THE NEW YORK TIMES has been called the "best newspaper in America." Alas, today's 8,365 word magazine cover story, "Who Can Possibly Govern California?" is so-o-o bad. It's worst than celebrity fluff in People Magazine. Newsom's note-taking? Schwarzenegger's cigars? Brown's love for arugula? Whitman NOT owning a horse? My elementary school grandchildren could write a deeper analysis!
A few days ago, I read a blog post by Rita Hao titled "That Horrendous NYT Magazine Article About Our Governor's Race" in which Ms. Hao promised to: "read and summarize that ridiculous-looking article about the California gubernatorial race in the NY Times Magazine with the ludicrous picture of Gavin 'I made a mess on my couch' Newsom on it, so you don't have to."
Published in The New York Times, Sunday, July 5, 2009
Who Can Possibly Govern California?
By Mark Leibovich
I should have taken Rita Hao's offer, but my wife, Cathy Deppe, and I used to live in New York and reading the Sunday New York Times is a bad habit I have not been able to break. My God! Today's 8,365 word Sunday Magazine cover story by Mark Leibovich is s-o-o-o bad. Just goes to show our broken politics is not just about some bad Republican and Democratic politicians, but also how those politicians are depicted in today's celebrity tabloid media. And unfortunately, our national tabloid media evidently learned nothing from the rise and fall of George W. Bush.
Here are the highlights of Ms. Hao's summary:
Posted on SF Appeal Online Newspaper, July 2, 2009
That Horrendous NYT Magazine Article About Our Governor's Race
by Rita Hao
Gavin Newsom has a weird method of reading books.
- Gavin is using the word "audacity" to sound like Barack Obama.
- Schwarzenegger says "even me as a celebrity governor -- even with that, I can't penetrate through certain things."
- Meg Whitman was photographed with a rental horse for the cover of Fortune.
- Schwarzenegger has installed a tent so he can smoke his cigars.
- Jerry Brown loves arugula.
- Brown mixes up "Finding Nemo" and "Where's Waldo."
- Newsom talks up his Twitter feed and shows off his annotated Bible.
What is even more important and alarming is the fact that there is virtually no analysis of how California got into this mess. What is downright shocking are serious factual errors.
First, Leibovich write this on the recall election of 2003:
the last time real life overwhelmed the state’s ability to govern itself — that’s when voters recalled their governor, Gray Davis, and once again looked beyond "reality," to Hollywood, for their next savior, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Fair enough, but then he goes on to describe our budget problems this way:
When the economy is booming, the stock market soaring and jobs abundant, relying on income taxes is not a problem. That was the case in the years after Schwarzenegger first became governor in 2003, and he was hailed as a "postpartisan" leader who cut taxes and appealed to Democrats by aggressively tackling issues like global warming. But in today’s cratering economy — in which California faces a decline in personal income for the first time since 1938 and unemployment sits at 11.5 percent — the state’s coffers have shriveled up quickly, along with the governor’s popularity.
The California economy was never "booming" and the stock market was never "soaring" during the Schwarzenegger regime. Leibovich is indulging the Republican-friendly canard that the Bush years were "not so bad" and Schwarzenegger was okay until the current "crisis" was suddenly upon us. In point of fact, "The System" was already busted in 2003, which is why Democratic Gov. Gray Davis faced the recall in the first place.
On the one hand, Leibovich trots out the cliché that California's political problems derive from excessive "partisanship" and so-called liberal versus so-called conservative "ideological" warfare:
Complicating matters further, the major parties in California are both effectively controlled by their most partisan elements, a byproduct of gerrymandered voting districts that force lawmakers to appeal to their ideological bases. . . the two parties are largely controlled by what Bruce Cain at Berkeley calls "the Taliban." The result? Gridlock in Sacramento, a standoff between the parties of "no more taxes" (Republicans) and "no more cuts" (Democrats).
But wait! Notwithstanding the both Republicans and Democrats are equally "polarized" by the "Taliban" wind of each party, there is this curious bipartisan clubbiness among the fraternity of rich aristocrats dying to be the next governor.
There is some consensus among people in both parties that Schwarzenegger has been genuine in his commitment to changing the system, particularly as it relates to fiscal policy. "He has done a very good job of getting the reform movement started," Poizner told me. Likewise, many Democrats say the governor has been more than sincere in his attempts to work with them (even hiring one of their own as his chief of staff). For the most part, though, Schwarzenegger is held up as the emblem of how impossible the job has become. He seemed to come in with every advantage — no debts to special interests, a nonideological orientation and a big, charismatic personality. "To see that he’s incapable of pulling this thing off suggests that you have a systemic problem, a governance problem," Newsom told me.
It was well known throughout the 2003 recall election that Schwarzenegger was totally in the pocket of California business interests, including Enron and the energy companies that systematically looted California (doesn't anybody remember the rolling blackouts and huge rate hikes from our phony "energy crisis" of 2001?). Schwarzenegger's only passions in 2003 were taxes and "the business climate" in California. But those things do not count as "ideology" and "special interest."
Nowadays, everybody decries excessive "partisanship." So, how exactly did these voting districts become gerrymandered? None dare say because it is not "politically correct" to directly address our sick, race-based, class-based Republican versus Democratic politics. As an African-American living in inner-city L.A. I am getting sick and tired of the constant insinuation that people of color serving in the state legislature are "extremists" (you can count the Republican legislators who are people of color on your fingers). Is Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, who happens to be the assembly member from my 4th AD in Los Angeles, a leader of the "Taliban?" If somebody thinks so, then as a tax-paying voter in the 47th AD, I'd sure like to know about it. Maybe the pundits do not cite examples of this ideology-driven hyper-partisanship of a leader like Karen Bass because there are none.
When MSM pundits write about the need for "centrist" and "moderate" and "less partisan" it always comes out sounding like a "need" for somebody like... Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But we've seen this movie before.