TERMINATING THE TERMINATOR CAMPAIGN TERMINATED BY THE TERMINATOR
Alex S. Gabor
August 11, 2006
RECALL ARNIE CAMPAIGN FIZZLED, DRIZZLED BY DRAZZLING DRUZZLING DRONES
It probably started out as a lark, but the idea to recall Arnold Schwarzenegger through the Recall Arnie Campaign, organized by Dr. Ken Matsumura shortly before November 30, 2005 had a life span shorter than a human fetus.
It was dead on arrival by June 22nd, 2006 when they failed to gather just over one million signatures required to call a special election concurrent with last June’s Primaries which have since put the spotlight on dueling Democratic challengers to the Office of “The Governator”.
The Recall Arnie campaign was a well organized attempt by still growing factions of Progressive Democrats and Independents, disgruntled by the many incumbent war supporting old line Democrats, at a pre-emptive strike.
Lieberman take note, running on an independent ticket is no refuge from the tide of tumult in our political systems.
By mid December, just 9 months ago, the drones were all lined up, thousands of them, operating out of a headquarters from a donated 2500 square foot furnished office from where Matsumura, his Chief of Staff, a Statewide Coordinator, even a cartoonist, and an army of volunteers flogging the blogs of the webosphere spent many hours contemplating the gorgeous sunsets overlooking the Golden Gate in Berkley, California.
By January of 2006, the army of blog flogging volunteer web engineers assigned to massage the opinions of masses of disgruntled Californians with volumes of propaganda about Schwarzenegger’s reneging on prior campaign promises had exceeded ten thousand.
It had failed to raise much more than a few thousand dollars from nickel and dime volunteers across the Bay Area, mostly as a result of publicity sparked from talk radio shows that caught the attention of the larger local news media organizations. The drones were off and buzzing.
But unlike the attention received in San Francisco from the likes of such media mogulites as the Knight-Ridder papers - Oakland Tribune, Oroville Times, Argus, the Hills Newspaper Contra Costa Times group, and the San Jose Mercury News, KGO radio, and Univision, all covering stories about “terminating the terminator” which made great alliterary headlines, the fired up drizzling never spread to Southern California, mostly because the majority of political activists there were spending most of their time and efforts on anti war protests and rallies being planned for months in advance, thinking it would put an end to the war in Iraq. Total Recall was an afterthought.
Another factor of failure may have been the delays caused in getting their petition approved by the Secretary of State.
In November of last year the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made a ruling that any election material approved by the Secretary of State for distribution in California had to be translated into 7 different languages. That also put the campaign many more weeks behind.
Despite these and other setbacks the drones were determined to druzzle up 30,000 volunteers and gather the requisite million plus signatures in just a single weekend in what Matsumura earlier had dubbed, “a historical grass-roots turnout.”
Matsumura, who claimed he had 30 years of experience in dealing with the press partly because he was Time Magazine’s Inventor of the Year in 2001 (he invented the artificial liver and a wristwatch that alerts people of an impending heart attack), was on the front page of practically every newspaper around the globe just over a decade ago.
He is the chairman of the oldest biotech company in the world, headquartered in Berkeley. He founded and directs the Alin Foundation and the Berkeley Institute for Advanced Medical Research.
He once wrote an intriguing article on the hidden history of Japanese internment camps in America. That story makes one wonder if the old American Republican Guard is now ready to intern 12 million Latin Americans who are being led by Jorge Ramos, author of The Latino Wave, in a growing junta to retake California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas as their legal cultural lands.
Despite all the coverage by The New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post, and FOX wanting to, but never doing any coverage on its’ Big News segments, the LA Times mostly ignored the story.
As the campaigns’ press releases droned on about how public schools and the poor couldn’t wait a whole year to replace Arnold, and pleas to 'Help us get a new governor by this Summer,' Art Torres, then chairman of the state Democratic Party, despite his endorsement of the campaign and promises that, “Democrats would help circulate the petitions for signatures” and “"there was a lot of excitement" about Dr. Matsumura's effort among members of the party's executive board, statewide Democratic support never coalesced into the million needed signatures, even though there are well over a million Democrats in California who don’t really like “Ahnold!”
At the time Schwarzenegger and his aides said they were not concerned about Matsumura's doings. In fact the governor was focused on campaigning for several measures on the ballot in the special election, but because 90% of the measures that he supported subsequently failed, Arnold put on his political face by saying publicly, "I pay very little attention to those kind of things", but in reality he and his political advisors took hard notice after the failure of those measures to pass, despite their forced appearances in the special election, and the growing grassroots movement to have him ousted.
