Several things stood out to me in the LA Times’ long profile of Susan Kennedy, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff. The article turns on this basic question:
Yet this is the great paradox of Kennedy’s career: She possesses encyclopedic knowledge of California’s byzantine state bureaucracy and nearly unrivaled ability to use the governor’s bully pulpit and his control over appointments, funding and contracts to wield power. But she has taken leading roles under two governors widely seen as disappointments to their supporters.
Inevitably, critics ask whether the shortcomings of Davis and Schwarzenegger reflect entirely on them, or also on her.
The answer has to be “a bit of both.” It cannot be coincidence that Kennedy has been at the center of two consecutive failed gubernatorial administrations. She’s accumulating a Bob Shrum-like record, one that ought to cause people to wonder just how much she actually has accomplished.
In fact, the problem with Kennedy seems to be that she is too well matched to the corporate centrism of her superiors. Particularly under Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kennedy prefers to operate essentially as a technocrat. Instead of finding ways to implement bold policy changes that will help rebuild a shattered economy and wrecked finances, she finds bold ways to implement stupid policy changes that merely make those matters worse – while pleasing the corporations who benefit at the expense of everyone and everything else.
Michael Rothfield’s profile makes much of Kennedy’s background as a liberal activist, but doesn’t quite explain how she made the transition to a hired gun who wields power without values. It could well be the story of many in the late 20th century, who chose power and money over the long, hard slog of activism, in an era where activism seemed a dead end and power and money made all the difference. Kennedy wasn’t the only one to reach that conclusion in the 1980s and 1990s.
But we are today living with the consequences of that sell-out. Kennedy is the archetypal corporate Democrat who sees her job as using the power of the state to cram unpopular and ineffective legislation down everyone else’s throat. She learned from the best, serving on Dianne Feinstein’s staff in the 1990s. At that she has been marginally effective – the article didn’t really dwell on the fact that she failed utterly at getting unions and others on board with the May 19 special election initiatives.
Some quotes from the article illustrate Kennedy’s approach to politics, and should help us understand why she is a failure:
She became cabinet secretary to Davis starting in 1999, but grew disgusted with what she says was constant pressure from their own party’s lawmakers to appease liberal interest groups, especially unions, at the expense of taxpayers. The party’s left wing could not abide Davis’ desire to govern as a centrist, she said.
“It was the Democrats that recalled Gray Davis,” she said. “And this was not a debate about principle or passion. . . . A lot of this was about lining the pockets of the people who suck money out of the system.”
“I thought what they were doing was unconscionable. And so I really lost faith.”
The notion that left-wing Democrats caused Gray Davis’s recall has got to be one of the most absurd and silly examples of revisionist history I have ever seen. In fact Davis’s basic problem was that he never was able to build a rapport with the public, perhaps because of his desire to “govern as a centrist.” And it wasn’t the left that caused the 2000-01 energy crisis of the 2002-03 budget crisis, or funded the recall signature gathering effort, or funded Arnold’s 2003 campaign. It’s impossible to see how Davis could have survived had he been more centrist.
Kennedy is also a lesbian who married her wife in the summer of 2008 when such marriages were legal, prior to the passage of Prop 8. While many LGBT couples and activists have to make complicated decisions about how to match their personal life to their politics, Kennedy’s decision to advise Arnold to veto the legislature’s legalization of same-sex marriage shows again her refusal to use her power to advance sensible and proper legislation that would help people, preferring to use it instead to advance corporate-friendly deals that hurt people:
Although she calls herself “a thorn in the side” of a state that does not recognize gay marriage, she has advised both governors she’s served to veto bills that would have legalized it. Overturning the voters’ will would be politically damaging and legally and morally wrong, she argues.
California doesn’t need technocrats who sit in Sacramento finding ways to cut stupid deals in support of bad policy that makes our problems worse instead of better. But in Susan Kennedy, that is exactly what we have. The flaws of the Davis and Schwarzenegger Administrations cannot be laid entirely at her feet – the chief executives bear the primary responsibility – but when the history of California’s collapse is written, Kennedy’s role in the disaster deserves a prominent place.
