TRUE MEANING OF 'ARNOLD THE BARBARIAN:' STATE GOP WOEFULLY WEAK

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
"TRUE MEANING OF 'ARNOLD THE BARBARIAN:' STATE GOP WOEFULLY WEAK"

Those several years in the last decade when actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was its Great Germanic Hope said more about the current state of California’s Republican Party than almost anything else that happened during his seven years in Sacramento.

The real meaning of Arnold: the GOP lacks credible candidates with intellectual substance whom it can run for major office here.

For quite awhile, Schwarzenegger, who did not bother to vote in the majority of elections over the six years before he became governor, was the hottest Republican commodity the GOP since Ronald Reagan.

Yes, some longtime California GOP political consultants reminded the Austrian-born thespian and his enthusiasts that Reagan's political career was durable because it did not suddenly spring Athena-like from anyone's mind, the way Schwarzenegger’s did.

"People forget that Reagan didn't just appear out of thin air to run for governor against Pat Brown in 1966," Dan Schnur, longtime press secretary to ex-Gov. Pete Wilson and now director of a politics institute at USC, recalled at the time.

Schnur added Schwarzenegger’s appeal within the state Republican Party, despite the fact he didn’t share many of its convictions, said more about the GOP than about anything or anyone else, including the muscleman himself, who has now returned to acting. He was right.

But Schwarzenegger was unique. What happened to Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain during the fall shows how remarkable it was that Schwarzenegger not only survived, but even took a large plurality of the female vote after his womanizing was exposed – and never denied – in the weeks and days before the 2003 Gray Davis recall election. It wasn’t until he was out of office that philandering cost him much of anything, and then it ended his marriage, but exacted no political price.

One magazine story titled "Arnold the Barbarian" (a play on his movie title role as "Conan the Barbarian") made it plain as early as 2002 that reporters would look into all aspects of his life, and they finally found something solid after he left office – an out-of-wedlock child conceived with his family’s housekeeper.

Schwarzenegger never really had much sense of irony. That became plain in late 2002, when he telephoned a columnist who had observed that California needed a new Patton in Sacramento. "That's a really good line," he said, perhaps unaware that complimenting the World War II general in his thick Germanic accent might seem inappropriate to some.

That call spurred even more enthusiasm among Californian Republicans, who have lost almost all statewide elections since 1994, than they've shown for any candidate since. They'll be even more irrelevant in Sacramento in 2012 than before, with current Gov. Jerry Brown indicating he may not even consult the minority party in budget negotiations.

The fact that party officials and voters in general could be so moved by Schwarzenegger's ephemeral and chimerical personality spoke volumes. It demonstrated the GOP would grasp at almost any straw as it desperately sought to win.

No doubt the party would do it again today, if another Schwarzenegger lurked in the political weeds. For as it heads into an election year, the GOP has seen absolutely no credible candidates rise up to oppose U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s reelection, not even a fabulously wealthy candidate like those the party has recently fielded, people like financier Bill Simon, its nominee for governor in 2002, and Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the twinned businesswomen it turned to for its top slots last year.

Not even record-level spending by Whitman in her campaign against Democrat Jerry Brown could make her truly competitive for governor, as all too often she had a deer-in-the-headlights demeanor.

Sadly for the GOP, no new billionaires show the stomach for a big-money run just now, and at this writing no one in the fabulously wealthy class is making any noises about trying for governor in 2014, either.

Without such candidates – and Schwarzenegger was an almost unique combination of celebrity and personal wealth – a party usually turns to its bench, people who have held secondary statewide offices like controller and lieutenant governor or been big city mayors, like ex-Gov. Pete Wilson, once top gun in San Diego.

But the GOP has no bench; it lost every statewide race last year and the only one it won four years earlier was Schwarzenegger’s own reelection.

Next in line might be members of Congress, but with the House under Republican control, the party’s best-heeled and best-known politicos there are loath to give up their leadership positions.

So where does the GOP turn? Who knows, now that there’s no Schwarzenegger available for a bailout?

