My inaugural post and Schwarzenegger's last year

The Governor of California, who is still Arnold Schwarzenegger (no, this hasn’t all been a dream), delivered his final State of the State address today. My first impression was that the man really is an excellent public speaker – whatever you may think of his politics, his intellect, or his ability to govern a nation-state of 39 million people, any politician alive would be jealous of Arnold’s ability to deliver a speech and connect with an audience. (This owes a lot, no doubt, to his training as an actor; our last actor-governor, Ronald Reagan, turns out to have been a hell of a speechmaker also, even if that’s just about the only thing he was good at.)

Having said that, though, I’d like to focus on one of the more off-putting elements of the speech – the Governator’s wrongheaded attack on the healthcare reform proposals currently being debated by the Democrats in Congress. (I say “debated by the Democrats” because the Republicans have clearly given up on actually debating the merits of the proposal, and at this point are simply trying to obstruct it.) You know, the one that’s about to pass and make it to the president’s desk and get signed into law, probably sometime in the next month or so.

Why is Arnold even wasting his breath on this? He calls the bill “a trough of bribes, deals and loopholes,” and insists that California’s congressional delegation either vote against the bill or fight to load it up with pork and “sweetheart deals” for California just like Ben Nelson did for Nebraska. News flash, Governor: all Democrats representing California in Congress (including our two Senators) are pretty certain to vote for the final healthcare bill, whatever it looks like; all Republicans are certain to vote against it, no matter what. Those “sweetheart deals” you’re railing against were put in there to guarantee the votes of red-state senators like Nelson and Mary Landrieu, who have to go home to constituencies where less than four out of every 10 voters went for Obama in 2008 and explain their vote.

Neither Barbara Boxer nor Dianne Feinstein would be able to secure similar perks for California because neither of them has the political capital to hold their vote on this bill hostage until they get what they want, like red-state Dems do. Boxer, Feinstein, and most of our House Democrats (especially Speaker Pelosi) all have a vested interest in this bill, their president, and their party succeeding; Ben Nelson doesn’t, really. He just has an interest in Ben Nelson succeeding.

Having said all of that, the Governor was absolutely right to insist that, if the bill will place new mandates on California (or any other state, for that matter), the federal government should fully fund those mandates. And if Boxer, Feinstein, or Pelosi fail to fight for even that much, then none of them is worthy of representing California in Washington.

I look forward to writing more about the healthcare bill later, particularly about how it affects California…