Seems to be that it would be a pretty big honor, at the relatively young age of 27, to be named associate deputy director of communications in the Office of the Governor.  And I am sure that in the five or so months that Amanda Fulkerson has worked with communications veterans like Adam Mendelsohn and Aaron McLear (Aaron, you’ve come a long way from working for the RNC), she has learned a tremendous amount in what amounts to a ‘trial by fire’ job as Arnold Schwarzenegger draws media coverage from all around the world, on a constant basis.

Naturally, in the course of doing her job (which I hear from folks she does very well), she has a responsibility to work with third-party messaging (that is to get ‘strategic partners’ on efforts by the Governor to weigh in publicly, on message, in support of the Governor’s agenda, and in support of the Governor).  That said, you have to wonder what her reaction was when Mendolsohn and McLear, stalwart Republicans both, pulled Amanda aside and said, we want you to go out to some of the Governor’s loyal GOP appointees out there and do like you do with our other efforts, get them talking points, but this time, we need to attack Senate Republicans, who are digging in because they want to lower spending in the California budget. 

I’m sure they all felt a little guilty, since, of course, I am quite certain that all three of them feel that state spending is way out of control.  Nevertheless, as professionals, it’s not their personal beliefs that matter now.  Undoubtedly Arnold’s Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy (the former Executive Director of the California Democratic Party), trying to get a little cute, asked if we couldn’t get Republicans to beat up on Republicans (kind of a win-win for her, no?).  So, Team Arnold goes into their action-mode, and what do we get?
 
While I couldn’t tell you exactly how things went down inside of the Governor’s office that resulted in this latest odd turn in the politics of a state budget, the scenario I outlined above is quite probable.
 
That said, you want to assume that the Governor himself was not consulted on such a strategy…  "Governor, we want to go ahead and see if we can get some of our Republican supports to attack Republicans in the legislators for wanting a budget that spends less…"
 
Anyways, it is, of course, very disappointing.  We should all hope that the Governor in the solitude of his office would be looking at that bust of Ronald Reagan, and saying "God Bless those principled men in the Senate" — after all, as someone who has stated publicly his affection for the late Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, the Governor knows how terribly big and bloated state government has become.  Just because he has changed his tactics (for the worse) since his 2005 special election defeat doesn’t mean that he has changed his opinion about what he would do with state government if he had the votes.
 
That said, it is totally disappointing that his administration would engage in using GOP volunteers to lobby Senate Republicans to, in essence, relent in a strong battle to curb deficit spending in this budget, and reduce deficits in future budgets.
 
I guess on a final note, I would also wonder a bit about Republican volunteers who would actually be willing to go along with this.  I remember back in the day, when I would debate with my friend Roman Buhler about divisions in the GOP — when "moderate" was defined by him as "fiscally conservative, socially moderate."  I wonder how he would define moderate these days?  Someone who lobbies Republican legisators to not fight for more fiscal prudence is somewhere substantially to the left of Roman.  It’s like I told former Governor Pete Wilson at a gala event for the Reagan Library Foundation a few months ago: these days he’s starting to look like Attila the Hun.
 
Below is a bit of the embarrassing e-mail chain between Amanda in the Governor’s office, and Noel Knight, who identifies himself as a member of the State GOP Platform Committee (you wonder if he will support a plank for raising taxes for healthcare in the GOP platform):

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.