The pic with the LATimes article says it all: She smokes a stoggie down to the nub.
“I get things done. Who cares who it hurts? Who cares who it helps?”
http://www.latimes.com/news/lo…
It’s not exactly a clear quote, but in the context I’d suggest she saying the Democrats’ demands for spending on this, that and the other led to the massive deficit, which led to the recall.
She was a disaster at the PUC and continues to attempt to rewrite history on the deregualtion of energy.
She hates organized labor – and people who must work for a living in general.
She considers the wants and desires of the haves, and cares not a whit for the have-nots.
All of the current candidates for Governor should be asked whether there will be a role for Susan Kennedy in their admininstration. There is no way in hell I would ever consider voting for a candidate that intends to employ her.
Her actions suggest that she is capable of carrying the same kind of grudge that Der Gropenfuehrer does – in my opinion.
In a perfect world, she would be on the receiving end of the kinds of policies she advances.
First, in England most of the legislative staff are civil service and work for whomever the member is. It’s not that big a deal. My problem with the story on Kennedy (and on most stories about staffers) is they hide what there role is supposed to be which is to help the member achieve his goals (and of course the member is supposed to be working to help the people achieve theirs). Virtually any staff person in Sacramento would have taken the job with Arnold even if they had a strong philisophical base in a different direction, because a lot of what politicians do is helping people in ways that ideology doesn’t impact. So Susan Kennedy is merely a person who carries out the wishes of the person that hired them. However what this story does is help Arnold escape accountability because it continues the myth of the all powerful staff person with an agenda of their own and there is no evidence that she is doing anything other than what the Governor wants her to do or what Gray wanted her to do previously.
As far as liberals making the recall happen, there is a lot more truth to that than you want to believe, although a big part of it was members of the Democratic base not really caring about whether Gray stayed or not. For example, the legislature passed the Cedillo bill letting illegals have drivers licenses while the recall was going on and then told Gray (who had veto’d the bill previously) that they would support the recall if he didn’t sign it. Gray caved and took a huge hit in the polls not only for signing an unpopular bill, but for changing his position. There were probably a dozen other similar things that happened during the recall that sunk him, but if Democrats had thought more highly of him, it wouldn’t have happened.
You never know specifically why someone loses an election because voters cast their ballots in secret, so you can always argue about why it turned out the way it did. Certainly the fact that Gray was put in a box on perhaps half a dozen issues like the drivers license bill played a role in the outcome. Of course as i also pointed out, if liberals in the legislature thought his retention mattered, they wouldn’t have put him in that box, so I am not disagreeing with your point that if he had been a consistent liberal, the recall wouldn’t have happened. i was simply making the point that politics winds up being in a lot of ways about the ability to develop personal relationships and those are usually connected to issues. In the end, polls at the time showed that a large percentage of self identified liberals (numbers varied depending on the poll) voted for the recall in part because they thought Arnold would be more liberal than he wound up being in large part because he was married to a Kennedy. That wasn’t the case, but clearly the perception contributed to the margin in what was a relatively close election.
As for the point about staff, I still think my point is correct. England and many other countries have staffers throughout government who remain employed no matter which political party holds power. That is not the way we do things in America, but if you know most staffers at any level, they will tell you that there are numerous issues where they disagree strongly with their boss and they always have to remind themselves that they are promoting their bosses agenda and not their own. Sine the premise of a representative government is that we get not the best elected officials, but the ones that best represent what they want, then I think you can make a pretty good case that any Governor deserves those “technocrats” to help implement their agenda but a lot of it comes down to philosophy of government.
But to blame Susan Kennedy for what Arnold is doing is in my opinion helping to create this mystery around how government really operates and to help get Arnold off the hook. There is nothing she does that Arnold doesn’t approve of and probably very little that doesn’t happen because she knows it is what Arnold wants. I also have no doubt that if she had real power that a lot of things would be done differently. But she doesn’t have real power in terms of policy and has in my opinion made a choice that she could make things better for California residents by working with the people in power. Maybe not the right choice, but certainly something many politico’s from both parties have done in the past, sometimes with very good results.