{"id":10943,"date":"2010-01-17T17:59:21","date_gmt":"2010-01-17T17:59:21","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-01-17T18:00:19","modified_gmt":"2010-01-17T18:00:19","slug":"susan-kennedy-and-the-failure-of-corporate-centrism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2010\/01\/17\/susan-kennedy-and-the-failure-of-corporate-centrism\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Kennedy and the Failure of Corporate Centrism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several things stood out to me in the LA Times’ long profile of Susan Kennedy<\/a>, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff. The article turns on this basic question:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, critics ask whether the shortcomings of Davis and Schwarzenegger reflect entirely on them, or also on her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Some quotes from the article illustrate Kennedy’s approach to politics, and should help us understand why she is a failure:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

“I thought what they were doing was unconscionable. And so I really lost faith.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several things stood out to me in the LA Times’ long profile of Susan Kennedy<\/a>, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff. The article turns on this basic question:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, critics ask whether the shortcomings of Davis and Schwarzenegger reflect entirely on them, or also on her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Some quotes from the article illustrate Kennedy’s approach to politics, and should help us understand why she is a failure:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

“I thought what they were doing was unconscionable. And so I really lost faith.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2Qv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}