The New York Times ran a pretty interesting piece about him over the weekend. Basically it said that being an independent he really had few friends within his own party, while he was also too conservative to earn the trust of many Democrats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/weekinreview/11steinhauer.html?hpw
I’m not a Californian, but frankly I’ve been largely impressed by him. I still don’t understand why Americans keep electing actors to high office though.
He is an excellent example of how many people underestimate the skill needed to be successful in governing. To a large extent his heart was in the right place - I like the anti greenhouse gas initiative, for example - but he did not have the connections that you need to get things done, especially in our increasingly ideologically divided state. No Republican owed him any favors, so they all opposed even reasonable budgets.
His term illustrates why Meg Whitman would be a total disaster. She would get nothing from the Dems, being further away and more ideological, and if she wanted compromise she’d get nothing from the Republicans. She wouldn’t be able to buy their votes, and she will find that you can’t order them around like she could order her subordinates around in EBay.
You don’t hire CEOs off the street - why hire governors that way?
ETA: I should add something about Reagan. Before he was elected governor, he spent years fund raising and campaigning for candidates. He also was president of SAG, which, based on the newsletters my daughter got when she was a member, was a highly political organization and no doubt taught him a lot of governing skills. He paid his dues, and it made him more effective.
He was put into office as a successful ploy by the energy industry to keep Gray Davis from holding their feet to the fire over their artificial energy crisis and all the money they extorted out of us. That alone cost us billions, and outweighs anything else he ever did or could have done.
Of course he was.
And this being Great Debates, naturally you can offer credible evidence for your assertion that the energy industry put him into office.
Schwarzenegger ended up being a much better governor than I expected, although to be fair I didn’t have very high expectations. I thought the recall that put him into office was a travesty, but I also thought Gray Davis sucked hairy balls so I wasn’t exactly devastated when it went through.
The problem with California is our legislature, which is terrible, and our jacked up budget process, where the legislature needs a 2/3 majority to pass a budget but propositions can set budget mandates with a simple voter majority. Throw all these things together and you have a nearly impossible job for any governor tasked with steering the state away from financial destruction.
As a “moderate” Republican I’m generally happy with Arnold. I think Voyager’s assessment is correct. I would also add that Arnold burned too many bridges with Democrats when he tried to run the state with the advice of conservative Republicans in his first term. When he realized that they were leading him too far from the center and replaced them with moderates (both R and D), he regained some credibility. But he lost the trust of too many to effective.
It’s going to be hard for me to decide who to vote for governor this fall. If Whitman shows any kissing up to the anti-immigrants, I won’t vote for her. Her initial attack ad turned me off.
Having only lived in California this century, I’m unfamiliar with Brown. He needs to explain his current positions well; he’ll not get my vote by coasting on his reputation or past accomplishments.
Schwarzenegger more or less passed on trying to get the budget in order back when he first came into office and was still popular enough to get legislation or ballot propositions through. Instead he burnt his efforts on convincing the legislature to nix the higher car registration fees, convinced voters to let him borrow money to make up the difference, and then tried to make it sound like this was fine by passing a toothless balanced budget inititive and mumbling the usual BS about how he was going to find billions and billions of dollars of waste in the budget to fix everything and buy everyone in the State a free lunch.
He’s charismatic, and certainly seems to have had a good time during at least the first half of his time in office, and I like some of the positions he’s taken since his initial two years in office, but the issue during his Governorship has been CA’s increasingly poor financial situation, and on that he basically kept kicking the can down the road as it became worse and worse. I think CA would’ve been better off sticking with the dull, unpopular Gray Davis and paying his proposed higher vehicles registration fees then electing the happy, funny movie-star who offered to fix all our problems with plans that inflicted no pain, and had no serious chance of working.
(not a Californian anymore, but lived in the Bay Area when Ahnuld first ran for Governor, so followed at least the first chunk of his governorship)
My question, for the Californians, is that though you may agree that he was unable to fix the financial problems, whether you think anyone would have been able to? I’m sure plenty of politicians could have simply danced around the problems and off-loaded them onto the next person, but that’s not fixing nor even attempting to fix the issues. Schwarzenegger seems to be getting kicked about for not fixing them because he actually fought to do so, rather than passing a layer of obfuscation and announcing the problem “fixed”.
How did he fight to fix the budget problems?
Again, in his first year he reduced revenue by 5 billion dollars, borrowed fifteen billion dollars at a time when the economy was relatively strong, and papered over the mess with vague promises to “cut waste” and a meaningless balanced budget proposition that allowed more borrowing and didn’t actually require the legislature to balance the budget.
So I’d claim the opposite, I think Ahnuld is actually more responsible for CA’s current woes then he is held accountable for. People tend to blame the CA political process and the legislature, both of whom certainly deserve plenty of blame, but the Governator decided to offer everyone a free lunch rather then fix the obvious and growing issues with the CA budget back when he actually had the political room to fix things.
He is utterly ineffectual. A spectacular meh.
If a bodybuilder can go into acting, why can’t an actor go into politics? 
I actually voted for him 4 years ago – the only Republican I’ve ever voted for. It helps that he’s a RINO.
Giraffe is absolutely right. California is completely screwed by its legislative and budget process, and it would take a miracle-working governor to make it work. Arnold is no miracle-worker. In a less-screwed state, or in California in a time of budget surplus, he would’ve been fine.
And Meg Whitman is mouthing the same platitudes, that we can make things better by “streamlining” things. :rolleyes:
Well, he single-handedly defeated the original predator, so that’s got to count for something.
Speaking of Reagan, Arnold reminds me of the lesson of Clark Kerr and his handling of the protests at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Kerr refused to expel the protesters but also refused to give in to their demands. Thus, he was hated by both sides. This helped Reagan get elected, who then fired Kerr.
I read an opinion piece and the guy said Californians elect moderate governors who are tough on crime and reluctant to raise taxes. Phil Angeledes, even if he had more personality and name recognition, never stood a chance because he was too far left while Arnold occupied the center.
Once in office, perhaps Arnold was too centrist to be effective.
I can think of the kind of person who might be able to fix things. I’m sure that the governor has some say in allocating money to districts - he need to call a legislator into his office, and tell him that bright shiny new project is moving elsewhere unless he votes the right way. While he is still popular he needs to threaten to support an opponent. He needs to know which buttons to push to get someone to change a vote. You don’t need that many votes here to get something done.
His ads now are talking about experience, which is reasonable, but you can hardly accuse him of coasting on his accomplishments. Most ex-governors go into business or consulting or something. Brown became mayor of Oakland, not the world’s easiest job, and is now Attorney General. He was willing to take lower level jobs to stay in public service. Who else can you say that of, except perhaps John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft?
Chief justice is lower than president?
You misunderstand me. I mean that if he expects me to vote for him, he’ll have to tell me why, other than the fact that he was a mayor or the AG.
And Whitman will have to do the same. I vote based on policy.
Name recognition. I expect it would help in any democracy.