governor of California. When the Angelides campaign sends these little missives forth, they are from Phil Angelides. Just as when similar documents issue forth from the Westly camp, they are from Steve Westly.
Here is a link to Rex Babin’s excellent cartoons in the Sacramento Bee. Recommended are “Revenge of the Nerds, Parts III and IV.”
** BAD NEWS FOR ARNOLD FROM SURVEY USA: Approve of Arnold’s job performance 36 percent. Disapprove of Arnold’s job performance 61 percent. This is before anyone has started advertising against him again. Which I hear may begin in less than a month …
After more than a week of nasty skirmishing via repeated e-mailed attack memos to reporters and supporters, the two Democratic candidates for governor of California have now gone five days without squabbling.
The practice of the two candidates in the now wide open race — Controller Steve Westly and Treasurer Phil Angelides — had drawn public and private criticism from a number of leading Democrats, including Oscar-winning filmmaker/actor Warren Beatty, state Democratic chairman Art Torres, and elements of organized labor.
Says one top aide to one of the candidates: “We are making a conscious effort to refrain from devolving into a counterproductive tit-for-tat.”
“This,” says another consultant to another of the Democratic gubernatorial campaigns, had become “okay, a childish exercise. We know we have to be gubernatorial.”
While Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was trying for and losing out on his late-breaking, full court press bid to place some version of his infrastructure megabond on California’s June ballot, Angelides and Westly were attacking one another on their finances, their condos, and the arcana of their environmental positions. Meanwhile, neither candidate had a thing to say, until prodded, about the biggest issue in California — Arnold’s maneuverings around his Big Bang Bonds infrastructure package — which shocked some observers and friends of the Democratic campaigns.
“These two have clawed out some tiny space in a corner of the video game universe for their private battle while the state is crying out for leadership,” commented one prominent consultant for organized labor.
Although sulky at the criticism, top hands in both the Angelides and Westly campaigns say they have heard the criticism and are ready for the task of promoting a gubernatorial quality agenda and taking on Schwarzenegger. Who, while all this has been going on, has been raising money much more rapidly than his would-be Democratic successors and has been, however unsuccessfully, laying out his vision for California’s future.
The super-rich Westly, whose key role in the success of one of the most important companies in the cyber economy, eBay, has made it possible for him to put more than $20 million into his own campaign so far, is now off to the East Coast for a fundraising development trip.
For his part, Angelides, the very wealthy former Sacramento land developer, has just put another TV spot on the air. This ad, which according to reports from unaffiliated media consultants is only running in the Los Angeles market, features his three appealing daughters talking about their dad and his plan to make college education more accessible to all.
This third in a series of introductory Angelides ads again tells the viewer little about the treasurer’s personal background, but does attempt to position him as a battler for a popular middle class entitlement.
Observers are now waiting for the two to lay out coherent platforms to counter what Schwarzenegger has been talking about for months since the failure of his ‘Year of Reform” special election agenda last November.
At this hour, a touching reunion is underway, that between the Alliance for a Better California (ABC) labor coalition and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Republican governor is in Beverly Hills to raise money for his embattled re-election campaign in big chunks, with erstwhile campaign reformer and current Republican presidential frontrunner, Senator John McCain, on hand for the festivities.
The ABC folks dogged the former action superstar throughout last year, which was to have been his “Year of Reform,” from event to event, ultimately dragging him down to an across-the-board defeat on all four of his special election initiatives last November. Now, in the wake of his failure last week to place his Big Bang Bonds infrastructure package on California’s June ballot, hundreds of ABC protesters have gathered outside the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills to protest his big ticket fundraiser tonight.
