Message Discipline and Nichols the Politico

There are two central themes to Dan Walter's column today, both worth examining: Arnold's team is in damage control mode and that their new Air Resources Board appointee is a politico. Walters points out that while Arnold's reasoning for dumping Robert Sawyer are all over the map, his advisors are "maintaining strict message discipline" over their validity.

Schwarzenegger said such characterizations are "not fair" and refused to allow top aides to testify at a legislative hearing into the firing that his spokesman dismissed as a "political drill." To them, it's water under the bridge and everyone should focus on, as press secretary Aaron McLear said Tuesday, "looking forward."

They're concentrating, instead on promoting Sawyer's successor, veteran environmental bureaucrat Mary Nichols, contending that she's the perfect choice to provide leadership on air quality and bridge the gap between environmental and business interests.

This reads like Walters tried fishing around for a cogent argument for Sawyer's ouster, but ran up against tight-lipped spokesmen, who only wanted to talk about Nichols, the new appointee. They want to move past last week's story and on to the confirmation hearings. Unfortunately for them, the Senate conformation hearing will rehash what transpired, in an attempt to assess Nichols ability to resist political pressure from the Schwarzenegger administration.

While Nichols was widely praised by the environmental community, it appears that she is much more of a political animal than her predecessor and has a history of bending to her boss's will.

The biggest difference between Sawyer and Nichols, however, isn't so much one of philosophy but of political orientation. He is a veteran energy scientist with scant political experience while Nichols, an attorney by trade, has operated in a political environment for 30 years and accepts that when one serves a governor -- this is her third -- or a president, there is just one ultimate boss.

That was driven home eight years ago, during the first months of Gray Davis' governorship, when Nichols was serving as Resources Agency secretary and unilaterally altered the state's position on a high-profile lawsuit pitting farmers against environmentalists on a major water issue. She dropped the state's support for farmers, which generated howls from agribusiness and earned her a very sharp, semi-public rebuke from Davis, who dressed her down at a Cabinet meeting, reminding her that he and only he would set policy.

Her situation was uncannily similar to the pressure that Sawyer says he was getting from the Governor's Office. He refused to buckle to Schwarzenegger, but Nichols bowed to Davis and kept her job.

Nichols has already indicated her willingness to find common ground with the governor on a cap-and-trade system. That does not mesh with the legislature, or with the wording of AB 32. It will be a topic of discussion at the hearing, and has the potential to derail her appointment. However that seems to be fairly unlikely, considering the support she has received from the environmental community.