Not quite red, not quite blue

Jennifer Steinhauer has a funny article in Sunday's Times, Twins, Not Really. But Not Far Off., in which she points out the interesting similiarities between the dimunitive Michael Bloomberg and the once-pumped Arnold Schwarzenegger. She notes:

Both men are moderate centrists, estranged from their party’s mainstream, who first ran for office on what seemed like a lark. After making a slew of goofy comments and odd policy pronouncements, they both found themselves, shockingly, in their first political jobs.

Both watched their popularity sink mid-term to embarrassing levels. Mr. Bloomberg came back to beat handily — and greatly outspend — a Democratic machine politician whose attempts to claw away at the mayor and paint him as the president’s buddy flopped.

Mr. Schwarzenegger’s re-election bid does not end until next month, but his campaign has uncannily mirrored Mr. Bloomberg’s 2005 race. Like the mayor, he distanced himself from his party, cut deals with lawmakers, and outspent his opponent while also more or less ignoring him. The outcome, polls show, is likely to be the same.

Each had two careers that made him buckets of money before settling into a $1-a-year job as a high-profile public servant, their old lives informing how they govern. ...

And they like each other. Mr. Bloomberg is hosting a fund-raiser for the governor in his home on Monday; the mayor’s recent visit here to promote environmental legislation was like one big buddy movie. During one news conference, Mr. Schwarzenegger announced that the mayor was, “My soul mate. He’s the man.”

It is not terribly surprising that the re-election campaigns of Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Schwarzenegger are so similar. The week after Mr. Bloomberg won reelection last year, Maria Shriver, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s wife, called Kevin Sheekey, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign manager, and said that she wanted her husband’s re-election campaign to be just like the mayor’s.

Makes you wonder how much of Shriver's Kennedy shrewdness is behind Arnold's success.

I like both men, although I disagree with a lot of Schwarzenegger's policies, and think Bloomberg post-transit strike and landslide re-election has become increasingly petty and at times surly.

I like them because they're not afraid to think big, and refuse to be held hostage to 'that's the way it's done.' I also like them because they understand the importance of, and seem to enjoy acting like, leaders--making speeches, using the bully pulpit, cajoling and even threatening.

A lot of who they are, and why they could be considered soulmates, is due to both being self-made, highly successful men. Unlike a lot of other politicians, when stacked up against businessmen they seem to suffer neither envy nor harbor an inferiority complex. As Steinhauer notes,

Mr. Bloomberg, who is sometimes mentioned as a 2008 presidential candidate, and Mr. Schwarzenegger, who by law cannot be, both see themselves as the answer to gridlock. “Perhaps fame and money sets them free to set their own course,” said Bruce E. Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “Maybe plutocracy is the answer to our partisan problems.”

Together, they promote causes (like environmental programs), raise cash (for the governor) and offer moral support in a political arena with few natural allies. “The Republican Party does not really meet either of their needs,” said Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. “They learn from each other’s mistakes.”

Not only do they learn from mistakes, but because they're not really bound to any party they can act on them too. They speak plainly, expect their staffs to deliver measureable results, and see government as about fixing fixable problems.

Neither of them, of course, will be president; Arnold because he wasn't born here, Bloomberg because of bad timing--at 64 he'll be too old after the 2008 election, which already has three New Yorkers who've been running for a long time.

But Barack Obama will. He's Colin Powell before Powell joined the second Bush administration, the perfect way for America in 2016, when he'll be 55, to vote for hope, for history, for competence over ideology.

And for one of their own--immigrants are already 12.4% of the total population, toss in the sons and daughters of immigrants and a sizeable chunk of America will directly relate to Obama, whose father came from Kenya.

Like Schwarzenegger and Blomberg, Obama has the basic likeability that John Kerry will tell you is critical in presidential candidates. He comes across as real, as sincere and as highly competent. [I've written before about why he shouldn't run in 2008, though.]

The Times' famously tough Michiko Kakutani touches upon all of these traits in her laudatory (but poorly-headline) review of Obama's The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon :

... But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced.

Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life. ...

Mr. Obama eschews the Manichean language that has come to inform political discourse, and he rejects what he sees as the either-or formulations of his elders who came of age in the 60’s: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage. The victories that the 60’s generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.”

I think he gets this just about right--so much of the political fights of the last two decades have been about rehashing Vietnam, a last shot at framing the arguments for the history books, an effort to shoehorn old wines into new bottles.

The baby boomers will, I think, go down as a maddening generation, capable of great idealistic good, but also oh-so-petty and selfish behavior. It's definitely time enough for them to retire--for new leaders, either too young or too newly-arrived to have been tainted by the scorched earth legacy of recent years--to sprout forth.

Getty Images pool photo of Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg at an environmental meeting in NYC by Susan Watts.

Uncredited photo of Obama posing in front of the Superman Statue in downtown Metropolis, Illinois from Obama's website.