Californians cast votes in key special election
CFT mobilizes for high-stakes special election

The contrast couldn’t have been more stark for George Martinez as he struggled to clear a few hours from his work schedule to attend an upcoming California Federation of Teachers training session geared to the high-stakes special election now under way in the state.

Martinez, co-president of the Greater Santa Cruz Federation of Teachers, was among the many AFT leaders and activists across the state who would gather at CFT offices in Oakland on a Friday in late summer to develop strategies that would help them in their communities. Over the next several weeks, they would fan out across their home precincts and talk to AFT members, parents and neighbors about the special election that kicks off in October with mail ballots sent to millions of Californians. The message Martinez hopes to get across is that the special election is nothing more than a costly and unnecessary war— a war against teachers, nurses, firefighters and other public employees that’s been bankrolled by well-heeled corporations and wealthy archconservatives with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as their standard-bearer.

As Martinez juggled calls and conversations the following Monday morning to clear the deck for the upcoming training session, he noted that Schwarzenegger also had been hard at work on the election just a few hours earlier. The governor was attending a Rolling Stones concert in Boston, scalping a block of tickets donated by Ameriquest Mortgage for campaign donations of up to $100,000 a seat. “As a matter of fact, he was seen out in front of Fenway Park tonight raising funds by scalping tickets and T-shirts,” Stones lead singer Mick Jagger quipped about Schwarzenegger at one point during the concert.

“It’s just amazing. Schwarzenegger has tried to pretend that he was a populist since he became governor, but he’s been exposed in this special election,” said Martinez.

Targeting teachers
Among the issues at stake are attacks on voter-approved school funding guarantees, due process and fair treatment for teachers, as well as schemes to weaken regular citizens’ political voice and leave corporations and wealthy special interests unchecked in the political arena (see sidebar). It’s a fight where voter outreach and grass-roots activism are working well for California unions but seem to have little appeal for Schwarzenegger and his wealthy backers, including leading banking and pharmaceutical corporations. Embarrassed by a “rally for the governor” in Sacramento not long ago that drew only a few dozen supporters (many of them political aides), Schwarzenegger has focused almost exclusively on handpicked audiences and big-bucks fundraisers—events that have been dogged relentlessly by demonstrators from CFT and other unions.

A recent column in the Sacramento Bee cast Schwarzenegger’s campaign as cash rich but people poor—and it questioned whether the “Governator” was the right man for the job, now that his brazen efforts to raise cash from deep pockets had cost him currency with voters in the state. “It would once have been unthinkable to imagine the celebrity governor going into a high-stakes campaign without being the star of the show,” the column observed. “But with his public approval ratings having dropped by half in the past year, Schwarzenegger no longer is the best spokesman for his policies.”

For their part, CFT and the other unions involved in the fight have no doubt who can best lead their effort: the regular teachers, nurses, firefighters and other employees who were the targets of the governor’s  unprovoked attacks.

Working though a broad labor coalition called Alliance for a Better California, AFT affiliates have participated in an extensive and effective media blitz. Television, radio and print ads have run for several weeks, ads that allow regular teachers, nurses and firefighters to address voters directly and explain how the governor has broken funding promises and cultivated a climate of blame against those who have dedicated their lives to public service. And they’ve punctuated their grass-roots message with rallies that have drawn crowds not seen in California for more than 30 years.

 “We are mobilizing in the streets and online to defeat this damaging agenda,” says California Federation of Teachers president Mary Bergan, who is also an AFT vice president. A new tool to help members stay involved and informed throughout the campaign, Bergan notes, is www.BetterCA.com. “This new online community is dedicated to building the grass-roots efforts of the millions of Californians who have spoken out against the bad ideas that Gov. Schwarzenegger has put on the November ballot—ideas that will take California in the wrong direction.”

Kenneth Burt, political director for CFT, says the bigger picture shouldn’t be lost on the AFT members around the state and the nation as they watch the election unfold. “California is in the frontline in the right wing’s attempt to roll back the New Deal safety net,” he says. “They are also seeking to silence the voice of working families by targeting public employee unions.”