The missed opportunity was to elect Tom McClintock.
Remember the threads? And how right we were about the liberal disaster Schwarzenegger would be?
Yep.
Yep. I remember it well. Everyone said, we have to vote for Arnold, because McClintock doesn’t have a chance.
I also remember everyone (including myself) saying, well, Arnold is a fiscal conservative. But he’s pro-abortion and pro gays.
Well, that delusion lasted about five minutes. Contrary to what this article implies, Arnold’s first act in office was to float a huge bond bill to pay off the debt. That’s fiscal conservatism?
Of course he said he just needed to do it just this once. It was all Gray Davis’s fault. Then he’d get the budget in order.
Sure. He gave in at the first sign of resistance, and turned out to be even worse than Gray Davis.
I don’t think you can blame the voters. It was Bush, Rove, and the RNC, who were already suffering under the delusions that real conservatives couldn’t win. So they undermined Bill Simon and shoved Arnold in to push McClintock aside. Here were the California voters once in a lifetime voting to balance the budget, and Bush, Rove and the RNC put their oars in and wrecked that once in a lifetime opportunity.