LA City Beat

It’s been easy, this past half-year, to feel despondent about the utility of grassroots political action. Sure, the world has seen some convulsive people-powered upsets – in Ukraine and Georgia and, to a lesser extent, in Lebanon – but in the western hemisphere it has been one long triumphal parade of the status quo.

George Bush, after all, won reelection despite his many glaring vulnerabilities and an unprecedented movement of money and volunteer man-hours dedicated to his defeat. Here in California, we were treated to the faintly depressing spectacle of a celebrity governor doing little or nothing to solve the problem he was elected to crack – the yawning budget deficit – but remaining obstinately popular nonetheless, as though a few broad smiles and hackneyed lines from old action movies could compensate for the billions of dollars of red ink and crumbling public services.

Personally, I hit my low point a few weeks ago when I watched a few thousand valiant Ecuadorians march through the streets of Quito to demand the overthrow of their president and the whole corrupt political order which has bled their country dry for the past decade. Just like demonstrators on union marches in Los Angeles, they chanted about invincibility coming through strength of numbers. Fat chance, I caught myself thinking. Not with the IMF breathing down their necks and much of the country’s wealth being siphoned into offshore bank accounts by a handful of elite families. I couldn’t help reformulating the marchers’ words inside my head. The people united, I thought, will still more than likely get royally screwed.

Turns out I was flat wrong. Against the odds, the demonstrations spread across the country with wildfire intensity, and within a few days President Lucio Gutierrez was history. And when I returned home to California, another grassroots campaign appeared to be catching fire with similar fervor, this one directed at the very same movie star governor who had seemed so invulnerable just a few short weeks earlier.

Demonstrators were tagging the governor at his every public appearance and deterring him, in some cases, from showing up. Barely a dozen protesters were enough to keep him away from church two Sundays ago. Last week I ran into a lunchtime crowd of Cal State students and teachers picketing the Schwarzenegger-owned restaurant Schatzi on Main in Venice, and they were both energized and seriously angry. “Screw you Arnold,” read one placard. Another, written by a 10-year-old, explained that her dreams of becoming a children’s author were being jeopardized by his slash-and-burn budget policies. “What am I supposed to do, Arnold?” she asked. “Go to prison? Work at a car wash?”

My e-mail inbox has been stuffed with anti-Arnold initiatives both promised and realized: a caravan of public school parents and teachers to Sacramento to talk him out of gutting their Proposition 98 funding stream; an outfit called “Moms to Maria” hoping to pressure the First Lady into doing the right thing by firefighters, teachers, and other unionized state employees; early plans to muster a major picketing operation when Schwarzenegger delivers the commencement address at Santa Monica College in June; and on and on.

Most telling to me was the fallout from a conversation I had in early March with a grassroots political activist named Anne Smith. She had told me back then that she was putting together a plan to confront signature-gatherers being paid by Schwarzenegger to qualify his pet initiatives for a special election in November. By the time I got back from Ecuador, her plan was not only in full swing; it had prompted the Schwarzenegger campaign to put out a radio ad of quite striking nuttiness denouncing the “roving gangs” and “special interests” who were trying to stop people from signing petitions in violation of their civil rights.

When I called Smith, she told me groups like hers had been challenging signature-gatherers up and down the state. Their job, she said, was not to stop anyone from signing, merely to point out to Wal-Mart or Ralphs shoppers that the cozy wording reeled off by the signature-gatherers concealed the initiatives’ true intent – to strip the teachers’ union of its collective bargaining powers, say, or effectively write Proposition 98 off the books.

Not only did the would-be signers back away once they had heard the counter-pitch. The signature-gatherers themselves often glowered in frustration and simply packed up and left.

One group at Crenshaw Plaza reported some trouble from mall security guards, who tried to keep them away from the signature-gatherers. More often, though, the protesters found themselves being treated as the good guys. In San Diego, a police officer approached a group trying to hang a banner from a freeway overpass. Instead of arresting them, he happily directed them to a different site where their banner would enjoy even greater visibility. He was no fan of the governor’s either.