Schwarzenegger’s event, which is to benefit both his campaign committee and the California Republican Party (the latter primarily also to promote his re-election) has a goal which has been variously estimated in Republican circles of $2 to $3 million. But, according to Republican sources, ticket sales have been harder than anticipated, as “donor fatigue” has set in with yet another consecutive election year in the Arnold Era. Late sales were probably not helped by a Los Angeles Times story yesterday by reporter Bob Salladay detailing — in excruciating detail, from a donor standpoint, and to the amusement of Arnold’s erstwhile Hollywood colleagues — how high spending and high maintenance Arnold’s political ventures have been. From two million bucks spent on jets to the $100,000 a year crony who makes sure Arnold’s speeches “sound like Arnold” to the Oscar nominee cameraman on TV commercial shoots to the Hollywood-style “craft services” a la Wolfgang Puck, it’s quite an adventure in big spending for those not initiated in Hollywood. Too bad the studio can’t cover all that stuff.
Will the ABC folks be on hand for future big Arnold fundraisers, as they were throughout last year? Was there, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “a bear in the woods?”
I am not on hand, by the way, because the Arnold fundraiser is closed to the press and private and all that. And while there are ways to crash these things, and without telling you how I’ve had success at this when I’ve not been on the list, I’m going to wait for something really exciting. Mind you now, these sorts of events used to be open to the press. They frequently were when I worked in politics, which was not all that long ago. But no more. It’s all part of the privatization of our politics, where you don’t get to know who really showed to flash the cash and what the candidate did to entertain and please his benefactors.
And, by the way, lest you wonder where I am coming from, I voted for both of the principals in tonight’s fundraising festivities. Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor in 2003 and John McCain for President in 2000. Personally, I like them both.
Why hasn’t Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced controversial movie director/initiative promoter Rob Reiner as chairman of the California Children and Families Commission? That’s the question that has many, especially Schwarzenegger’s fellow Republicans, perplexed. Reiner has stepped away, taken a “leave of absence” from his post at the so-called “First Five Commission” in the wake of revelations about its highly questionable spending practices under his leadership. But he intends to return to the chairmanship after his Proposition 82 universal preschool initiative is voted on in June, even though his term in office expired in 2004.
Many Republicans thought they understood Schwarzenegger’s motivation when they saw several high-profile Hollywood names among the sponsors of tonight’s big Beverly Hills fundraiser for the governor. But those figures are not close to Reiner, a very liberal Democrat. The truth of the matter lies elsewhere.
There are several reasons for Arnold’s refusal to act, according to sources around the former action superstar. One is his desire not to speak ill of a fellow celebrity. Another is Maria Shriver’s insistence that he not get into more fights with liberals. Then there is the previously undisclosed fact that Arnold’s own administration is implicated in the unsavory doings at the First Five Commission.
Former Pete Wilson official Kimberly Belshe was a founding commissioner when it was formed in 1998 following the passage of Reiner’s Proposition 10 tobacco tax initiative. She served as vice chair of the commission. While she was a member of the commission, Reiner’s media consultants developed their plans to use state funding to promote Reiner’s “Preschool For All” theme of stimulating public demand for state preschool services.
Then in the fall of 2003, Belshe became a member of the Schwarzenegger Cabinet as secretary of the Health and Human Services Agency. After joining the Arnold Administration, she became an ex officio member of the Reiner Commission.
Another ex officio member of the Reiner Commission was then Schwarzenegger Secretary of Education Richard Riordan, a longtime friend of Arnold. Riordan, the former Los Angeles mayor, was part of the working group assembled by Reiner to draft Proposition 82. He is one of its most prominent endorsers.
The media contract under which the $23 million in taxpayer money was used to boost the Preschool For All initiative was executed on June 28, 2004. That was over seven months after Arnold became governor, clearly on his watch.
The Reiner Commission came under scrutiny from the California Performance Review (CPR). But although the former action superstar famously promised to “blow up the boxes” of the bureaucracy in his 2004 State of the State address, the highly-touted CPR was shelved by Schwarzenegger under pressure from Democrats and members of his own administration.
