Bloomberg and Schwartzenegger suck. I think we can all agree on that. Schwartzenegger just left office with an approval rating of 22, which is, ironically, just about the number of inches of snow that was simultaneously paralyzing New York and showing his bi-coastal sidekick and noted control freak Michael Bloomberg to be somewhat less in control of his city than he thought he was.
It seems just a few short years ago that Arnold Schwartzenegger and Michael Bloomberg were celebrated as some kind of New Age superheroes (after some disagreement, it was decided, perhaps, that Bloomie would be Robin), out to save the planet AND usher in a bright new era of postpartisanship and understanding. You see, they weren't some kind of ideological neanderthals - they were the sort of Republicans even Democrats could love. Now everybody's scratching their heads and wondering what went wrong. Jonah Goldberg makes some good points, but even he misses the boat here. Was it the bad economy? Not enough photo-ops? Did PARTISANSHIP sink these two great men?
No. I'll tell you what it was. It was that neither of them had an ideological commitment to rely upon. That's what's led to Schwartzenegger crowning his incredibly successful career with an enormous failure, and what has led Mike Bloomberg to look impotent and feeble, being pushed around by the same union thugs who bus Democrats to polls every election day. An ideological commitment is what keeps a politician from spinning in the wind. It's what guides the tough decisions that leaders need to make. It's where dependability and consistency come from. Ideological commitment is also what led us to have faith when Ronald Reagan retaliated against Libya, and to rebound when the Challenger blew up. It's what helped us to know even when interest rates were at 20% and unemployment rampant, that it was morning again in America. Well, the alarm clock is ringing, but someone needs to wake Arnie and Bloomie. They've missed the train.
Dysfunctional Duo’s Undoing
Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger, and the perils of “pragmatism”‘Unfortunately, partisan politics has immobilized Washington,” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told Time magazine in 2007. Bloomberg, according to Michael Grunwald’s cover story, was the diminutive half of a dynamic duo revolutionizing American politics. The other partner: California’s then-still-shiny governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Together, they were “The New Action Heroes” who, according to Grunwald, were “doing big things that Washington has failed to do.”The article was mostly a clever way to slap George W. Bush. But there are still important lessons to be learned, particularly as the Big Apple remains immobilized not by partisan politics but by Bloomberg’s arrogance. Hizzoner was more concerned with getting salt off of New Yorkers’ plates than he was with getting it on the snow clogging their streets.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - “The Governator,” meanwhile, leaves California $28 billion in the hole, his former presidential ambitions an absurd joke and the state’s GOP in tatters.Both Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg were deemed heroic for abandoning ideology for pragmatism. Bloomberg has made this something of a crusade. He helped launch the laughingstock group No Labels, which seeks to get the “politics out of problem-solving.”But people disagree about how to solve problems, and they may disagree about what is a problem in the first place. In a democratic republic, we hash out these disagreements through this thing called “politics.” Getting politics out of problem-solving is synonymous with getting democracy out of politics.The same goes for ideology. If you agree with a solution, it doesn’t seem ideological. But if you disagree with the proposed solution (or that there’s a problem at all), the remedy might look very ideological indeed. GivenTime’s political agenda, it saw Schwarzenegger’s decision to spend his political energies on the Global Warming Solutions Act as an exercise in “pragmatism.”This was ludicrous because California can no more do anything substantive about climate change than it can halt Iran’s nuclear program.In other words, even if you’re on the climate-change bandwagon, couldn’t you say that the governor of the state with the nation’s worst credit rating, a budget crisis more unbelievable than the plot of Twins, a cratering manufacturing base, and famously dysfunctional schools was making an ideologically blinkered decision to make global warming a priority, particularly given that the benefits of the law for California — and the world — will be somewhere between symbolic and trivial, while the costs will probably be huge?Meanwhile, Bloomberg, who before snowmageddon reportedly took seriously the idea of being carried to the Oval Office by a groundswell of support from Americans who don’t believe in labels, thinks it’s not ideological to dedicate much of his mayoralty to fighting global warming by choking the streets with bike lanes and hybrid taxis.The point isn’t to argue with every one of the Dysfunctional Duo’s decisions or priorities. They didn’t get everything wrong, and things in NYC and California might have been even worse with different men at the helms. The point is that ideology is in the eye of the beholder and that pursuing nonpartisanship for its own sake isn’t necessarily courageous or wise. Sometimes what seems visionary to Time magazine is nothing more than craven fad-following.It is true that some serious problems are fairly free of partisan wrangling. But that doesn’t mean they are free of politics. It means that there is such an overwhelming political consensus that nobody disputes what should be done (even if they might fight over how, or how much to pay for it). We all agree, for example, that firefighters should fight fires and that police should fight crime.Oh, and New Yorkers believe that one of the mayor’s top responsibilities is to make sure the snow is cleared so ambulances can reach those in need and so everyone can get to work. Mayors who spend more energy fighting “labels” in our politics than clearing the snow are rewarded with some labels too colorful for a conservative website. But “ideologue” works as a substitute.— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.Dysfunctional Duo’s Undoing - Jonah Goldberg - National Review Online
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