Naturally, the grassroots groups did not create the governor’s political difficulties. Credit for that has to go principally to Schwarzenegger himself, who endeared himself to absolutely nobody by describing the state’s nurses as a special interest whose butt deserved to be kicked. He has taken aim at one group after another who previously supported him in his own insurgent campaign to upset the status quo in the recall election 18 months ago.

What the grassroots have done is to articulate the broad outlines of an opposition (something Schwarzenegger scarcely had to face, at least until his State of the State speech in January), act as a catalyst for would-be detractors in the state legislature, and thence develop the notion in the media that Arnold may not, in fact, be the indestructible Terminator everyone had taken him for.

At least some of the inspiration for the anti-Arnold movement has come from the examples set by earlier campaigns – relying on tools like power-networking, Internet fundraising and organizing, meet-ups, and online web forums. Soon after Schwarzenegger’s State of the State speech, the political filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Uncovered, Outfoxed) volunteered his time to shoot an ad in support of the nurses. Rick Jacobs, who had been Howard Dean’s presidential campaign chair in California, helped raise the money to put it on the air, and before long it had generated media coverage halfway around the world.

By early March, as many as 1,000 hardcore activists joined a conference call with Fabian Núñez, the Assembly speaker, to discuss ways of thwarting Schwarzenegger’s plans for a special election. The direct challenges to the signature-gatherers was one idea that came out of that confab.

The battle is far from won, of course. The signature-gatherers were too numerous to counter with more than token resistance and appear to have met their targets on three out of the four initiatives Schwarzenegger was looking for. In terms of turning the tide of public opinion, however, the campaign has been a resounding success – with Schwarzenegger’s approval rating plummeting from 60 percent to 40 percent in just a couple of months.

It would be foolhardy to predict as swift an end for the Governator as befell President Gutierrez in Ecuador – it would probably take another recall to remove him before his term finishes in November next year, and that is no more than a pipe-dream. It is, of course, eminently possible that Schwarzenegger will win enough of his political battles over the coming months to bounce back.

The point, though, is that political action is not only still alive in California. It is reaping results. And that’s a potent force worth cultivating and redeploying – against the real special interests – as many times in the future as is necessary.

George Bush, after all, won reelection despite his many glaring vulnerabilities and an unprecedented movement of money and volunteer man-hours dedicated to his defeat. Here in California, we were treated to the faintly depressing spectacle of a celebrity governor doing little or nothing to solve the problem he was elected to crack – the yawning budget deficit – but remaining obstinately popular nonetheless, as though a few broad smiles and hackneyed lines from old action movies could compensate for the billions of dollars of red ink and crumbling public services.

Personally, I hit my low point a few weeks ago when I watched a few thousand valiant Ecuadorians march through the streets of Quito to demand the overthrow of their president and the whole corrupt political order which has bled their country dry for the past decade. Just like demonstrators on union marches in Los Angeles, they chanted about invincibility coming through strength of numbers. Fat chance, I caught myself thinking. Not with the IMF breathing down their necks and much of the country’s wealth being siphoned into offshore bank accounts by a handful of elite families. I couldn’t help reformulating the marchers’ words inside my head. The people united, I thought, will still more than likely get royally screwed.

Turns out I was flat wrong. Against the odds, the demonstrations spread across the country with wildfire intensity, and within a few days President Lucio Gutierrez was history. And when I returned home to California, another grassroots campaign appeared to be catching fire with similar fervor, this one directed at the very same movie star governor who had seemed so invulnerable just a few short weeks earlier.

Demonstrators were tagging the governor at his every public appearance and deterring him, in some cases, from showing up. Barely a dozen protesters were enough to keep him away from church two Sundays ago. Last week I ran into a lunchtime crowd of Cal State students and teachers picketing the Schwarzenegger-owned restaurant Schatzi on Main in Venice, and they were both energized and seriously angry. “Screw you Arnold,” read one placard. Another, written by a 10-year-old, explained that her dreams of becoming a children’s author were being jeopardized by his slash-and-burn budget policies. “What am I supposed to do, Arnold?” she asked. “Go to prison? Work at a car wash?”

