Posted on 12/19/2004 12:45:50 AM PST by Roots
Report: Schwarzenegger suggests U.S. Republicans move leftward
BERLIN - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested in a German newspaper interview published Saturday that the Republican Party should move "a little to the left," a shift that he said would allow it to pick up new voters.
Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has taken an unorthodox approach since winning office last year - standing by a promise to toe a conservative line of fiscal matters while veering left on social issues such as gay rights and the environment.
In an interview with Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, Schwarzenegger said that "the Republican Party currently covers only the spectrum from the right wing to the middle, and the Democratic Party covers the spectrum from the left to the middle."
"I would like the Republican Party to cross this line, move a little further left and place more weight on the center," he was quoted as saying. "This would immediately give the party 5 percent more votes without it losing anything elsewhere."
Schwarzenegger was guarded on suggestions that he harbors presidential ambitions, saying only that a debate on whether the constitution should be amended to allow foreign-born citizens to run was "overdue." Schwarzenegger became an American citizen in 1983, 15 years after he immigrated from Austria. He has said he'd consider running for president if such an amendment passed but also taken pains to say it shouldn't be created specifically for him.
"I would like people to remember me as someone who raised standards, wherever I got involved." he was quoted as saying. "I brought bodybuilding from nothing, I made the action film a genre, and the same goes for politics - I want to do things that no one believed possible. I would like to bring people together as governor."
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Arnold's my hero, but does anybody feel he is a bit of a sell out here or would this be a good strategy?
THIS WOULD BE A TERRIBLE STRATEGY - and this is only one of many reasons I did not vote for Arnold.
that was my first take... Arnold's quickly losing my support
A related article
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1304381/posts
Dude, you're on a roll tonight!
Tell Arnold to stay in Germany.
I think Arnold has lost his freakin' mind! The voters have spoken!
Arnold is a huge improvement over Gray Davis. Barney Fife would've been a huge improvement over Gray Davis. Arnold is a little too full of himself and a little too influenced by the most liberal family in the country- the Kennedys.
Thanks! I needed this break. Been working on a humongous project for work and I'm starting to get cross-eyed with all the regulations governing what is normally a straightforward thing. Oy!
I don't agree. We don't need to cede our principles to win over the center. What we to do is do exactly what we're doing - standing for American sovereignty, family, and a free economy. The rest will take care of itself. It did long before Arnold was California's Governor and will continue to move along as well when he's gone from the political scene here.
what change what is currently working, i.e. staying to the right?
Arnold is faced with a mess in the name of California. But he does still have that (R) by his name, which has seemed to me to be a rarity in my lifetime (I think only one other republican governor has been elected out there since I was born in 1980 but I could very easily be wrong).
There is no reason to go to the left, because where the GOP is right now is winning elections....
Too bad the original article (http://www.sueddeutsche.de/sz/2004-12-18/politik/artikel/sz-2004-12-18-010-hujer-a.hujer ) is behind a subscriber wall; I have a few years of German and would be curious to see the context. The subhed ("...fordert, dass die Republikaner nach links rücken") is of course blaring exactly the meaning which CNN and the AP portray
I'm glad he announced this early, before people tried to step up efforts to make people who weren't born in the USA eligible to run for prez.
Bye-bye Arnold. Go back to flexing your muscles, since you don't have a brain.
I guess half a conservative is better than no conservative at all. Still, Arnold would last about 10 seconds on the national scene. His watered-down conservatism would appeal to only a very small group within the Republican party. Besides, sooner or later it would come out that Maria and Ted are blood relatives!
No, thank you.
No, but a good strategy might be to talk slightly leftward but govern firmly to the right.
Wrong -- the Democrats have totally abandoned the middle. They are pure left, unadulterated socialists. Hence, the nitwitery of people like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon as their national "celevrity" spokesmen.
Arnold is talking primarily here about California, which has gone completely off the deep end politically. I'd give the inhabitants of LA and the Bay area about another decade of crippling liberalism before some will start seeing the light. In fact, the Gray Davis/Arnold election may well herald that we've turned the corner on the problem already.
I strongly disagree. Allow me to elaborate:
In New York State, there was a parity in the house and senate that prevented any meaningful gun control from passing. The Dems would propose; the Reps would dispose. This parity existed from about the 1960's -- when gun control first hit the radar -- to the end of the Cuomo years.
Then, gun owners worked together to defeat Cuomo in favor of Pataki. To everyone's surprise, Pataki acted in the gun control measures, and twisted arms behind the scenes among Republicans to get things passed.
So it turns out gun owners would have actually been better off with a Democrat governor. Republicans were used to -- and willing to -- defy a Democrat governer. But they were unable to defy a Republican governer, since he was able to threaten to withhold party funds for re-election efforts.
A single enemy soldier inside your camp is always more effective than a thousand enemy soldiers without.
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