‘Unfortunately, partisan politics has immobilized Washington,” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told Time magazine in 2007. Bloomberg, according to Michael Grunwald’s cover story, was the diminutive half of a dynamic duo revolutionizing American politics. The other partner: California’s then-still-shiny governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Together, they were “The New Action Heroes” who, according to Grunwald, were “doing big things that Washington has failed to do.”
The article was mostly a clever way to slap George W. Bush. But there are still important lessons to be learned, particularly as the Big Apple remains immobilized not by partisan politics but by Bloomberg’s arrogance. Hizzoner was more concerned with getting salt off of New Yorkers’ plates than he was with getting it on the snow clogging their streets.
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“The Governator,” meanwhile, leaves California $28 billion in the hole, his former presidential ambitions an absurd joke and the state’s GOP in tatters.
Both Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg were deemed heroic for abandoning ideology for pragmatism. Bloomberg has made this something of a crusade. He helped launch the laughingstock group No Labels, which seeks to get the “politics out of problem-solving.”
But people disagree about how to solve problems, and they may disagree about what is a problem in the first place. In a democratic republic, we hash out these disagreements through this thing called “politics.” Getting politics out of problem-solving is synonymous with getting democracy out of politics.
The same goes for ideology. If you agree with a solution, it doesn’t seem ideological. But if you disagree with the proposed solution (or that there’s a problem at all), the remedy might look very ideological indeed. Given Time’s political agenda, it saw Schwarzenegger’s decision to spend his political energies on the Global Warming Solutions Act as an exercise in “pragmatism.”
This was ludicrous because California can no more do anything substantive about climate change than it can halt Iran’s nuclear program.
In other words, even if you’re on the climate-change bandwagon, couldn’t you say that the governor of the state with the nation’s worst credit rating, a budget crisis more unbelievable than the plot of Twins, a cratering manufacturing base, and famously dysfunctional schools was making an ideologically blinkered decision to make global warming a priority, particularly given that the benefits of the law for California — and the world — will be somewhere between symbolic and trivial, while the costs will probably be huge?
Meanwhile, Bloomberg, who before snowmageddon reportedly took seriously the idea of being carried to the Oval Office by a groundswell of support from Americans who don’t believe in labels, thinks it’s not ideological to dedicate much of his mayoralty to fighting global warming by choking the streets with bike lanes and hybrid taxis.
The point isn’t to argue with every one of the Dysfunctional Duo’s decisions or priorities. They didn’t get everything wrong, and things in NYC and California might have been even worse with different men at the helms. The point is that ideology is in the eye of the beholder and that pursuing nonpartisanship for its own sake isn’t necessarily courageous or wise. Sometimes what seems visionary to Time magazine is nothing more than craven fad-following.
It is true that some serious problems are fairly free of partisan wrangling. But that doesn’t mean they are free of politics. It means that there is such an overwhelming political consensus that nobody disputes what should be done (even if they might fight over how, or how much to pay for it). We all agree, for example, that firefighters should fight fires and that police should fight crime.
Oh, and New Yorkers believe that one of the mayor’s top responsibilities is to make sure the snow is cleared so ambulances can reach those in need and so everyone can get to work. Mayors who spend more energy fighting “labels” in our politics than clearing the snow are rewarded with some labels too colorful for a conservative website. But “ideologue” works as a substitute.
Nice job, Jonah. You rolled a strike. Let me be the first one to blow a nice big raspberry at anyone who dares tell you your toe was over the line on the Schwarzenegger thing.
I think the answer to the whole Schwarzenegger presidency thing is that there was a time when he was so overwhelmingly popular that it was thinkable that he might drive a constitutional amendment. I said "thinkable", not "realistic"...it was never going to happen no matter how popular he was.
Your "toe" was over the line from the get-go. It was the massive economic downturn and California's weird budgeting laws (with an assist from his predecessors incestuous love affair with the unions) that has so badly damaged California, not his pragmatism.
Still, the whole "presidential ambition" thing was a pretty silly mistake.
Of course Demolition Man predicted the Schwarzenegger presidency (and constitutional amendment) long before he entered politics.
And while I do think Shwarzenegger was largely neutral, two things I remember him for is supporting a proposition to go three billion dollars further into debt in order to finance embryonic stem cell research (in response to Bush's refusal to spend federal money on that) and of course his support for this global warming economy crippler (which Californians just voted to keep a couple months ago). Those definitely hurt the economy, even if they didn't single-handedly cripple it. Would they have happened without him? Maybe, but the governor shouldn't help break the economy (and maybe not if he was solidly against them). Jonah's point about Schwarzenegger is well taken (and his larger point).
The issue isn't whether California's issues were Ahnold's fault or not, the issue is whether or not he did enough to solve them.
Doesn't matter where California's problems came from. Yes, California's budget mess was inherited from Gray Davis, but Schwarzenegger was elected to deal with that mess. Likewise, the economic downturn wasn't his fault, but helping California through it was his responsibility. He failed on both those counts.
Give Bloomberg a break, already. It's not as if we can just have city plows burning all that diesel and spewing all that pollution while spreading contraband salt all over the streets. The next thing you know, depraved New Yorkers will be crouching behind parked cars under broken street lamps, scraping halite crystals into old Chinese food containers and hiding it in their sugar bowls.
In speaking of Time magazine, I believe Jonah should have used the word "usually" as opposed to "sometimes." "Visionary" to Time is just a repetition of Leftist dogma.
Those of us of a middle age are Greg LeMond fans. Eddy Merx was a bit before our time--and he wasn't televised. As to playing wiffle ball, it seems the city has plenty of grassy parks, where I don't ride my bike. What was your point?
I was trying to make a bit of a funny. But in the name of alternative transportation we are setting aside a lot of transportation infrastructure to an activity that outside of Manhattan and Brooklyn is essentially a sport and a hobby.
In fairness to Arnold, those of us who lived here for his entire governorship remember that he initially took the fight right where it needed to go (public sector unions) and got his hat handed to him by the buffoonish CA electorate.
I've always been of the opinion that once he realized we couldn't even be convinced to vote to save ourselves from Chapter 11 he kind of gave up and spent the remainder of his time hopping from one photo op to the next.
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