I said in 2003 he’d be an epic fail disaster and he’s proven I wuz right.
But he delivered California for Bush!
(oh.... wait a minute...)
Amen. Ahnuld's positions on the issues differed little from Cruz Bustamante and he governed just like the DIABLO (Democrat In All But Label Only) that we predicted he'd be. Not ONE of the lofty predictions his cheerleaders on this board made (he'll deliver California to Bush, he'll get the budget under control, he'll end Democrat dominance of the General Assembly, etc.) came to pass.
I can think of precisely ONE instance where I was proud of Ahnuld as Governor -- the Tookie Williams execution where the Austrian socialists threatened to remove his name from their stadium and revoke his citizenship, and the Hollyweird crowd had a 24-7 candle vigil trying to turn the murderous Crips gang founding thug into a victim. Ahnuld called their bluff, told them all to F themselves, and nonchantly fried Tookie. But the fact of the matter is, Gray Davis was a pretty staunch death-penalty supporter and would have done the same thing. So despite Ahnold standing up to leftists for once in his life, there was no net gain in that circumstance either.
The problem with Ahnuld's supporters is they only cared about the short-term goal... what a morale victory it would be to "beat Gray Davis". You could have run ANYONE against Davis and they would have blindly voted for that person (and in hindsight Davis wasn't even as bad as Arnold!) The fact the candidate they rallied around to do so was fatally flawed was of little consequence to him. They just accepted Ahnold's scripted talking points about "Milton Friedman" and believed his conservative backers would sway a man wedded to the Kennedy klan. Bad mistake. Now we see the long term effects of a "Republican" doing the Democrats dirty work for them over two terms.
I do feel better when some of Ahnuld's formerly staunch supporters here have admitted they were wrong and now say they would have voted for Tom McClintock in hindsight. But will this lesson be learned in other races? I'm hopefully with Mark Kirk's latest (in a decade long record of treason) action, supporting Elega Kagan, will finally cause the GOP base to accept that Mark Kirk is NOT a Republican, he is just a swarmy socialist Democrat running as a Republican. Indeed, just like Arnold, Mark Kirk is to the LEFT of many card-carrying Chicago Democrat politicians. Imagine the damage he'll do after six years in office. Just like the California recall, within a few months of "Republican" Mark Kirk in power, we'll be wishing the worthless lame duck RAT Roland Burris was still in Obama's Senate seat.