"The people have sent me to Sacramento to fix a broken system and now I need their help in order to do it, “said Schwarzenegger at the time, and apparently, the campaign to Recall Arnold did just that. It highlighted his weaknesses and allowed his political machine to adjust their own priorities enough to terminate the “terminate the terminator” campaign.
The Governator, while he lost the measures, set the stage for his re-election campaign, by setting up his Democratic opponents to argue and bicker among themselves in what has become a major divisive factor for the democrats in California. It’s the traditional Machiavellian role. Divide and conquer.
Against the backdrop of budget crises and impending teacher strikes, Dr. Matsumura called on the press to announce that the recall petition could be printed off their web site.
By borrowing his way out of the crises with $37 billion in new loans to the State from Wall Street interests, Schwarzenegger was able to diffuse the budget issue by putting it off for another generation to deal with.
Dr. Matsumura complained. 'All that Schwarzenegger is interested in are his wealthy friends."
Surely Wall Street investors today are collecting interest checks amounting to at least $150 million a month as a result of the refinancing of California, all at the expense of California taxpayers.
Charging that Schwarzenegger-appointee, Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson dragged his feet for two months in approving the printing of the petition, Dr. Matsumura called on his volunteers across the state, by then 10,000 by his own count, to accelerate the pace of signature gathering to avoid a special election.
The goal had been to gather the required 1,040,000 qualified signatures in the months of February and March, allowing the recall election to have coincided with the June Primaries.
The actual number of signatures gathered was not disclosed but now, just three months before the November elections, the web site of the Recall Arnold campaign is twisting in the wind like a burned flag flying at half mast with nothing new since July 23rd, yet some new information surely must surface by the 15th of August this year as the site promises.
Dr. Matsumura said, 'The recall campaign had done a lot of good. We turned the tide before the November election by tarnishing Schwarzenegger's image; we got him reading our website, giving concessions to appease recall volunteers."
Schwarzenegger, according to the web site, “is running for re-election with our campaign platform”.
According to the web site, written by Matsumara, “Schwarzenegger has tried to by-pass the legislature in order to more quickly institute a dollar raise in the minimum wage for our working poor, and he is now supporting the repair of the delta levees whose failure threatened Southern California's water supply. Today, the infrastructure is the main thing on his mind!”
New mass transportation systems and environmental concerns are issues he is focusing on, while support of the minimum wage increase may be another tool to stave off an impending implosion in Los Angeles county real estate sales and prices, already down by 10% so far this year.
Fearful of thousands of nurse and teacher volunteers ready to gather recall signatures; he stopped harassing our nurses and began to return the money he stole from our public schools. It appears that this governor can use our help in steering the right course for California. Many comments from our over 12,000 volunteers across the state that we need to keep a watch over him have led to our decision to keep our group together through this website.
The Democrats are massacring themselves at the Primaries. We hope the winner can recover in time for the November election. However, should the worst happen and, as we warned many times, if Gov. Schwarzenegger is re-elected, we stand ready to recall him if he returns to his old habit of breaking promises with the voters.
Our machinery is now well-oiled, and should he return to his old habits, no one will have any hesitation from a feeling that perhaps he has reformed. Governor Schwarzenegger, we are very pleased that you have adopted the Recall Campaign platform. We are watching you,” says Matsumura.
So after all the drizzle and drazzle by the druzzling drones died down, the terminator managed to terminate the “terminate the terminator” campaign and he remains firmly crowned as the Governator of California. Or was it just that the campaign didn’t have enough time to accomplish its mission? Perhaps November will tell.
Fast forwarding to the present, one campaign issue that is gradually niggling voters, particularly in the real estate and mortgage industry, is a subject this author wrote about last December, in the midst of all the hullabaloo about Ahnold, that was titled, “The Real Estate Bust of 2006”.
Countrywide, one of the largest lenders in the US with strong ties in California has lost 20% of its business and is laying off 500 people in California while San Diego County is being called the Enron of public finance, and the condo market there has imploded.
It took nearly $2 million for critics to qualify the recall vote against Gray Davis, and without such an infusion of cash, it was predicted by critics of his campaign that it would be difficult for Dr. Matsumura to collect enough signatures in the 160 days allowed under law.
History was also on Schwarzenegger's side: in 32 prior bids to recall California governors, only one against Davis qualified for a vote. The stats are now 1 in 33 successes, not a very good percentage for future optimism.
