An unlikely pair

Susan Kennedy held a meeting with advisers to discuss the state's budget crisis in the governor's smoking tent at California's capitol in mid-June.
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More from Gov. Schwarzenegger about Ms. Kennedy's work in the capital.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his effort to end the partisan bickering that is pushing California to the brink of insolvency, is deploying Susan Kennedy, his cigar-smoking, paintball-playing Democratic chief of staff, to get the job done.

The 48-year-old Ms. Kennedy has built a reputation as a pragmatic leader equally inclined to work with -- and lambaste -- lawmakers from both parties. Such a regard would have been unthinkable five years ago, when Republicans viewed her as a stereotypical Democrat -- a former director of the state party and top aide to Gov. Gray Davis who lives in famously liberal Marin County with her partner.

Unlikely allies, yet Arnold is a pragmatist, as she clearly is, too.

She didn't always have a cordial relationship with Republicans, the governor included. When Mr. Schwarzenegger won the 2003 recall election -- ousting Gov. Davis, her former boss -- Ms. Kennedy said, she "was as angry and as much of an anti-Arnold person as any Democrat was." Mr. Schwarzenegger said he regarded her as part of a gubernatorial administration in which "everything that they did was wrong."

Though often critical about California Democrats, Ms. Kennedy raised money for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and said she has no intention of dropping her party affiliation. "My wife would kill me," she said.

Great line.

Conservatives and Their Carnival of Fraud

How did this guy get on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal?

...call into question one of the greatest shibboleths of conservative governance. Although contracting-out has been celebrated by big thinkers from both parties and although it has been practiced in some form or other since the earliest days of the republic, an ideological commitment to outsourcing is one of the signatures of conservative rule.

And a bad, wasteful and dangerous one.

The ostensible justifications for it, in the early days, were thrift and efficiency. The 1984 "Grace Commission," in which a battalion of corporate executives ransacked the government looking for waste, recommended privatizing federal operations as a way to save money. With the government plunged deep into deficit, government needed to hire out its duties to business in order to save itself. The ideological assumption was only barely concealed: Whatever "big government" could do, the private sector could do better, cheaper and faster.

And outsorced to friends and cronies, say, as in Halliburton.

Privatization also constitutes a fundamental change in the constituency to which government answers.

Exactly; it is anti-democratic.

It is time for a new Grace Commission, this one examining the sordid history of privatization in all its details. President Barack Obama should launch it on day one.

Yup, I read this in the Journal. Amazed, I emailed the dude:

Very well said, dude!

Reaganomics is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated, and its effects went beyond federal budget deficits ballooning to heights never seen before in history. It was Ronald Reagan who labeled government an enemy of the people. As a result, neoconservatives were emboldened to outsource governmental functions, to slash government programs that could not be outsourced to their friends, allies and cronies, and to call for government to be run as a business.

Where is J. Peter Grace now, anyway? And is his company out of Chapter XI bankruptcy?

I sure hope, along with you, that President Obama appoints a Commission of Governmental Services (or some such) in his first week in office? Wonder what his email address is, anyway; maybe you/we could send him the idea.

Right on, dude.

Sal Weir
Flushing, NY