{"id":1733,"date":"2003-10-08T01:41:54","date_gmt":"2003-10-08T08:41:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2003\/10\/behind-the-landslide\/"},"modified":"2003-10-08T01:41:54","modified_gmt":"2003-10-08T08:41:54","slug":"behind-the-landslide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2003\/10\/08\/behind-the-landslide\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Landslide"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tYour final numbers on the landslide are at the Secretary of State’s<\/a> place.<\/p>\n

A lot of good stuff has been written about this already, by Dan Weintraub<\/a>, Andrew Sullivan<\/a>, Mickey Kaus<\/a>, Roger Simon<\/a>, Matt Welch<\/a> and others, so I’ll just hit the high points:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

3. The crocodile tears that were especially moist on the blogs of the self-styled<\/a> technical elite<\/a> 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<\/a> campaign?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Behind the Landslide”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-rX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}