Peter Schrag: Gov. Schwarzenegger trips over his own horseshoe

You have to hand it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's PR operation. Rarely has there been a faster and more thorough piece of damage control than the administration's handling of the blowup with the California Air Resources Board, which hit the news two weeks ago but had been simmering for months.

The surface details are simple. On June 28, the governor fired board chair Robert Sawyer, allegedly because of Sawyer's weak leadership. Three days later, Catherine Witherspoon, the agency's respected executive officer, quit, in part in support of Sawyer, who had refused orders from the administration to fire her, and in part because, as she said last week, she would have been fired if she hadn't quit.

No prior administration, Witherspoon said, had interfered as much with the complex work of the air board as Schwarzenegger's had. The meddling became especially intense as the agency began to plan for the implementation of Assembly Bill 32, the landmark California law passed last year that seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

At the same time, in the view of many California environmentalists, the departures in the past year of Terry Tamminen and Bonny Reiss, the administration's strongest environmentalists, tilted the balance in the "horseshoe," the governor's inner sanctum, strongly toward business.

Sawyer told a legislative committee Friday that Witherspoon's resignation protected the rest of the agency's board, who themselves would have been replaced if they kept her on. The air board is an administrative oxymoron, a supposedly independent agency whose members serve at the pleasure of the governor.

But last week, as questions began to be raised about the depth of the governor's devotion to the battle against climate change and the other environmental causes which he's parlayed into global notoriety, he appointed Mary Nichols, a richly credentialed environmentalist to replace Sawyer. Sawyer was dumped on a Thursday; Nichols was officially named the next Tuesday, complete, in the governor's announcement, with glowing endorsements from other environmentalists.

But beyond that the story gets complicated.

Witherspoon said that Susan Kennedy, the governor's chief of staff, has had her "in her gun sights since last August." She also charged that the governor's office had repeatedly questioned the board's actions.

Kennedy, she said, was "paranoid" about the board.

"We'd even get calls during our regulatory hearings," she told a legislative committee Friday, "with specific instructions on what to do."

The clear inference was to do nothing without checking with the horseshoe.

On one occasion, she said, she was ordered to obey "or else." In May, Sawyer was ordered to fire her. He refused. Two weeks ago, he was sacked.

Adam Mendelsohn, the governor's communications director, denied that Kennedy had been gunning for Witherspoon. But the governor's office was admittedly furious when Witherspoon notified the federal Environmental Protection Agency that California would request a time extension in the deadline for meeting federal clean air standards in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the dirtiest places in the country.

Witherspoon is certain that, given the difficulty and the prohibitive cost to agriculture and industry of achieving the standard on time, an extension made sense. But it ran flatly contrary to the governor's political posture -- showing up the feds and setting a shining example for the world. How could he tootle around, meeting with Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy, signing memorandums of understanding on various environmental policies with the governors of other states and some Canadian provinces, and at the same time ask the feds for more time?

Under AB32, the air board had until the end of June to designate "early action" items that could be achieved by the beginning of 2010. Sawyer released a transcript of a phone message from Schwarzenegger Cabinet Secretary Dan Dunmoyer indicating that they wanted no more than three: "That," said the message "is the direction from the governor's office." Mendelsohn said they wanted more.

But which and under what circumstances?

The governor wouldn't let Kennedy or Dunmoyer testify at Friday's hearing. But Dan Skopec, until recently undersecretary of the California EPA, said there were some air board proposals that might be desirable but on which the administration hadn't done the economic analysis.

What became apparent amid all that ambiguity was that the governor's ambitions may be overmatched by the dimensions of the problem. Its very scope should make global warming a federal issue. It's President Bush's failure to address it that gives Schwarzenegger the opportunity to star on the national and world stage.

That doesn't undercut the value of the attention he's drawn to it. And given what's happened, Nichols is virtually fire-proof. Still no agency in any state may have the capacity, at least not yet, to do all the necessary work, much of it highly technical, and provide all the bells and whistles that the governor's unbounded ambitions require.

Some environmentalists believe that there's near-panic in the horseshoe that a high-profile operation like the governor's climate campaign could explode with a loud bang as, ironically, it almost did two weeks ago. That could make control freaks out of even the most normal people.

Source: Sacramento Bee
July 11, 2007

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