Why Couldn’t Sarah Be A Good Governor, Like Arnie?

The response was predictable. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s friends were shocked, bewildered and disgusted.

“He betrayed the people who supported him from day one,” said Sacramento’s Ted Costa, who helped launch the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in 2003. If you went by the papers and the television talking heads, the revelation about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s out-of-wedlock son would stain, if not destroy, the governor’s “legacy.”

What legacy?

When he was elected in 2003, California faced a multi-billion dollar budget deficit. When he left office eight years later, the state faced a multi-billion dollar budget deficit.

When he began, he declared his intention to “tear up the credit card.” In the years since, he’s put more on the credit card than any of his predecessors. In the meantime, trying to pretend that the state had got its fiscal house in order, he exhausted every fiscal gimmick and dodge that was still left to him. He compounded the state’s fiscal problems – he and the legislature together — by running us out of gimmicks.  He tried to sell the lottery and the state’s office buildings. He would have sold the sunshine and the beaches had they been marketable.

On his first day in office, he cut the state’s vehicle license fee at a cost of roughly $6 billion a year. Californians had paid it for most of the prior half century and never noticed until a right-leaning politician made an issue of it, immediately after, he borrowed a record $15 billion to pay off part of the state’s debt.

He pushed still more borrowing for water projects and other infrastructure, much of which should have been funded by user fees and gas taxes. He endorsed passage of the unfunded stem cell bonds that will cost the state another $6 billion before they’re paid off.

He made deals with interest groups – the teacher’s union on school funding, the Latino caucus on drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens – and promptly reneged. He first resisted, then grudgingly agreed to sign AB32, the state’s landmark greenhouse gas emission control law and then promptly took credit for it.

The shock last week was not the news about retired former worker in the Schwarzenegger household and her 14-year-old son in Bakersfield, but the shocked response among people who should have known. Should we have really been surprised? Didn’t we know about the drug use, the narcissism and the pathological exercise of power?

http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/node/9002

About Tony Heller

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12 Responses to Why Couldn’t Sarah Be A Good Governor, Like Arnie?

  1. Can you imagine, if anybody could get their hands onto Arnie’s governatorial e-mailbox, what we would be reading now…

  2. Latitude says:

    Remember when Obama campaigned and told us all it was our fault and how irresponsible we were with our credit cards, spending, and mortgages?

    …and people actually bought into that BS

  3. suyts says:

    Great points guys.
    Why isn’t our MSM sifting through his e-mails?
    And, as far as Obambi goes, he gets extra hypocrisy points in that while, yes, he did, does, and will continue to spend like a drunken sailor just back from a year long cruise, his administration actually encouraged a resumption of debt spending by the individual of this nation……..to spur the economy. He’d be the laughing stock of all presidencies if our media would ever call him on anything.

  4. papertiger says:

    He first resisted, then grudgingly agreed to sign AB32, the state’s landmark greenhouse gas emission control law and then promptly took credit for it.

    This is a revelation that might be useful. Since Arnie isn’t nearly as wed to the climate change legislation as the Ca media like to pretend, it might be relatively easy to flip him on it.

    That would be a coup. Imagine the governator himself in a youtube ad condemning the climate change lobby.

  5. papertiger says:

    It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to surmise that Arnold was presented with opposition research, done by the LA Times or some other California paper (pick one – they’re all of them about the same level of unscrupulous), presented to him by Fabian Nunez or Darrel Steinberg.

    “Co-operate while we dismantle the State, and Maria never needs to see this.”

    Now that the cover is blown, you think Arnie might want to get a little payback?

  6. Jim Cole says:

    Arnie’s problem, fundamentally, is that he had a Shriver-Kennedy between his legs instead of his Johnson. Never could man-up to the uber-lib CA legislature

    Couldda been worse – might have been a Wiener there

  7. PhilJourdan says:

    Arnie’s problem is pretty much the same as a parent trying to be a child’s “BFF”. Governing is somewhat like parenting in that you often have to make tough decisions. While he started out that way, he was quickly seduced by the media so instead of making tough decisions, he sought to be popular with the press. That is not the way to run a state, a country or even your family. And Palin knows this. A parent as a BFF is shirking their duty and responsibility and harming the ones they are entrusted to care for.

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