Which means California can expect its years of Democratic domination to build on themselves – and that’s the true meaning of the Schwarzenegger boom, which highlighted better than almost anything else the deep weakness of the party he identified with. He did little for California during his time as governor and less for his party, now in a sad-sack condition.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

OPEN PRIMARY SHOULD BE TOP 2010 VOTER PRIORITY"

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 1, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“OPEN PRIMARY SHOULD BE TOP 2010 VOTER PRIORITY”

Memo to California voters: If you’re tired of dysfunctional government where ideology trumps good public policy, vote yes on the “Elections: Open Primary” proposition this June.

Why? Because that’s the quickest way to assure putting at least some moderate centrists into the state Legislature. It’s also the quickest way to give a voice to millions of voters who now essentially have no representation in state government. And it's the first step toward making state government work better, far faster and surer than a constitutional convention or any other tactic.

The open primary would be pretty simple: Each primary election would be completely open, with all candidates from all parties listed on a single ballot. No more Republican, Democratic, Green, Libertarian or any other party primaries conducted simultaneously but separately. No more haggling over whether to let independent voters into party primaries.

From that one ballot, the top two vote-getters would reach a runoff election, regardless of their party affiliation, unless one has a clear majority.

This should sound familiar; it’s exactly how hundreds of local elections in California have been conducted over decades. This is why two Democrats often are the finalists in mayoral elections in places like Los Angeles, Oakland and Sacramento.

The open system differs in two ways from the “blanket primary” approved by voters in 1996 and later thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court. That plan, used only in one California election cycle, also listed all candidates on a single ballot, but it put the leading vote-getter from each party into the runoff election. So all parties still conducted their own primaries.

The ideological extremists running both major parties hated that system as much as they despise the open primary, also known as the “top two” system. Regardless of ideology, party honchos can’t stand the idea that voters from the other major party could influence the primary outcome in theirs.

This might in fact be bad for the party bosses. But it’s good for almost everyone else. Here’s why:

Today’s legislative and congressional districts are gerrymandered so thoroughly that even though term limits change the bodies occupying them, very few seats ever switch parties. Change can rarely happen when voter registration in many districts is so one-sided that winning a party primary is tantamount to election.

So in a district where Republicans hold a 60-40 percent registration edge among voters willing to affiliate, Democrats essentially have no voice. Whoever wins the GOP nomination will get the seat. The converse for districts where Democrats maintain big advantages.

Because the primary winner can’t lose in a runoff, candidates rarely even try to appeal to the general populace, speaking only to the party faithful. Meanwhile, party primaries for many years have been dominated by extremists on the left or right, the left for Democrats and the right among Republicans.

Open primaries can change all that. Republicans running in GOP districts would need Democratic votes and could no longer cater only to their party’s right wing. The same for Democrats in districts their party dominates.

That’s exactly what leaders of the two major parties don’t want. Elected at party conventions attended mostly by true believers, they represent the far fringes, not the broad moderate middle of America and California. It's no accident party bosses who find it hard to agree on anything all want to maintain the system that created them.

They went to court together to throw out the blanket primary and they teamed to defeat an open primary proposition in 2004. Their counterparts did the same thing in Oregon last year, defeating a top-two proposition there.

The two major parties are joined in opposing top two by the smaller parties, who want to stay in general elections even though they have no chance to win. They whine that they should have a presence in every election, regardless of whether they’ve earned it.

Even officials of the major parties will piously argue for this while they're opposing open primaries. It’s the only time these people give the slightest thought to Greens, Libertarians and other small parties.

But open primaries don’t deprive any party of anything it earns. Put up candidates with wide appeal and they would make runoffs, just as they occasionally do in local primary elections.

There’s also the complaint that an open primary can put two candidates from the same party into a runoff. This can happen only if one of them draws heavily from members of the other major party. It’s possible in districts with one-sided registration if many members of the No. 2 party cross over in the primary. Rather than depriving those voters of representation, as party purists claim, an open primary actually would give them influence for the first time since 1998.

All of which should make the open primary the top priority this spring for any voter interested in better government for California. Nix it again and voters will have no one to blame but themselves for continued gridlock in the state Capitol.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net