There was Larry King Live, now there’s The Tonight
Show with Jay Leno. What’s next? Comedy Central’s news parody
program The Daily Show?
The tittering Republicans so enamored with Arnold Schwarzenegger
undermine their own case that the crisis is dire by addressing it
in such a light setting. Doesn’t it occur to them that their
candidate’s announcement on a show of gags and jokes just
buttresses Gray Davis’s argument that the state is not in a solemn
crisis justifying a recall? The superficiality of it all lends
support to the Dems claim that the Republicans are engaged in a
frivolous power grab.
A serious Republican filed papers to run in the recall this
week. But his name is not Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is Tom
McClintock, a budget hawk in the state legislature who was
carefully laying out his plans to address the $38-billion budget
crisis while Schwarzenegger was screwing around on Leno.
A Schwarzenegger run represents power without purpose. It seeks
to substitute a liberal with a D after his name for a liberal with
an R after his name. Boy, what a meaningful recall: We could go
from a tainted pol to a tainted celebrity!
McClintock, however, isn’t engaged in a lark. He is not
interested in a cheap celebrity victory but in rescuing the state
from a deadly serious budget crisis. He says he will cancel the
electricity contracts Davis signed in a panic during the state’s
power crisis in 2001, call for a special session of the California
Legislature to rewrite California’s business-destroying workers’
compensation laws, and rescind the car tax Davis has tripled to pay
for his excessive spending. These acts do not require legislative
approval, so McClintock says he could do them “before lunch” on his
first day in office. He has also told the press that he is
committed to “zeroing out the budgets” of every duplicative agency
in the state government.
What does Schwarzenegger stand for? Nothing as specific as
McClintock. As Schwarzenegger stood behind a podium emblazoned with
“The Tonight Show” — a little show-business back-rubbing at its
best (Leno’s surrogates no doubt worked out some deal with him to
field questions behind a “Tonight Show” podium) — he spoke in
generalities and banalities about his plans for the state. To the
extent that he said anything, he sounded not like a fiscal
conservative but a moderate Democrat. He said that he wanted
businesses to come back to California so that the state government
could collect enough tax revenues to provide social “programs.”
This is the sort of obtuse comment middle-of-the-road Democrats
always make, forgetting that businesses are leaving the state
because they are tired of paying high taxes for those big
government social programs.
Schwarzenegger is the sort of Republican Jay Leno could love —
a Republican in name only, capable of advancing an essentially
Democratic agenda through the Trojan Horse of liberal
Republicanism.
Schwarzenegger’s Republicanism is about as real as his movies.
It is jokey — after heart surgery, he cracked, “We made, actually,
history, because it was the first time ever that doctors could
prove that a lifelong Republican has a heart” — and P.C. to the
core. He has told the press he is “very liberal” about social
programs, supports abortion and homosexual adoption, and advocates
“sensible gun controls.” His entree into politics last year was a
proposition Democrats endorsed because it raised state spending for
what amounted to state babysitting — before-school and
after-school programs that cost the state up to $455 million a
year.
He has complained openly about the party’s conservatism. In an
interview with CNN after Richard Riordan tanked in last year’s
primary, he declared that a “conservative Republican will not win
against Gray Davis.” Talk magazine described him as “impatient”
with the religious right. In an interview with George magazine, he
expressed disgust with the Republicans who impeached Clinton. “That
was another thing I will never forgive the Republican Party for,”
he said. “We spent one year wasting time because there was a human
failure. I was ashamed to call myself a Republican during that
period.”
Given this, we are supposed to believe Schwarzenegger is the
solution to the California GOP’s collapse? He is not a solution to
the GOP’s collapse; he is a symptom of it. The party is so
rudderless it is content to field candidates Kennedys can vote
for.
If the Republicans want an honorable, not hollow, victory, they
will get serious and support Tom McClintock.
