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He signed almost all of the Sierra Club backed bills and a majority of the GLBT bills (giving most rights of married people to gay couples). He certainly impressed me--two years in a row--by proposing and signing budgets with record-breaking spending increases and unprecedented borrowing. In 2 years of budgets, he has failed to wield his line-item-veto power, vetoing less that 0.2% of spending. From the North County Times, today:

The governor has used the line-item veto 133 times in the past two years, cutting $435,322 in spending.

Yep--quite impressive.

majority of the GLBT bills (giving most rights of married people to gay couples).

Come on, this lie is beneath you. Grey Davis already gave most of the rights of married people to domestic partners (who may be other than gay couples). Arnold can't undo this without something reaching his desk even if he wanted to. In a very practical sense, this can only be undone by referendum.

Are you saying he should've used the line-item veto to undermine the negotiated deals he made with the legislature? That's not smart politics. You oppose 76 and yet 76 offers the governor an opportunity to adjust a budget mid-year to reign in spending to respond to actual revenues if the legislature doesn't do it themselves in the 45 day period they're allowed.

There was no new borrowing this year, debt maintenance began a year early. When a state is in a fiscal mess you do what you need to get wiggle room to make the structural changes required to keep this mess from happening again. Since the legislature is beyond obstructionist, he's been forced to go to the People which is a very slow and expensive process. There's hope, at least, that redistricting could change the makeup of the legislature and via injected competition, force them from their extreme spend-free socialism. Look at how Clinton moved toward the middle after the 1994 GOP Revolution. Arnold himself acknowledged his reform and recovery agenda is taking longer to implement and far more difficult to enact than he expected all thanks to the Dems, unions and their politic pals. He tried to get better candidates elected and he wasn't able to overcome the power of incumbency in the gerry-mandered districts.

There's no magic wand to repair the systemic damage in California. It's a many-headed hydra.

There are some things I might've done differently and I desperately wish Arnold didn't need a year-long crash course in highly partisan politics (and got better and smarter support from the state GOP) but you can't say no progress is being made.