That is a 97% failure rate and might be an indication that even if Schwarzenegger is reelected, and the California real estate market revisits the rate of 50,000 foreclosures per month as it did in 1995; there is not much in the way of the Governator continuing to say, “I’ll be back!”
It probably started out as a lark, but the idea to recall Arnold Schwarzenegger through the Recall Arnie Campaign, organized by Dr. Ken Matsumura shortly before November 30, 2005 had a life span shorter than a human fetus.
It was dead on arrival by June 22nd, 2006 when they failed to gather just over one million signatures required to call a special election concurrent with last June’s Primaries which have since put the spotlight on dueling Democratic challengers to the Office of “The Governator”.
The Recall Arnie campaign was a well organized attempt by still growing factions of Progressive Democrats and Independents, disgruntled by the many incumbent war supporting old line Democrats, at a pre-emptive strike.
Lieberman take note, running on an independent ticket is no refuge from the tide of tumult in our political systems.
By mid December, just 9 months ago, the drones were all lined up, thousands of them, operating out of a headquarters from a donated 2500 square foot furnished office from where Matsumura, his Chief of Staff, a Statewide Coordinator, even a cartoonist, and an army of volunteers flogging the blogs of the webosphere spent many hours contemplating the gorgeous sunsets overlooking the Golden Gate in Berkley, California.
By January of 2006, the army of blog flogging volunteer web engineers assigned to massage the opinions of masses of disgruntled Californians with volumes of propaganda about Schwarzenegger’s reneging on prior campaign promises had exceeded ten thousand.
It had failed to raise much more than a few thousand dollars from nickel and dime volunteers across the Bay Area, mostly as a result of publicity sparked from talk radio shows that caught the attention of the larger local news media organizations. The drones were off and buzzing.
But unlike the attention received in San Francisco from the likes of such media mogulites as the Knight-Ridder papers - Oakland Tribune, Oroville Times, Argus, the Hills Newspaper Contra Costa Times group, and the San Jose Mercury News, KGO radio, and Univision, all covering stories about “terminating the terminator” which made great alliterary headlines, the fired up drizzling never spread to Southern California, mostly because the majority of political activists there were spending most of their time and efforts on anti war protests and rallies being planned for months in advance, thinking it would put an end to the war in Iraq. Total Recall was an afterthought.
Another factor of failure may have been the delays caused in getting their petition approved by the Secretary of State.
In November of last year the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made a ruling that any election material approved by the Secretary of State for distribution in California had to be translated into 7 different languages. That also put the campaign many more weeks behind.
Despite these and other setbacks the drones were determined to druzzle up 30,000 volunteers and gather the requisite million plus signatures in just a single weekend in what Matsumura earlier had dubbed, “a historical grass-roots turnout.”
Matsumura, who claimed he had 30 years of experience in dealing with the press partly because he was Time Magazine’s Inventor of the Year in 2001 (he invented the artificial liver and a wristwatch that alerts people of an impending heart attack), was on the front page of practically every newspaper around the globe just over a decade ago.
He is the chairman of the oldest biotech company in the world, headquartered in Berkeley. He founded and directs the Alin Foundation and the Berkeley Institute for Advanced Medical Research.
He once wrote an intriguing article on the hidden history of Japanese internment camps in America. That story makes one wonder if the old American Republican Guard is now ready to intern 12 million Latin Americans who are being led by Jorge Ramos, author of The Latino Wave, in a growing junta to retake California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas as their legal cultural lands.
Despite all the coverage by The New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post, and FOX wanting to, but never doing any coverage on its’ Big News segments, the LA Times mostly ignored the story.
As the campaigns’ press releases droned on about how public schools and the poor couldn’t wait a whole year to replace Arnold, and pleas to 'Help us get a new governor by this Summer,' Art Torres, then chairman of the state Democratic Party, despite his endorsement of the campaign and promises that, “Democrats would help circulate the petitions for signatures” and “"there was a lot of excitement" about Dr. Matsumura's effort among members of the party's executive board, statewide Democratic support never coalesced into the million needed signatures, even though there are well over a million Democrats in California who don’t really like “Ahnold!”
At the time Schwarzenegger and his aides said they were not concerned about Matsumura's doings. In fact the governor was focused on campaigning for several measures on the ballot in the special election, but because 90% of the measures that he supported subsequently failed, Arnold put on his political face by saying publicly, "I pay very little attention to those kind of things", but in reality he and his political advisors took hard notice after the failure of those measures to pass, despite their forced appearances in the special election, and the growing grassroots movement to have him ousted.
