Notes on politics, mostly: Votescam Goes Splat

By Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker
September 28, 2007

Glad tidings from points west. It appears that the quasi-official Republican attempt to siphon off twenty or so of California's electoral votes has suddenly dried up, at least as far as the 2008 election is concerned.

You can find the details here, in the Los Angeles Times, and here, in the San Francisco Chronicle. (In an act of remarkable generosity, Dan Morain, author of the L.A. Times story, acknowledges The New Yorker’s role in drawing public attention to this lamentable business.)

The now-comatose power play was a ballot initiative that would have allocated California?s electoral vote by Congressional district, with the two bonus electors going to the statewide winner. The result would have been to hand the G.O.P. nominee an unearned Ohio-size package of electoral votes, along with, quite possibly, the presidency.

The Snidely Whiplash of the scheme was a well-connected Sacramento lawyer named Thomas Hiltachk, and his abrupt abandonment of it was the proximate cause of its collapse. Hiltachk and his firm represent both the Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party, and he is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal attorney in matters related to election law. Hiltachk wrote the ballot measure and was the point man in organizing for it. The reasons given for his withdrawal include difficulties in fund-raising (Republican donors are in a foul mood these days) and shifty behavior on behalf of its seed-money donor, a Missouri-based, previously nonexistent, anonymously funded entity called Take Initiative America.

But hidden funding sources and phony organizations are standard in the “Chinatown”-like world of California ballot-initiative politics. Here’s a simpler, though admittedly speculative, explanation for the measure’s demise: the Governator terminated it.

I see via Bill Bradley’s New West Notes that Schwarzenegger “doesn’t like the proposed measure one bit.” Bradley points to a September 5th KABC-TV interview in which the former action superstar, as Bradley likes to call him, says,

To me, what we have in place right now works. I feel like if you all of a sudden in the middle of the game start changing the rules it’s kind of odd, it almost feels like a loser’s mentality, saying I cannot win with those rules, so let me change the rules. I have not made up my mind yet in one way or the other, because I haven’t seen the details on it, but basically I would say there is something off with this whole idea.

One question remains: Why would Schwarzenegger want to shoot down a proposal that has the potential of delivering the White House to his party next year?

My guess is that he isn’t losing any sleep over the probability of a G.O.P. Presidential rout, which would make him the indisputably most important Republican in America. His current port tack, on issues like health care and climate change, suggests that he knows which way the wind is blowing. Doubtless he would rather be swept along than swept away.

Then there’s this. Anybody remember the first Republican debate , on MSNBC back in May? I’ll bet Arnold does. He was in the front row at the Reagan Library when Chris Matthews asked the ten candidates if they would support changing the Constitution ever so slightly to make naturalized citizens eligible for the presidency. The vote onstage was eight to one against. (The one was Giuliani; McCain said he’d “seriously consider it,” which I count as an abstention.) Eight to one, in other words, in favor of crushing the ultimate and perfectly legitimate dream of the distinguished Governor of California.

If I were Schwarzenegger, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help these bozos.