Nowhere to hide: Minutemen to sponsor a ballot initiativeI'm starting to see some convergence between the
Governor's love of ballot initiatives and his recent praise for the white supremacist vigilante group, the Minutemen.
Here's the
logic:
1) The Governor is losing support, as evidenced by a dramatic drop in approval polls. The greatest shift is among moderates. 2) Governor Pete Wilson, in trouble at the end of his own first term, exploited the "immigrant problem" to garner support in the center and right, and successfully made it over the hump to a second term in office. 3) Schwarzenegger must be doing the same thing. He's got to be increasingly aware that he's going to get pummeled on the issues — that his "leadership" style is so detail-poor that he's likely to keep fucking up the way he did on pensions — so he's creating a non-issue issue to help him score points by targeting the weakest, least popular Californians. This all started coming together for me when I learned that the Minutemen — an ad hoc border patrol militia comprising know-nothing conservatives, gun nuts, and National Alliance members — were sponsoring their own ballot initiative. (For in-depth explication of the Minutemen, follow the links from this article, especially the ones to Orcinus postings). California state-run Mexico border patrol proposed (Reuters) Saying the U.S. government has failed to secure the border with Mexico, California activists who helped recall former Gov. Gray Davis said on Thursday they would promote a ballot measure calling for the state to fund its own border patrol. Assuming that the Minutemen can find enough Californians small-minded and -hearted enough to sign their petitions (unfortunately a safe assumption), the measure would appear on the June 2006 ballot. Here's where Schwarzenegger comes in. In exactly the same way that George W. Bush's re-election campaign benefited from anti-gay voter initiatives on state ballots around the country, Arnold's own pet initiatives (redistricting, pension reform, tenure, autopilot budget cuts) would benefit from an anti-immigrant initiative that shared space on the same ballot. This would be true passively, even if the Governor didn't lift a finger, since the folks who would be mobilized by the Minutemen initiative would break Republican. It would be even more true if the Governor had already whipped up Californians into an anti-immigrant fervor, and associated himself with the Minutemen by explicit endorsement. Which process, I'm sad to say, has already started. Obviously, this won't help if Schwarzenegger's pet projects get their own special election this fall, but as we've pointed out before, that's far from clear: While most of the initiatives will probably qualify for the ballot, the Governor may still reach a compromise with legislators, avoiding the "necessity" of a special election — in which case some of the Governor's more dearly held but less time-sensitive measures may end up on the June 2006 ballot, alongside the Minutemen's California Border Police Act. And the folks who are scared to death of the illegals — of the stooped-over strawberry pickers and humble sanitation workers and sun-wrinkled gardeners who came here for a scrap of a better life, and who incidentally are essential to our economy — will turn out in droves to support the Minutemen and their Governor. It might be a small effect in absolute terms, but meanwhile, Democrats (and the merely sane) don't seem to have any counterbalancing force: Largely because of the distaste for ballot initiatives (which are tightly associated in many Democrats' minds with the Republican Governor), we're not thinking of ways to put our own hot-button issues on the ballot in a way that could rally our own base. And that could be a problem. Posted: Tue - May 10, 2005 at 08:22 AM | Category: | | | |
|
Quick Links
Search
Related topics
Categories
Archives
Calendar
XML/RSS Feed
Blogroll
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category: Published On: Jul 23, 2006 02:49 PM |
||||||||||||||