"The people have sent me to Sacramento to fix a broken system and now I need their help in order to do it, “said Schwarzenegger at the time, and apparently, the campaign to Recall Arnold did just that. It highlighted his weaknesses and allowed his political machine to adjust their own priorities enough to terminate the “terminate the terminator” campaign.
The Governator, while he lost the measures, set the stage for his re-election campaign, by setting up his Democratic opponents to argue and bicker among themselves in what has become a major divisive factor for the democrats in California. It’s the traditional Machiavellian role. Divide and conquer.
Against the backdrop of budget crises and impending teacher strikes, Dr. Matsumura called on the press to announce that the recall petition could be printed off their web site.
By borrowing his way out of the crises with $37 billion in new loans to the State from Wall Street interests, Schwarzenegger was able to diffuse the budget issue by putting it off for another generation to deal with.
Dr. Matsumura complained. 'All that Schwarzenegger is interested in are his wealthy friends."
Surely Wall Street investors today are collecting interest checks amounting to at least $150 million a month as a result of the refinancing of California, all at the expense of California taxpayers.
Charging that Schwarzenegger-appointee, Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson dragged his feet for two months in approving the printing of the petition, Dr. Matsumura called on his volunteers across the state, by then 10,000 by his own count, to accelerate the pace of signature gathering to avoid a special election.
The goal had been to gather the required 1,040,000 qualified signatures in the months of February and March, allowing the recall election to have coincided with the June Primaries.
The actual number of signatures gathered was not disclosed but now, just three months before the November elections, the web site of the Recall Arnold campaign is twisting in the wind like a burned flag flying at half mast with nothing new since July 23rd, yet some new information surely must surface by the 15th of August this year as the site promises.
Dr. Matsumura said, 'The recall campaign had done a lot of good. We turned the tide before the November election by tarnishing Schwarzenegger's image; we got him reading our website, giving concessions to appease recall volunteers."
Schwarzenegger, according to the web site, “is running for re-election with our campaign platform”.
According to the web site, written by Matsumara, “Schwarzenegger has tried to by-pass the legislature in order to more quickly institute a dollar raise in the minimum wage for our working poor, and he is now supporting the repair of the delta levees whose failure threatened Southern California's water supply. Today, the infrastructure is the main thing on his mind!”
New mass transportation systems and environmental concerns are issues he is focusing on, while support of the minimum wage increase may be another tool to stave off an impending implosion in Los Angeles county real estate sales and prices, already down by 10% so far this year.
Fearful of thousands of nurse and teacher volunteers ready to gather recall signatures; he stopped harassing our nurses and began to return the money he stole from our public schools. It appears that this governor can use our help in steering the right course for California. Many comments from our over 12,000 volunteers across the state that we need to keep a watch over him have led to our decision to keep our group together through this website.
The Democrats are massacring themselves at the Primaries. We hope the winner can recover in time for the November election. However, should the worst happen and, as we warned many times, if Gov. Schwarzenegger is re-elected, we stand ready to recall him if he returns to his old habit of breaking promises with the voters.
Our machinery is now well-oiled, and should he return to his old habits, no one will have any hesitation from a feeling that perhaps he has reformed. Governor Schwarzenegger, we are very pleased that you have adopted the Recall Campaign platform. We are watching you,” says Matsumura.
So after all the drizzle and drazzle by the druzzling drones died down, the terminator managed to terminate the “terminate the terminator” campaign and he remains firmly crowned as the Governator of California. Or was it just that the campaign didn’t have enough time to accomplish its mission? Perhaps November will tell.
Fast forwarding to the present, one campaign issue that is gradually niggling voters, particularly in the real estate and mortgage industry, is a subject this author wrote about last December, in the midst of all the hullabaloo about Ahnold, that was titled, “The Real Estate Bust of 2006”.
Countrywide, one of the largest lenders in the US with strong ties in California has lost 20% of its business and is laying off 500 people in California while San Diego County is being called the Enron of public finance, and the condo market there has imploded.
It took nearly $2 million for critics to qualify the recall vote against Gray Davis, and without such an infusion of cash, it was predicted by critics of his campaign that it would be difficult for Dr. Matsumura to collect enough signatures in the 160 days allowed under law.
History was also on Schwarzenegger's side: in 32 prior bids to recall California governors, only one against Davis qualified for a vote. The stats are now 1 in 33 successes, not a very good percentage for future optimism.
That is a 97% failure rate and might be an indication that even if Schwarzenegger is reelected, and the California real estate market revisits the rate of 50,000 foreclosures per month as it did in 1995; there is not much in the way of the Governator continuing to say, “I’ll be back!”