The CPR had recommended that the Reiner Commission be placed under the aegis of a new Department of Health and Human Services, effective July 1, 2005. Had the commission been placed under the direct oversight of the department, it is hard to believe that its $23 million advertising campaign boosting the Preschool For All initiative — after Reiner launched the campaign and while his operatives were in the field collecting signatures to qualify it for the June ballot — which started several months after, would have been allowed.
It’s clear that the two men, despite their differing partisan allegiances, have an entente. Each has contributed to the other’s causes. Reiner criticized Arnold during the special election, but his comments were much less pointed and of lower impact than those of fellow Hollywood stars Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
In fact, Reiner was actually a guest at private parties during the Arnold Inaugural. It is laudable that people can have friendships across partisan lines in this far too partisan era. But Reiner’s term in office ended some 15 months ago. He has made it abundantly clear that he either deliberately pushed to use taxpayer money to promote his own ballot initiative or was remarkably unaware of activities that coincidentally promoted his own ballot initiative. Either way, it’s bad.
Consider his disastrous appearance at last week’s Sacramento Press Club luncheon. He said he doesn’t know about the state contract between his Children and Families Commission and his ad agency which instituted the program to stimulate more public demand for universal preschool which is his initiative campaign. He doesn’t know about the earlier memo by his advisors laying out the need for such a program. He doesn’t know about the highly improper use of state resources to promote his initiative campaign kick-off event featuring himself. He never even saw the taxpayer-funded TV ads promoting universal preschool after his preschool initiative campaign was launched.
That media contract he says he doesn’t know about is for $67.5 million. It was executed on the watch of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is just the sort of thing Arnold promised in his campaign to put an end to. Yet he has not. Aside from a few vaguely disapproving comments in response to questions at his Arnold Classic bodybuilding extravaganza last month in Columbus, Ohio, he has dodged the issue.
Indeed, at the end of last week, his people continued to evade the question.
Asked about Arnold’s intentions with regard to Reiner, a Schwarzenegger aide, who insisted on speaking on background, said this: “There’s nothing new to tell you. He has been totally focused on the infrastructure bonds. I can’t tell you when the governor will have something to say.”
Given the involvement of senior members of his administration in the Reiner Commission, given the fact that this has happened on his watch, given the fact that the CPR would have placed the commission under direct state oversight but was dropped by his administration, and given the fact that his drive to place the infrastructure bonds on the June ballot is now over, it seems obvious that Schwarzenegger should attend to this embarrassment in his front yard.
According to sources, Mike Murphy — remember him? we used to talk about him all the time — has said that when Arnold Schwarzenegger is in trouble this August, he’ll be back. Some would say after the Big Bang Bonds debacle that the former Mr. Universe is in trouble now. Murphy, a Washington-based consultant to many Republican luminaries, emerged as Governor Schwarzenegger’s chief political strategist after the landmark 2003 recall election in which he served as a key senior strategist.
But Murphy, who was pursuing many interests — multiple clients around the country, dallying with two Republican presidential candidates (Mitt Romney and John McCain), the siren song of Hollywood (his sole credit thusfar as consulting producer to CNBC’s late Dennis Miller talk show), and a lucrative corporate consulting/lobbying business that embarrassed Arnold on a few occasions — was a key part of the group that presided over the former action superstar’s slide to the right. This move culminated in the disastrous “Year of Reform” special election agenda of 2005.
Still, these things always have levels of complication that are not always apparent even to the most informed observers of this most secretive of operations. One of those levels of complication is Schwarzenegger himself. Murphy is a talented guy who now has a knowledge of California politics he did not have when functioning as Arnold’s political supremo last year, when he used to say things like: “Politics in California is like politics anywhere else.”
In the current Arnold set-up, which I think of as Team Schwarzenegger Version 3.0, the only member of the real inner circle who has been acquainted with the governor for any length of time is his wife, Maria Shriver. As any politico can tell you, that makes for a problematic situation. And Schwarzenegger’s re-election team is dominated by very recent arrivals to the Golden State, with a chief strategist (Bush veteran Matthew Dowd), currently ensconced in the McConaughey-esque cool confines of Austin, Texas.
