Politics Truth Today
posted by on November 11 at 10:14 AM
From the LA Times.
This is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger expressing a truth (the truth here being a match between what he is saying and what he is feeling):
“I think it’s good that there are new ideas and new blood, because Washington was stuck,” the governor said after a meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox at Los Pinos, Mexico’s equivalent of the White House. “They could not move forward. Not much was accomplished. I think it was terrible…So I think the people have spoken in America, all over the United States,” the governor told a roomful of California and Mexican journalists. “And they’ve sent a very clear message to Washington: We are not happy about the way things were going. And I think we want to see a new way of going, and we want to see bipartisanship.”
This is the governor’s communication director, Adam Mendelsohn, dislocating the match between what the governor said and what the governor feels:
After the governor spoke, his communications director, Adam Mendelsohn, hastened to tell reporters that Schwarzenegger was not saying he was necessarily pleased to see Congress under Democratic control. Rather, he was making the point that “it’s good there is an infusion of new ideas and desire for bipartisanship…”
But it all comes down to this: For reasons that have nothing to do with reality, Schwarzenegger conintues to call himself a Republican.
At least in California he's a bit to the right of many democrats. He's a lot more to the center than many of the more rabid Repugs though, so he can pull down a lot of votes, particularly because his moderate drive gives him the ability to work with democrats, and people appreciate that.
I'm about as democratic as you can get. In Washington I can't remember the last time I voted for a Republican -- Eikenberry, I think, when he was running for AG (but I was an Assistant AG at the time, and Eikenberry was scrupulously nonpartisan in that position.) I was happy to vote for Arnold in CA even though he was not as good on LGBT issues as we had hoped, because I thought he'd simply be more effective overall than Phil Angelides ever could be.
The sad point is that the "communications director" muddied the waters even more with his hyperboles.
One can identify as a Republican in practice without swearing loyalty to the corrupted GOP.
It's just that many find it hard to separate their political beliefs from the illicit practices of their party.
I see this statement as AHHHNOLD at least trying to do so.
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