Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Brown likely to retain most of Schwarzenegger's administration

"Meet the new boss.  Same as the old boss." 
-- The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"
November 17, 2010

Throughout his campaign for governor, Jerry Brown suggested that the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had fallen short, going so far as to ridicule Schwarzenegger in campaign advertisements and repeatedly assert that the movie star was in over his head in Sacramento.

Politics aside, however, Brown and Schwarzenegger had relatively good relations. And now that Brown is about to assume office, the 72-year old Democrat appears likely to keep much of his predecessor's administration intact for some time.

Brown advisors say the governor-elect is focused on the budget; filling a couple of thousand government posts with new faces is not his priority now, they say. Even on financial matters, Brown may not bring in a new top-level advisor. He has praised Schwarzenegger's budget director, who people close to the transition say may be invited to keep the job.

Brown had consulted the budget director, Ana Matosantos, for insight on state fiscal matters during the campaign. At one point he showed up at her office unannounced and without any entourage, and the two sat down and drilled deep into budget policy.

Matosantos fits the profile of some of Brown's top appointees in the attorney general's office: Wonky, apolitical and a workaholic. One of those appointees, Jim Humes, is spearheading Brown's transition. Few in the Capitol know anything about him other than that he tries to steer clear of politics.

Another prominent official who could easily hold over would be one of the state's top environmental regulators, Schwarzenegger appointee Mary Nichols, who heads the Air Resources Board. She worked for Brown when he was governor three decades ago.

The governor-elect returned to the Capitol on Tuesday after a weeklong vacation to hold meetings with legislators and prepare to take on a budget deficit that has swollen to more than $25 billion — or roughly 29% of this year's general fund. He and his advisors provided few details about his plans for the transition or closing the budget gap. But they did make clear that Brown's first order of business is not to shake up the administration.

A go-slow approach is consistent with how Brown managed after he was elected attorney general four years ago, opting to promote from within instead of cleaning house.

"If people are doing a good job and they are on the same wavelength, he'll be inclined to keep them," said Tom Quinn, a longtime Brown friend and advisor who is helping manage the transition.

Quinn said the transition team received a briefing from Schwarzenegger's chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, on which officials want to stay in government. Kennedy declined to comment on who they are. But Schwarzenegger administration officials anticipate that many department heads will stay put.

Quinn said Brown plans to meet with department heads one-on-one as his team culls through the transition books each department and agency has prepared.

Brown, however, remains unpredictable.

His transition team is refusing to say who he is meeting with while in Sacramento. On Tuesday, they made him available only briefly for a photo op where he took just three questions from reporters.

The transition team is barricaded inside one of the most secure public buildings in all of California, the Department of Justice edifice in downtown Sacramento. Its lobby is protected by bulletproof glass and security guards; visitors must scan their driver's licenses to enter.

Brown spokesman Sterling Clifford refused to offer details about Brown's other meetings Tuesday, saying only that he met with "lawmakers, administration officials and people outside of government."

Brown advisors say the location was picked to save taxpayers the expense of renting office space for the transition. But it also allows the team to stay walled off from the press.

At the photo op, Brown listened as Jeannie Oropeza, Schwarzenegger's budget manager for education issues, walked through portions of the budget for the state's public university systems.

Joining Brown was his campaign manager, Steve Glazer; Quinn, who ran Brown's first campaign for governor; and education consultant John Mockler. Mockler has longtime ties to the California Teachers Assn. Perhaps as important, he was the author of Proposition 98, the 1988 ballot measure that guarantees minimum funding levels for California public schools, and is widely viewed as one of the few people in Sacramento who thoroughly understands the workings of the state's convoluted system of education funding, under which roughly 40 cents of each general-fund dollar goes to education.

Brown said it was too early to say how much of the Schwarzenegger administration he would keep intact. "This is Day 1," he said. "I'm not going to decide anything until I get a better understanding of what the possibilities are."

One area where Brown seems to be taking a markedly different approach than Schwarzenegger is labor relations. He has taken on as an advisor Marty Morgenstern, who served as director of the Department of Personnel Administration under Brown three decades ago. Morgenstern held the post under former Gov. 
Gray Davis and helped negotiate some of the lucrative contracts for state workers that Schwarzenegger spent most of his administration trying to unwind.

