It's impossible!
Governing California, that is. That's what they all say, anyway. Poor Gray Davis didn't have a chance, because the state is too big and contains too many factions for effective government. All you can do is hope it doesn't get too bad, too fast. Here's Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Dog Trainer Times in todays paper:
By Friday, the easy part of Schwarzenegger's life — leaving Austria and starting over in America, winning the Mr. Universe contest with women hanging off of him, becoming a box office legend and pounding nails into Gray Davis' coffin — will have ended, and he'll have come eyeball to eyeball with his hairiest challenge ever:
Governing California.
GOP strategist Stu Spencer was on the money, as usual, when he reminded me recently that our epically sprawling, famously fractured, incorrigible state is ungovernable.
I am so reminded of the 1980's, when Ronald Reagan talked about the Soviet Union joining the rest of the dictatorships on the ash heap of history. When people said that America was in decline, that her best days were behind her,
Reagan said as often as possible that "America's best days are yet to come." And everyone said the man was crazy. He'd start a war, or lead us into Depression with his crazy economics. And when the Soviet state came crashing down, they said "Why, it was inevitable -- Reagan had nothing to do with it -- and I knew it all along."
When Reagan became president, inflation was over 15%, the economy was flat and entering recession, taxes were at 70% and everone was buying gold. And they laughed at Reagan's simple solutions. When the economy boomed for 18 straight years (less two quarters) they said "it's technology, productivity and innovation" -- certainly not Reaganomics or the collapse of Communism -- and "we knew it all the time."
*Sigh* So it will be with California. We'll get out of the mess, despite a Legislature filled with Communists. Spending will come down, taxes will not go up, the schools will continue to provide lifetime employment (that being their purpose), and everyone will talk about how they
just knew that things would be better. But it won't be Arnold's doing. No, it will have been inevitable -- and they saw it way in advance.
But Lopez is right on one point:
"You don't hear too many people saying they miss Gray Davis." Which of course, he knew all along.
Posted by Kevin Murphy at January 7, 2004 09:22 AM
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