New Top Aide’s Role: Help Gov. Find His Voice

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger picked a former Democratic Party activist as his new chief of staff after concluding that his current team was trying to push him in the directions they wanted to go, rather than embracing his more centrist ideas, sources familiar with the governor’s thinking said Wednesday.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity in discussing the governor’s private conversations, said Schwarzenegger had also concluded that his management style was flawed and needed to be overhauled.

The sources painted a picture of a governor’s staff riven with rivalries and partisan disagreements -- an eclectic mix of Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and a scattering of friends Schwarzenegger knows from the movies.

The governor has been “floating back and forth. There was no course, and he needs badly to have one agenda, one vision,” said one of those familiar with his thinking on the issue. “He was getting [advice from] all these people with strong opinions, and it was about their personalities.”

Another person knowledgeable about the workings of the governor’s office said Schwarzenegger has “known for a long time he had a problem. He just didn’t have options.”

The governor’s solution, announced Wednesday, was to hire Susan P. Kennedy, a onetime top aide to former Gov. Gray Davis whom Schwarzenegger had gotten to know over the last two years through her work as a member of the state Public Utilities Commission.

In announcing the appointment, Schwarzenegger said that he can count on Kennedy to “implement my vision” and work cooperatively with Democrats.

After a bruising political year, Schwarzenegger concluded he could not rely on his current staff to perform that role, according to the sources who discussed the appointment.

The appointment has angered some Republicans, particularly conservative activists. But Schwarzenegger said at a news conference where he appeared with Kennedy that “the important thing is we all know the things that need to be done here in the state. None of that will change. Susan is going to be someone who will be really terrific in implementing the kinds of things we want to do.”

“There’s no one better out there than her to implement my vision,” he said.

Kennedy, asked about working for a Republican governor, said: “My philosophy has not changed. I see a man whose philosophy is not that different from mine. I can’t see a lot of differences in philosophy. Moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans -- there’s not a lot of light between us.”

Schwarzenegger won the governorship in a campaign in which he described himself as being outside the usual partisan fray. But the governor moved noticeably to the right over the past year. He eschewed conciliation with legislators and pursued a special election in which he directly challenged the public employee unions that form a major part of the Democratic Party’s political base in the state. In the end, Schwarzenegger lost all four of the ballot measures he had backed.

That rightward shift split Schwarzenegger’s advisors. Some aides to the governor were happy to see him confront entrenched Democratic interests. Others thought the strategy was mistaken. After the election, Schwarzenegger publicly said that his wife, Maria Shriver, had warned him against the special election.

As the year progressed, and polls showed the governor’s ballot measures faltering, people within Schwarzenegger’s political family began reaching out to Kennedy, sounding out whether she might want to join the administration.

Over time, the overtures picked up in intensity. In an interview Wednesday, Kennedy said that at first, she did not believe the people approaching her were acting at the governor’s behest. Her initial instinct was to “laugh it off,” she said.

“But I would go home and think, ‘Would I?’ Could I?’ ”

After the governor’s agenda was defeated on Nov. 8, she said, she was asked once more.

“People were feeling me out,” she said, adding, “this time I got the impression my answer mattered.”

She met with Schwarzenegger after he returned from his trade mission to China.

She said that she had been impressed with the contrition Schwarzenegger had shown in a news conference after the defeat and was inclined to accept the job.

“I watched how he handled the loss,” Kennedy said. “I had never seen a politician in there who said, ‘Hey, I screwed up.’ I was really impressed.... After I met with him, I was so taken by him that I thought ‘this is too good an opportunity. I could be part of history here.’ ”

She described her return to the governor’s suite of offices two years after the recall of her old boss as “a little strange.”

“To be here and look across the table at people who I’m usually on opposite sides of campaigns from, that was a little weird,” she said.

She said does not expect an overhaul of the staff, emphasizing that it is still too early for her to make a judgment about what should be changed.

Kennedy replaces Patricia Clarey, a Republican who served as a deputy chief of staff to former Gov. Pete Wilson.

Earlier in the year, Clarey had moved from the governor’s office to the campaign team that sought vainly to pass the governor’s four initiatives.

She returned to the chief of staff job after the special election. Some people close to the governor’s office contend that Clarey bears some responsibility for the special election debacle, having resisted a compromise with Democratic legislators that could have averted the divisive campaign.

Conservative groups sharply criticized the change.

The Campaign for Children and Families, based in Sacramento, issued a statement Wednesday that said: “By placing a leading homosexual, pro-abortion Democrat activist in charge of his entire administration, Arnold has taken a disastrous turn to the left.... Why doesn’t Arnold get honest and just leave the Republican Party?”

But other Republicans sought to put a more positive face on the change. “I think it’s a move the governor needs to make because he has not had an efficient staff,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), who helped finance the signature-gathering effort in the 2003 recall.

“He’s had many members of his administration in my opinion who have not been a good conduit for the flow of information to the governor and who have not been loyal,” Issa said.