Arnold Schwarzenegger ran as the guy who would unite Sacramento, the guy who, as a moderate and an outsider, was uniquely qualified to bridge the partisan divide to get things done for California. Arnold was touted by the Broders and the Brookses of the world as a paragon of post-partisanship but look at him now: Sacramento is more paralyzed than ever before; forget working with Democrats, Arnold can't even work with Republicans. He's become a cautionary tale.

But up until recently no one in the media seemed to get just what a failure of leadership Arnold represents. The irony is that with California's ridiculous rule that requires a 2/3 majority in both houses of the state legislature to raise revenues or pass a budget and the fact that Democrats come just a few seats shy of that threshold, a true consensus builder and a real maverick Republican in the governor's mansion might have actually exerted some leadership in Sacramento and gotten something done. Instead, Arnold has thumbed his nose at the Democratic majority trying to broker impossible compromises and has refused to stand up to the obstructionist Republican minority, which is holding the state hostage as Democrats try to hammer out a state budget that will somehow deal with the state's crippling $41 billion budget shortfall.

So it is with great relief that I find this New York Times article, which pretty much gets it right about Arnold:

The state of California -- its deficits ballooning, its lawmakers intransigent and its governor apparently free of allies or influence -- appears headed off the fiscal rails. [...]

The roots of California's inability to address its budget woes are statutory and political. The state, unlike most others, requires a two-thirds majority vote in the Legislature to pass budgets and tax increases. And its process for creating voter initiatives hamstrings the budget process by directing money for some programs while depriving others of cash.

In a Legislature dominated by Democrats, some of whom lean far to the left, leaders have been unable to gather enough support from Republican lawmakers, who tend on average to be more conservative than the majority of California's Republican voters and have unequivocally opposed all tax increases.

And then there is Governor Schwarzenegger, whose budget woes far outweigh those of his predecessor, Gray Davis, whom he drummed from office in a 2003 recall that stemmed from the state's fiscal problems at the time. The governor has failed to muster votes among lawmakers in his own party, whom he often opposes on ideological grounds, resulting in more scorn from Democrats.

On a related note, while I think Arnold has escaped much deserved blame for not leading California at a time when real leadership is desperately needed, it's enormously frustrating that the media tends to whitewash the blatant obstructionism of the Republican minority and fall back on "partisan bickering" as the culprit. So, I agree with Robert at Calitics, that George Skelton's L.A. Times column today calling them out is significant.

The math seems pretty simple. But apparently it's too rigorous for many Republican politicians.

To avoid raising taxes and still balance the books in Sacramento, you'd have to virtually shut down state government.

Some politicians are in denial. Some are demagoguing. Some are just ducking. Scared.

The scared are rather pathetic. Here are elected officeholders who represent 475,000 people in an average Assembly district -- 950,000 in a Senate district -- and they cower before conservative bloggers, radio talk entertainers and activists of a declining party.

Robert pulls no punches.

Regardless of the fate of this budget, it should now be clear to California that the Republican Party is a threat to our state's basic survival. The next move needs to be a systematic disempowerment of these terrorists. The 2/3 rule must be eliminated at the first available opportunity. And then we go after their seats - whether through a recall or a vote in 2010.

Hopefully this time, the media will not stand in the way of removing the last obstacles to economic recovery and a stable and effective government here in California.

As at the national level, we're seeing here in California that, contrary to the post-partisan boosterism of Arnold, Obama and the Villagers, that the marginalization of the obstructionist minority is the only path to progress.

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Gee, didn't see this coming. Greg Sargent at The Horse's Mouth brings us the results of a recent Gallup Poll, which find that, {gasp!}:

"The American public does not appear to believe it is important or necessary for an independent candidate outside of the traditional two major parties to step into the race in order to save the nation."

More specifically:

* A startling 84% of respondents think there's a candidate running who would make a "good president."

* Nearly three in four -- 72% -- say that the candidates are talking about issues they "really care about."

* A solid majority -- 58% -- feel that one more more candidates has come up with "good ideas for solving the country's problems," a finding that runs directly counter to Bloomberg's frequent and self-serving criticism of the other candidates.

The truth is, of course, we didn't need a Gallup Poll to tell us this. One need only to look at the record-setting crowds, amounts in political donations and number of primary votes that the Democratic candidates are inspiring this election season, which is in stark contrast to the fewer than 2,000 signatures DraftMichaelBloomberg.com's petition has elicited since the website went live one week ago.

One of my biggest problems with pundits' insistence that post-partisanship is the preferable path for the future of American politics is that these very same pundits sat idly by while Republicans used fierce partisanship to gain and wield power and now that they've lost power, suddenly the onus for civility and unity is on Democrats. As a moderate Republican friend told me once Democrats took over both houses of congress in 2006, "I hope the Democrats can work across party lines to unify the country." Are you kidding me? Anyone who voted for any Republican, whether for president or congress, has given up any right to wish for reconciliation, and so have the members of the media elite that enabled the rise of the worst. president. (and congress.) ever.

Another troubling aspect of the whole post-partisan ethos embodied by the Unity08 crowd is this idea that Democrats and Republicans are equally bad and equally to blame for the failures of Washington. There's absolutely no acknowledgment that it's Bush and the Republicans who have gleefully obstructed the change that America voted for in 2006; there's absolutely no acknowledgment that the ideas Americans are clamoring for are Democratic ones. All parties are not created equal.

It's for this same reason that I find Barack Obama's newest national ad so troubling. Certainly it's no secret that Obama has been a proponent of his own brand of post-partisanship, a sort of anti-partisanship, one might even say it's healthy, as it has brought new people into the political process and ultimately, into the Democratic Party. But even as he's made this unity appeal, he usually at least mentions he's a Democrat; over the course of his campaign, he's gotten much more explicit about that. Not so in this ad in which he seems to be avoiding the D-word as though it's toxic.

Those that do argue that this country is clamoring for a new politics that gets beyond the divisions of red and blue America might point to Barack Obama's incredible fundraising success and the excitement he's generated as proof that this post-partisan message is exactly what America is looking for; on the contrary, I would point to his losses in New Hampshire and Nevada as proof it's exactly what Democrats are NOT looking for (winning Democrats is the immediate goal here after all.) Calling the Republican Party "the party of ideas" and running an ad that runs away from his own party identification are of a piece and, if Obama does lose the nomination, this sort of messaging will largely be to blame. I don't begrudge Obama's unity message, I think it's inspiring and has genuinely excited people outside of the two party system, but I reject the idea that it must be done without stating plainly, as he did in the debate last night, what we all know to be true: one party is right and one party is wrong and it is our ideas that not only are right for America but are the ideas that voters are clamoring for. Wouldn't it be nice if his unity message simultaneously communicated this fact, maybe then he wouldn't be doing such a good job of losing the liberal vote, and, so it would seem, the nomination, to Hillary Clinton.

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