Forget the LA Times controversy. That was a ginned-up deal and only mattered because lefty journalists, who don’t want Schwarzenegger to win, wanted it to matter. Look instead at Tradesports.com (click on “RECALL.ARNOLD”), where Arnold’s odds have been rising since mid-September and are now around 75%. That’s always been the real story. He’ll win and probably win big.
8 thoughts on “Arnold Will Win”
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Hell yeah. If a female-groping, cheating maniac can spend 8 years in the White House, I would think a guy who did it 30 years ago when he was single and everbody else in Hollywood was doing the same could become state governor.
This could indeed turn into another rout for the liberal punditocracy. Few of them seem to have learned from the Congressional elections. Remember the Jeb Bush canard, and all those angry Democrats who were going to make him pay for 2000 ?
The fact that this same tactic failed against Clinton shows that the liberal apparatus is motivated by anger and a desire for vengeance and not common sense.
I anticipate a huge win for Arnold, probably an outright majority.
The only real losers in this race are the hardcore rightwingers in this thing who foolishly backed McClintock to the end, and McClintock himself, who will at least not be a spoiler. But, by staying in to the bitter end instead of going for party unity, is owed nothing by Arnold. McClintock has effectively positioned himself and the movement he represents out of the GOP, which just won an election without any participation by him and his ilk at all.
McClintock is a decent guy and is principled (and with the right principles) in a way that the other candidates aren’t. He ran a straightforward campaign, and provided a valuable service by making it difficult for Schwarzenegger to stray too far to the left. I don’t think McClintock should be blamed for not playing a game that other people think he should have played.
Now let’s see how Arnold does in office. I don’t have high hopes so I’m in a good position to be pleasantly surprised.
I still think that the main point of the recall was to make Davis accountable. In this respect the recall will have been successful no matter how Davis’s replacement performs in office.
It is not a matter of “blaming” McClintock. What I am saying is that as a matter of fact, because he did not play the “game” his cause and its supporters will have less influence and impact than they otherwise would have. In other words, he played a weak hand badly, in large part because he is “principled” and does not want to play games. I object to this not on moral but on practical grounds. In politics, to repeatedly say, “I will have all, or I will have nothing” means you will always get nothing. All Conservatives profess to love Reagan, but Reagan was always willing to cut his losses at some reasonable point rather than be totally marginalized. Reagan was effective, within the limits of what he faced. McClintock is not effective at all and has failed to make any use of the unusually favorable situation he faced. He is now in no position to extract any concession at all from anybody. I don’t agree that he kept Arnold from going left. I saw no evidence of that. Arnold, to the extent he articulated anything, stayed exactly as he has always been: libertarian about money, libertine about sex. I don’t think McClintock had any impact on Arnold at all. Arnold basically won this by running as if the conservatives do not exist. Now, for all practical purposes, they don’t, and this is due in large part to McClintock’s missplaying of the situation.
Lex, we shall see. We’ve already seen Arnold change his tack in response to criticisms from free-market types about, e.g., his emphasis of lefty tax-enthusiast Warren Buffett as a campaign advisor. McClintock may have had something to do with that, too.
My impression of Arnold is not that he is “libertarian about money,” but that he was trying to sell what the voters were buying. When he started to be criticized by serious people who pointed out that Buffett was an unsuitable avatar of low-tax principles, Arnold quickly enlisted respected free-marketer George Shultz and penned an anti-tax op-ed in the WSJ. This is not the behavior of someone staying as he has always been, but of someone who is above all responsive to the public. Arnold doesn’t owe McClintock anything, but McClintock may still have value to Arnold as long as there is a significant minority of committed conservative voters.
Lex and Jonathan – I’m pretty sure that the only reason Arnold got Warren Buffet on his side, is because he thought it would economic ‘muscle’ to his team. I’d be willing to wager that Arnold was quite ignorant of Buffet’s la-la-land economic views.
Lets be honest about the fact that Arnold has been touting his facination with Milton Friedman for decades now (including in his first couple media appearances after declaring) and never fails to relate the story of how he used to give “Free to Choose” Christmas gifts to his lefty Hollywood colleagues/friends. I also know first-hand that he has attended a bunch of Reason Public Policy Institute dinners and made speeches of solidarity there – as you know, Reason is one of California’s pre-eminent free-market think tanks.
The fact remains that Arnold’s heart is libertarian but he doesn’t really understand policy very well – perhaps he simply hasn’t tried, perhaps it is not his forte. But the fact remains that he never endorsed Buffet’s loony tunes, and dropped him like a hot potato as soon as he could. Also, he has pretty good free-market muscle on his team, that he will listen to. It has been well documented that he believes in delegating in business matters.
He never needed McClintock to ‘keep him from veering left’. McClintock might have had more influence on Arnold’s campaign by bargaining to join him as an adviser early on (perhaps in return for having dibs on Boxer’s Senat seat). But he in fact stayed on, almost as a spoiler, and now just comes off as a sour puss loser. Not cool.
Have some faith, guys. Arnold is not perfect, but the fact remains that he is the most libertarian governor in the country. This should be something to celebrate, not mourn or even be indifferent about!
Thanks, Rahul. I had forgotten about Arnold’s meetings with Friedman. I don’t usually associate faith and politics, but I certainly hope that you are correct.
Picking Buffett early on made sense from a PR standpoint. It lent his bid for governorship credibility, given the dire state of the budget. It did get him attention. If Buffer bothered to show up for him, the guy was not such a schmoe after all. And given Warren’s views, he was reassuring to the more moderate Democrats and bridged the gap between them and Arnold’s economic agenda. I think that was shrewd in that sense but maybe I’m reading too much into it.