My e-mail inbox has been stuffed with anti-Arnold initiatives both promised and realized: a caravan of public school parents and teachers to Sacramento to talk him out of gutting their Proposition 98 funding stream; an outfit called “Moms to Maria” hoping to pressure the First Lady into doing the right thing by firefighters, teachers, and other unionized state employees; early plans to muster a major picketing operation when Schwarzenegger delivers the commencement address at Santa Monica College in June; and on and on.

Most telling to me was the fallout from a conversation I had in early March with a grassroots political activist named Anne Smith. She had told me back then that she was putting together a plan to confront signature-gatherers being paid by Schwarzenegger to qualify his pet initiatives for a special election in November. By the time I got back from Ecuador, her plan was not only in full swing; it had prompted the Schwarzenegger campaign to put out a radio ad of quite striking nuttiness denouncing the “roving gangs” and “special interests” who were trying to stop people from signing petitions in violation of their civil rights.

When I called Smith, she told me groups like hers had been challenging signature-gatherers up and down the state. Their job, she said, was not to stop anyone from signing, merely to point out to Wal-Mart or Ralphs shoppers that the cozy wording reeled off by the signature-gatherers concealed the initiatives’ true intent – to strip the teachers’ union of its collective bargaining powers, say, or effectively write Proposition 98 off the books.

Not only did the would-be signers back away once they had heard the counter-pitch. The signature-gatherers themselves often glowered in frustration and simply packed up and left.

One group at Crenshaw Plaza reported some trouble from mall security guards, who tried to keep them away from the signature-gatherers. More often, though, the protesters found themselves being treated as the good guys. In San Diego, a police officer approached a group trying to hang a banner from a freeway overpass. Instead of arresting them, he happily directed them to a different site where their banner would enjoy even greater visibility. He was no fan of the governor’s either.

Naturally, the grassroots groups did not create the governor’s political difficulties. Credit for that has to go principally to Schwarzenegger himself, who endeared himself to absolutely nobody by describing the state’s nurses as a special interest whose butt deserved to be kicked. He has taken aim at one group after another who previously supported him in his own insurgent campaign to upset the status quo in the recall election 18 months ago.

What the grassroots have done is to articulate the broad outlines of an opposition (something Schwarzenegger scarcely had to face, at least until his State of the State speech in January), act as a catalyst for would-be detractors in the state legislature, and thence develop the notion in the media that Arnold may not, in fact, be the indestructible Terminator everyone had taken him for.

At least some of the inspiration for the anti-Arnold movement has come from the examples set by earlier campaigns – relying on tools like power-networking, Internet fundraising and organizing, meet-ups, and online web forums. Soon after Schwarzenegger’s State of the State speech, the political filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Uncovered, Outfoxed) volunteered his time to shoot an ad in support of the nurses. Rick Jacobs, who had been Howard Dean’s presidential campaign chair in California, helped raise the money to put it on the air, and before long it had generated media coverage halfway around the world.

By early March, as many as 1,000 hardcore activists joined a conference call with Fabian Núñez, the Assembly speaker, to discuss ways of thwarting Schwarzenegger’s plans for a special election. The direct challenges to the signature-gatherers was one idea that came out of that confab.

The battle is far from won, of course. The signature-gatherers were too numerous to counter with more than token resistance and appear to have met their targets on three out of the four initiatives Schwarzenegger was looking for. In terms of turning the tide of public opinion, however, the campaign has been a resounding success – with Schwarzenegger’s approval rating plummeting from 60 percent to 40 percent in just a couple of months.

It would be foolhardy to predict as swift an end for the Governator as befell President Gutierrez in Ecuador – it would probably take another recall to remove him before his term finishes in November next year, and that is no more than a pipe-dream. It is, of course, eminently possible that Schwarzenegger will win enough of his political battles over the coming months to bounce back.

The point, though, is that political action is not only still alive in California. It is reaping results. And that’s a potent force worth cultivating and redeploying – against the real special interests – as many times in the future as is necessary