http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15510&CFID=9275422&CFTOKEN=47616683
Use your noggin
Knowledge is a virtue in an executive officer. We promise.
By Molly Ivins
AUSTIN --
One problem I have with Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he looks like a
condom stuffed with walnuts.
I realize that is superficial, shallow and unbecoming to a
semi-serious-minded liberal like myself, but there it is.
The other is that he doesn't know what he's talking about when it
comes to public policy.
And therein lies our thesis for the day:
Politics as showbiz versus what actually happens to real people's
lives as a result of stupid public policies.
When 200,000 poor children get knocked off a federal health insurance
program because a state decides it can't afford the one-fifth co-pay,
what happens?
In fact, children rarely die, because when they are finally horribly
ill and burning up with fever, their parents take them to an emergency
room, where they receive excellent care at a very high cost to the
rest of us.
In the meantime, their teeth aren't attended, and their hearing and
eyesight are never checked.
As a result, many of them try to function in school with tooth pain or
without being able to see or hear clearly.
Those little kids aren't celebrities, but they're just as real as
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
They have bangs and bright eyes and dreams.
When a state does something really dumb, like pass a three-strikes
law, people wind up doing life for minor crimes -- so minor it's
mind-boggling -- stealing a sandwich, pilfering a mop.
What they usually need is treatment for alcoholism or addiction so
they can become productive members of society.
Instead, they rot behind bars at a cost to the taxpayers of $40,000 a
year per head, draining the state of resources to improve the schools
and teach all those bright little ones who would take California into
the next generation of high tech.
Arnold Schwarzenegger's top adviser is, of all people, former
California governor Pete Wilson, the man who caused the mess Gray
Davis got the blame for.
"Blackout Pete" is the guy who made utility deregulation the
centerpiece of his administration.
Wilson said deregulation would mean lower prices, a new age of better,
cheaper, more reliable energy.
The magic of the marketplace would inevitably lead to lower prices.
You can look it up.
Instead, deregulation opened the market to gaming by crooked
enterprises like Enron (how could they resist?), and they milked $45
billion out of California's economy before the Bush administration
finally, finally, at long, long last allowed the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission to slap on price controls.
During those rolling blackouts, people's ventilators went out,
dialysis machines stopped, old people who needed air conditioning were
left to swelter and people's lives were at stake.
This is not showbiz.
You can't fix it with a quick script change.
When the Republicans in Congress, led by the increasingly
out-of-control Tom DeLay, announced they would not vote for money to
fix the electric grid because (gasp! shudder!) it is a Democratic
bill, he did not increase the odds of drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife
Refuge (which has nothing to do with blackouts), he merely insured
there will be more blackouts.
While politicians play dumb politician games, real people suffer.
Real people's lives are changed, and not for the better.
This sort of "Oh, hell, anybody can run the country, you don't have to
know anything" attitude is beyond ludicrous.
I'm sorry, but Jesse Ventura, whom I thoroughly enjoy as a
personality, was a disaster as governor of Minnesota.
A few elementary basics, like understanding the school aid formula,
having some idea how to set fair insurance rates, what home health
care providers need and a few hundred other subjects are a minimum
requirement.
Sure, you can surround some attractive political personality with
top-notch aides, experts, advisers and bureaucrats, and many a dim
bulb in executive office has been pulled through by just such a team.
But it helps, honest, if you have a leader who has knowledge,
understanding and vision.
I grant you, they're in short supply, but "Hasta la vista, baby"
doesn't sound that good when people's lives are on the line.
I realize Gray Davis was supposed to be Mr. Experience, Mr. Detail --
and didn't he make a fine mess out of things?
Yes, he did.
He panicked during the energy crisis (brought about by Wilson),
groveled at the feet of Southern California Edison (which wrote the
electricity de-reg bill in California), begged for power to keep
lights on and overpaid billions for it.
Too true.
But use your noggin, is that really an argument in favor of putting
somebody who knows nothing in charge?
As far as I know, Mr. Schwarzenegger is as qualified as any other
citizen to run for public office.
So why doesn't he start with the school board or the country
commissioner's office and learn something about what’s involved first?
Read more in the Molly Ivins archive.
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Hasta La Vista, Baby, eh? Isn't that sumthin' like "Read My Lips?"
Harry
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