Amazingly, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger still doesn’t get it.
Although his public opinion ratings will likely rebound a bit from
their all-time low of 40 percent in April, it’s doubtful they will
ever again approach the 70-plus percent levels of last fall and
winter.
Amazingly, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger still doesn’t get it. Although his public opinion ratings will likely rebound a bit from their all-time low of 40 percent in April, it’s doubtful they will ever again approach the 70-plus percent levels of last fall and winter.
One reason they won’t recover much: Schwarzenegger doesn’t understand why his public esteem dropped in the first place.
Plainly, he believes it happened because of the multi-million dollar ad campaign waged against him by police, fire and teachers unions who felt threatened by changes he sought to impose on their pension plans.
No doubt, this contributed to the Schwarzenegger slide. It doesn’t pay to make enemies of three of the most trusted professions in modern America. Sure, Schwarzenegger has backed off his pension “reform” proposal, using a claim that it was “poorly drafted” as an excuse. Still, he would be foolish to expect these public employees ever to trust him fully again.
But the pension fiasco was only a symptom of what’s gone wrong between Schwarzenegger and the voters of California. The fact that he could propose this month that all critical electrical energy and natural gas decisions be consolidated in his office is the most solid indicator the governor just doesn’t get it.
The energy consolidation plan bears strong resemblance to his earlier effort to “reform” state government by wiping out more than 100 state boards and commissions and personally taking over their powers. Schwarzenegger complained the boards were filled with old politicians collecting $100,000-plus salaries for doing little or nothing.
While it’s true that a few commissioners and board members get those large sinecures, the public quickly learned that most members of state boards get little more than carfare.
So this plan was quickly labeled a “power grab” and began losing support almost from the moment the governor presented it. He eventually had to back off, leaving almost all boards and commissions untouched. And his image suffered.
But the power grabber label stuck to the governor. When he began aggressively touting his desired pension changes, one accusation working against him was that this was yet another way he sought to take power for himself.
The same charge is now being hurled at his energy consolidation plan. This time, Schwarzenegger in the name of efficiency proposes to take all electric generation and natural gas facility siting and approval authority from the state Public Utilities Commission and hand it to a new state secretary of energy. That secretary would also chair the state Energy Commission, which now has only vague powers and mostly issues reports and studies.
While PUC commissioners serve five-year terms and cannot be fired by any governor, Energy Commission members and cabinet secretaries have no such protections. Governors can hire and fire them at will, so their decisions are really those of whoever is governor.
If this plan, now before the Little Hoover Commission and later to be considered by the Legislature, goes forward, it would be another way for Schwarzenegger to move California toward dependence on expensive foreign liquefied natural gas.
At least four proposals for LNG terminals are now active along the California coast, with the gas to be frozen into a liquid form in places like Australia, Indonesia and the Persian Gulf, then brought here in tankers and converted back to gaseous form.
Schwarzenegger’s brand new Energy Commission chairman Joe Desmond, previously the deputy resources secretary for energy and before that a board member of the National Association of Energy Companies, is an outspoken LNG advocate.
He was one of four top Schwarzenegger aides on an energy industry junket to the Far East and Australia last year, a trip formally sponsored by the pro-LNG California Foundation on the Environment and Energy. Schwarzenegger’s current resources secretary, Sunne Wright McPeak, was previously that group’s vice-chair and executives of Shell Oil, ChevronTexaco, Sempra Energy and the Australian energy giant BHP Billiton serve on its board. All those companies have plans to import LNG to California.
One way to get quick approvals for LNG terminals would be for the governor’s energy reorganization plan to go forward, with Desmond as the first energy secretary. Schwarzenegger could then lock Californians into high prices in perpetuity – without so much as a public hearing.
This plan is no more likely to prove popular than the rest of Schwarzenegger’s so-called reforms. But it was presented with the show-biz style grandeur that’s accompanied many other Schwarzenegger pronouncements, a type of hype that’s wearing thin for many voters.
This kind of clueless thumbing his nose at what’s been wrong with his approach demonstrates the governor has no clue why his popularity plummeted and may help ensure that his ratings stay low.