** SOME SUNDAY NEWSPAPER COVERAGE CATCHING UP on the Arnold bonds aftermath analysis. I mostly agree with Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Weintraub’s analysis of the Big Bang Bonds failure, having written as much last week in my real time coverage of the maneuverings and in analytical pieces. One thing he is missing, however, and this was key, was the governor’s repeated assurances to Democratic legislative leaders that he could deliver the requisite handful of Republican votes for the deals he negotiated with them. Perhaps, as I have suggested several times, if Team Schwarzenegger had secured that handful of Republican votes to support some version of the Arnold bonds BEFORE negotiating his deals with the Democrats, then he would have had some success.
I am less simpatico, as it were, with Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters’ suggestion that Arnold can win by “playing the immigration card.” Drawing a false analogy with the 1994 governor’s race, Walters suggests that Arnold can jump on the illegal immigration horse and ride it to victory over some hapless Democratic campaign.
For starters, Pete Wilson was in much stronger shape than Arnold at this stage of the campaign. His problems were in previous years, not in his election year. He had not just lost on his biggest issue of the year. Though he was not popular, few doubted that he was a real governor, which is not the case with Arnold. He had a real campaign plan, which was developed and executed over a long period of time with a consistent, proven winning team in California. By this point, he had been establishing immigration as a principal issue for him for about eight months, so it was not something he suddenly jumped on to as other things went sour. And immigration was much more of a hot button issue then than it is now. Unlike now, a strong majority of Californians regarded illegal immigration as a serious problem.
Then there is the question of the reality of Arnold’s record. Although he did vote for Wilson’s Proposition 187 measure, Schwarzenegger publicly announced in 2002 that he opposes it, winning a standing ovation at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco declaring: “I would never stand in the way of a child going to school.” And while he did away with the, shall we say, less than security-minded drivers licenses for illegal immigrants bill signed by then Governor Gray Davis, he has also made statements that make it clear he will support a much more limited license — that looks different from the regular license and can’t be used for purposes other than lawful driving — when the federal government comes up with its guidelines.
** IN A STUNNING DEVELOPMENT, neither of the Democratic campaigns for governor of California has issued an attack memo on its opponent for three entire days. This comes after a week of squabbling over increasingly arcane matters while ignoring — until prodded — the biggest political issue in the state, i.e., the collapse of Arnold’s bid to place some version of his Big Bang Bonds infrastructure package on California’s June ballot. Might we have entered into a new period of more productive, gubernatorial-level discourse?
** The State of California press release which I presented to movie director/initiative promoter Rob Reiner during his Tuesday appearance at the Sacramento Press Club as evidence of taxpayer promotion of his campaign kick-off event for his Preschool For All initiative has mysteriously disappeared from the state Department of Education web site. It was there last week when it was revealed here, but as of Wednesday, the day after Reiner’s disastrous appearance, it has disappeared.
I have several e-mail messages in on this. But no replies. I did receive a phone call from a state official wanting to discuss it. I called back, but she was out and I was told no one else was able to answer my questions.
** I’m told that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce changed out their infrastructure-oriented pro-Arnold Schwarzenegger TV spot yesterday to one extolling Arnold’s record in office, closing with this tag line: “With his heart in the right place, Gov. Schwarzenegger is turning California around.”
His previous ad had turned into a complete waste with the failure of the governor’s drive to put some version of his Big Bang Bonds onto California’s June ballot.
** Does this new pro-Arnold TV ad by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce qualify as “issue advocacy” if it talks up his record as a politician “with his heart in the right place?” Since the earlier ad was ostensibly extolling the Schwarzenegger infrastructure plan and not the candidate himself, the Chamber was able to claim an exemption whereby it does not have to reveal its contributors to the campaign.
I’ll keep you updated on this and other items this weekend. Meanwhile, sit back and enjoy the 12 Hours of Sebring.
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