Today’s Guest Commentary is penned by Jeff Miller, the Chairman of the Riverside County Republican Party. Miller flew up to Sacramento on Friday and attended the inauguration of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has written this piece, after reflected on the Governor’s remarks…
Remember the Californian Dream that needed so much protecting just three months ago?
That dream where solitary visionaries, like Disney, DeMille, Hewlett and Packard, and Jobs & Wozniak, could work through the night in a garage and create sensational things that could best be summed up by B.C. Forbes who long ago stated, “The purpose of capitalism is not to create a pile of wealth, but a pile of happiness.”
Remember that that dream was in such danger that the biggest gubernatorial campaign ever imagined was undertaken just to save it?
After some really great pomp, humor, dancing kids, and military bands had had their say at Friday’s inaugural, Governor Schwarzenegger had the state’s attention with what he had to say.
And when our state is celebrating the 31st year of our highly successful evisceration of the state’s largest employers – small businesses (read – full fledge believers in the California dream) the best message man in post-partisan California history was off message.
Nothing about the dream.
Unless your dream is the DMV handling health care for your child, or an equivalent bureaucracy determining whether or not your fees are high enough to guarantee clean air you didn’t hear a word.
Did an air quality management district bring Disney to California? Did employer paid health care attract DeMille from New York? Or the Yahoo or Google guys from Stanford into business? Did these visionaries require vast new government agencies and subsidies so that they could one day build sensational amounts of happiness so vast that entire businesses, like web logs, could be built on them?
It recently took CalTrans three months to decide it would only take a year to paint a series of lines approximately five inches by three feet on the 91 for a quarter mile in Corona that will literally cut the commute time of mothers and fathers by fifteen minutes DAILY. So that means it took trained engineers in the Party of California 90 days to figure out how to in just one year coordinate cones and a couple of signs while at the same time applying maybe 400 square feet of phosphorescent white paint with some bots dots to an unused portion of existing road. How many kids in my city have to dream for another year that their parents can see them make the clutch play at Wednesday night’s game while CalTrans makes sure it got the appropriate bristle tensile strength for its paint brushes?
We’ll never know because the Party of California has a bigger agenda than dreams.
Remember those halcyon days of the pre-post partisanship? Like say October 2006, when we were all protecting the California dream? Remember, when you could close your eyes and visualize that glorious morning when we could go to the Sacramento Municipal Auditorium to see Governor Schwarzenegger sworn in on a stage populated by Dick Ackerman, Mike Villines, Pete Wilson, Gayle Wilson, Steve Poizner, and oh say, thirty Democrats to hear about the California dream which creates happiness for everybody everywhere.
Gosh, those were great days weren’t they. I know the Governor has lots of great days in him and Sacramento over the last two was very exciting. I was lucky enough to spend hours with elected and business leaders alike, who all believe like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and John Kennedy did in partisanship as the ballast and keel on the ship of state, while enterprise and economic self determination are the sails, tack, timber, and crew of that ship.
Sacramento can barely govern, as Willie Brown so humorously pointed out. If you can’t govern, you probably shouldn’t try and dream – otherwise you will start to do things like forget what motivated people to have faith in you in the first place.
In his speech, Governor Schwarzenegger spoke of 2005 when in his words, he lost his initial vision and focused narrowly on partisan solutions.
The real shame of the inaugural is that it is so clear that the Governor, like in 2005, forgot to talk about what got him elected in the first place – that wonderful California dream. If he did that, Speaker Nunez probably wouldn’t have enjoyed Jennifer Holliday singing “I’m Not Going Anywhere” nearly as much but maybe a twelve year old second baseman in Corona wouldn’t have to wait another year for his parents to see him turn a double play.
The shining city on the hill was so powerful for President Reagan because it wasn’t a prop or device. It was the key allegory for his goals for America. It was an awe inspiring way to bring partisanship to heel if necessary because his clear statement of his vision gave him a well spring of trust, even when his individual policy steps may have strayed from popular opinion.
The California Dream has that power for Schwarzenegger. He needs to get back to selling that dream to the people who believe in it most – the small business employees and employers like myself that will be killed by almost any employer paid health care plan.
Getting back to the Dream will require the Governor to start to think like a business owner again – which history shows is increasingly difficult for many after three years of legislative fights.
But maybe if he pauses one morning at the Hyatt and notices the gigantic towering burr oak that obscures his view of the Capitol just as it has for nearly one hundred years despite global warming, perhaps the Austrian Oak will put our Dream of pursuing happiness by the diesel truckload back on his agenda.
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