Good deals or not such good deals

Both today and yesterday, there have been stories (see here and here) about Gov. Schwarzenegger cutting deals with Dems and undercutting Democratic challenger Phil Angelides. This is what Jordan Rau in the LA Times wrote yesterday: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's agreements this week on a minimum-wage hike and prescription drug discounts solidifies an election-year transformation that robs his Democratic opponent, Phil Angelides, of coveted middle-class issues. Since voters rejected his largely conservative special election platform last November, Schwarzenegger has methodically shed all links to his calamitous second year in office. He replaced his strategists with a team imported from two distant lands: a campaign manager from Washington, D.C., and a chief of staff from the Democratic Party. He showed that he had absorbed the lesson of the special election — that lawmakers, not the electorate, should be responsible for governing — by striking a $116-billion public works deal with legislators. Well, Steve Maviglio, staffer to one of the Dems, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, says that conventional wisdom just isn't so. These deals might actually help Angelides–if he plays them right. How? Let me explain (with the full disclosure that Assembly Speaker Nunez, architect of both of the deals, is my boss). It’s no secret that the Angelides campaign gets traction when it has attacks the Governor’s broken promises and flip-flops. Just over a month ago, Angelides began picking up where last year’s Alliance for Better California campaign left off, hitting Schwarzenegger with more pointed versions of last year’s Alliance tagline: "He’s not the Governor he said he’d be." Angelides painted the Governor as a political chameleon who is simply changing stripes in an election year. That won praise from Democrats, who look cautiously at Schwarzenegger's move to the center. And it resonated with those on the Republican right who are equally concerned about the Schwarzenegger's swift departure from the hard-core conservative positions he embraced during the first two years of his governorship. Find the rest of Maviglio's hopeful piece here.