Morgenstern said Brown approached him the day after the election and asked him to examine the state's labor-related agencies. "I'm nosing about seeing how deep this hole we're in is, trying to make sure he'll be presented with all the facts and know where all the land mines are when he takes over," Morgenstern said.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Obama Without Tears

William Greider

Given the election results, the question Barack Obama has to decide for himself is whether he really wants to be president in the fullest sense. Not a moderator for earnest policy discussions. Not the national cheerleader for hope. Not the worthy visionary describing a distant future. Those qualities are elements in any successful presidency, and Obama applies them with admirable skill and seriousness.
What's missing with this president is power—a strong grasp of the powers he possesses and the willingness to govern the country with them. During the past two years, this missing quality has been consistently obvious in his rhetoric and substantive policy positions. There is a cloying Boy Scout quality in his style of leadership—the troop leader urging boys to work together on their merit badges—and none of the pigheaded stubbornness of his "I am the decider" predecessor, nor the hard steel of Lyndon Johnson or the guile of Richard Nixon.
Obama has patience and the self-confidence not to insist that his solution is the best and only one. On many vital questions, he went so far as to not even say what his solution was. Such a governing style is too nice for real-life politics, where Boy Scouts get their heads handed to them.
Some politicians may enjoy Obama's generous spirit, but many despise him for it. Washington always takes the measure of a new president and tests him early on. Congress and the surrounding power centers, swiftly reading weakness in this president, decided they would fill the vacuum Obama left for them.
A friend and longtime warrior for liberal reforms described what unfolded in harsh but accurate terms: "First he was rolled by the bankers, then he was rolled by the generals, then he was rolled by the Blue Dogs and other Democrats who had no interest in going along with what he proposed." Obama seemed exceedingly tolerant of resisting forces and even cooperated with them. Or maybe he privately agreed with them. He never made it clear.
Perhaps because he was young and relatively inexperienced, Obama surrounded himself with savvy veterans of Washington's inside baseball. He inherited his economic advisers from Robert Rubin, his political team from former Senate leader Tom Daschle and center-right Clintonistas like Rahm Emanuel. Together with old friends from the academy, the administration was overstaffed with intellectual abstraction and short on street-smart politicians, especially any harboring liberal instincts. That pretty much ruled out the "change" many voters had expected. It produced a tone-deaf seminar of policy thinkers in which Obama assumed he was hearing all sides.
Republicans, who are masters of deceptive marketing, seized on Obama's most appealing qualities and turned them upside down. Their propaganda cast him not as soft but as a power-mad (black) leftist, destroying democracy with socialist schemes. The portrait was so ludicrous and mendacious, the president's party hardly bothered to respond. Egged on by the Republican Party and Fox News, right-wing frothers conjured sicko fantasies and extreme accusations: the president is not only a black man (bad enough for the party of the white South); he is not even American. The vindictive GOP strategy is racial McCarthyism, demonizing this honorable man as an alien threat, just as cold war Republicans depicted left-liberal Democrats as commie sympathizers.
Even Obama supporters began to ask, Where is the fight in the man? Some critics blame a lack of courage, but that neglects the extraordinary nerve Obama displayed in his rise to the White House—a young black man with an unusual name and limited experience who triumphed through his audacity. Obama's governing style is a function of his biography—a man who grew up always in the middle, both black and white. He succeeded by learning rare skills, the ability to bridge different worlds comfortably and draw people together across racial, political and intellectual divides. He learned to charm and disarm, not to smash and conquer.
For the first time in his life, those qualities seem to have failed him. Indeed, he may have been misled by his high regard for his own talents. This is really his first encounter with devastating political defeat. The question now is, What will he learn from his "shellacking"? Possibly not much, since it is always very hard to rethink and adjust in midstream. But remember, this man is an unusually observant politician with a great thirst for self-reflection. One can reasonably hope that as he absorbs the hard knocks, he will make calculated changes in how he governs.
Bluntly put, Obama needs to learn hardball. People saw this in him when he fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and many of us yearn to see more. If he absorbs the lesson of power, he will accept that sometimes in politics you can't split the difference or round off sharp edges. He has to push back aggressively and stand his ground, more like those ruthless opponents trying to bury him. If Congress won't act, the president will. But first he has to switch from cheerleading to honest talk. Tell people what the nation really needs, what Republicans intend to sabotage. In a political street fight, you've got to hit back.
Only Obama can decide this about himself, but others can influence the outcome by surrounding him with tough love and new circumstances created by their own direct actions. It does not help Obama to keep telling him he did great but the people misunderstood him. He did lousy, not great, and in many governing dimensions people understood his failures clearly enough. They knew he gave tons of money to bankers and demanded nothing in return. They knew he thought the economy was in recovery. They couldn't believe this intelligent man was that clueless.
Popular forces can blow away the fuzziness. They can mobilize to demonstrate visible support for the president's loftier goals and to warn him off the temptation to pursue a Clintonesque appeasement of the right. Given the fragile status of his presidency, Obama needs to know that caving in is sure to encourage enemies and drive off disheartened supporters. People should, likewise, call out the president's enemies and attack them with the harshness that's out of character for him. The racial McCarthyism of the GOP establishment is a good place to start.
People who still have great hope for Obama can help revive his presidency, but only if they toughen up themselves. Stop holding his hand (he's an adult) and start building a people's agenda that compels the president to change his. Obama won't like this at first—his own supporters talking back—but he can learn to draw strength from their courage. If people fail to step up with their own message, the president will likely fail with his.