Your final numbers on the landslide are at the Secretary of State’s place.
A lot of good stuff has been written about this already, by Dan Weintraub, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, Roger Simon, Matt Welch and others, so I’ll just hit the high points:
1. The voters tossed Davis out on his can and replaced him with an ass-grabbing, movie-making bodybuilder with an accent because they figured Arnie couldn’t do any worse. Davis failed to deliver as governor because he has no leadership and no balls, and we know Arnie has an abundance of both — the LA Times proved it.
2. Davis wasn’t the real problem — the entrenched ultra-left wing of the Democratic Party, the Willie Brown/John Burton Frisco machine and the Berman/Waxman LA machine are the real problem — but he wasn’t strong enough to stand up to these machines and face them down. Arnie, in the people’s judgment, is better equipped to do that.
3. The crocodile tears that were especially moist on the blogs of the self-styled technical elite about the “un-democratic” nature of the recall were shot to pieces. The recall succeeded dramatically, and Arnie got more votes than Davis even after sharing his with 134 other candidates. They won’t admit it, but they were wrong, wrong, dead wrong and couldn’t have been more wrong. Was anything more sad than the MoveOn.org campaign?
4. It’s a new day for the California Republican Party, and possibly for the national one, but Arnie and Bush could hardly be more different ideologically; one’s conservative on fiscal issues but liberal socially, and the other is the reverse. But they’re both real men and that may, at the end of the day, mean more than their policies.
5. The LA Times is out of touch with California. Thinking that their last-minute sleazy hit would swing voter sentiment against Arnie was a classic mistake of the Politically Correct smug and arrogant class. Blogs and other forms of New Media have made their style of persuasion transparent and obsolete. Voters are not the oh-so-sensitive soft New Males and Aggressive Women that news rooms seem to be full of these days; they’re more like bloggers.
I think this is going to be a good thing for the Sunny South, but they’re in a deep hole and it’s going to take a lot of digging to get out of it.
I’m not sure how Arnold’s win proves the recall to be more or less democratic. Are you implying that if McClintock or Bustamante won, then the recall would be proven to be less democratic ? Or if the recall didn’t pass, then it would have been a failure of democracy ? If so, seems like such a failure has occurred every year since recall was on the books.
Can people recall Arnold now ? And then recall that guy after him ? And then the next guy ? Kinda feels like we can finally get to the problems of the state, of which has been recently added to: trying to convince the rest of the country that we’re not really just two states.
Responding to Richard’s points:
1. It’s up to Arnold to “prove” his leadership and balls. The LA Times was/is irrelevant.
2. I don’t know how those political machines can be “ultra-left.” They are like all the rest of the career politicians in this state: pandering to those with money to spend and votes to deliver. If they were ultra-left, wouldn’t we have state-run health care, affordable housing for all, fair taxes on the rich, living wage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, et cetera? Example: Cruz was totally repulsive in his pandering to the casino owners last night.
3. What could be more democratic than the largest voter turn-out in recent history? However, democracy can be irresponsible, too. All of the state’s bond debt comes from democratic ballot initiatives, which is a big part of the budget mess.
4. “Real men?” We shall see.
5. The LA Times was/is irrelevant. You want to talk about out of touch? Based on the vote, the SF Bay Area is really out of touch with the rest of California.
Responding to “sty”: If California is “two states,” where do you draw the line?
I don’t know where the line should be drawn, but I suspect that they could be somewhere near the obvious differences in voting on a large majority of issues, not just including this recall campaign.
This is just a hunch, and people more qualified than I have argued that California should be split into two states, and the arguments for and against fall somewhere between being absolutely apparent and obviously urbanlegend-ish, but looking at the recall stats per county draws some pretty disparate lines, and it’s not just SF and LA versus everywhere else.
Mike, I totally agree with your point that democracy can be handled quite irresponsibly. Whether it’s feasible or not, the fact that one can recall a recall a recall, etc. bothers me quite a bit. People who argue that politicians will somehow do better when they are ‘under the killer thumb’ 24x7x365 are living in la-la land themselves, obviously have never held office, and ignore the effect that party polarization can have on democracy.
Either way, I hope Arnold doesn’t turn out to be more of a puppet than a leader. At least McClintock gave the impression that he knows the facts, and not leaning on a staff for feel-good eloquence.
p.s. go RedSox.
Mike, the machines are able to pursue an ultra-left agenda because of where their money comes from: unions and business that depend on state regulation, such as electric utilities, cable companies, and rice farmers who need cheap water. By selling the taxpayers, rate-payers, and water consumers out to these special interests, they’re able to play Bolshevik all day long. Witness Sheila’s reaction to the election.