I think I threw up in my mouth a little when I read the headline of the L.A. Times ‘news analysis’ this morning:
This is news? You mean some people actually thought “post-partisanship” was, like, real?
The conclusion of the article:
conditions are ripe for the kind of partisan clash that Schwarzenegger says is vanishing.
More…
As contemptuous as we are of Arnold’s “post-partisan” nonsense, the article casts Republicans as the biggest opponents of the governor’s invented style of fake governance:
Post-partisanship, said a rueful state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) “is the process by which Arnold sits down with Democratic leaders and gets them to do exactly what they wanted to do all along.”
And…
“A lot of the large goals accomplished last year didn’t feel bipartisan to us,” said Michael Villines (R-Clovis), leader of the Assembly’s Republicans. “It just felt like we got steamrolled.”
Certainly, Republican support was scant among the three accomplishments the article cites as Arnold’s pillars of “post-partisanship”: “a multibillion-dollar public works project, a plan for cutting prescription drug prices and a program to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.”
But the state’s elected Democrats aren’t exactly doing a jig either.
Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland), who voted for the environmental bill last year, now says the market-based carbon-trading system the state adopted won’t do enough to curb global warming.
And…
On his recent trip to Washington, the governor met with the state’s congressional delegation to discuss ways to get more federal money for California and to urge members of both parties to work together…U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) said the meeting yielded little in the way of concrete accomplishment; she described it as more cosmetic than substantive.
In other words, despite the fact that Schwarzenegger plans to tour the country over the next year touting the unifying nature of “post-partisanship,” the governor has actually managed to alienate both Democrats AND Republicans.
So I guess the MSM deserves kudos for noticing and reporting what we’ve known for a while: that “post-partisanship” is merely Arnold v.3.0, a role he’s playing based not on some core principle of above-the-partisan-fray governance, but rather on political calculation.
national political analysts said Schwarzenegger’s style could be tough to export. Few Republicans elected in classic “red” states see the need to accommodate Democrats in ways that Schwarzenegger has felt necessary in his “blue” state.
“If you’re in a solid red state, I don’t think you have to do that,” said G. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
The key words in those paragraphs: “need” and “have to.” “Post-partisanship” IS politics, reflecting the political reality that governors of one party who run a state dominated by the other party have known forever. It’s just that no one before has so brazenly claimed it as his own and felt the need to brag about it.
But then again Arnold is unique; he knows how beneficial it is to one’s career when a sequel does better than the original.