There is no denying that California is fubar. The state’s political institutions simply no longer function and as painful as 2009 was, it looks like 2010 is going to be even worse. Setting aside the real human costs of that failed government there is a larger political failing, one that extends beyond California. That failure is the one of the Republican Party to be anything but the Party of No. To see what it has wrought we need look no further than the man who has presided over the final act of California’s self destruction: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger had the background, the charisma, the money and the timing to potentially take the Republican Party in a new direction. He chose not even to try. Instead he bent over backwards to appease the state’s hard right fiscal lunatics. During the recall campaign his plan for cleaning up the state’s budget, already a mess in 2003, was to chant the words “waste”, “fraud” and “abuse” over and over again. Even though the numbers indicated that those were minor problems – at best – he and his supporters seemed to think those three bugaboos accounted for all of the states financial woes. (Fiscal magical thinking of this kind is still prevalent amongst aspiring Republican office holders.)
Schwarzenegger kowtowed to these easily disproved budgetary fantasies for the same reason that all politicians do: they’re just plausible enough to help win an election even if they’re outright false. The reality is that the California government is starved for revenue and requires super majorities to raise any kind of taxes. But there are just enough Republicans (largely from the state’s archly conservative interior) in the legislature to prevent any kind of sane financial action. That the state as a whole is as Blue as they come and that the Democrats are firmly in control of both halves of the legislature doesn’t matter. The result is a real life experiment of what snake oil salesman Grover Norquist famously called “starve the beast”. The results aren’t pretty and are likely to cost the state’s taxpayers considerably more money over the long haul as the government crumbles beneath their feet.
Schwarzenegger’s willingness to indulge the fiscal fedaykin has been his and his state’s undoing. It’s also what makes him such a tragic figure because if ever there was a conservatively minded guy who could’ve stood up to this self destructive orthodoxy it was him. Here was a guy with an absolutely perfect biography. He’s an immigrant who made it to the peaks of American society, and that’s a story that always causes American hearts to swoon. He can’t be accused of being a girly man because he’s literally the antonym for it. He’s rich, he’s famous, he’s good looking. He could’ve been the leader they needed, but instead he became yet another victim of right wing political correctness.
Now Schwarzenegger is stuck in the unenviable position of being the governor who took the shine off the Golden State. Despite his enormous personal popularity he never attempted to lead them towards genuine fiscal responsibility and now it’s too late. The hard core are all that’s left, both in California and in the country at large. The party he sought to lead is tearing itself apart because its philosophical purity has prevented it from doing anything that could be called governing. It’s a genuinely dangerous failure, because a non-insane Republican Party is something the country needs.
But let’s end on a high note. The day after the election, long before the current nightmare, The Daily Show pretty much nailed it. Jon Stewart asked Steve Carell (“live” from California), what the mood was like at Terminator HQ on the morning after. Carell’s response:
“Well in a word Jon, the mood here is one of devastation.”
