CALIFORNIA DISPATCH
The Muscular Middle
Meet Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican's problem solver.
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005573
BY JILL STEWART
Sunday, September 5, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
The media have largely missed the import of who and what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is. It's tough for journalists to see past their own conventional wisdom--so you'll hear plenty about how surprised pundits are that a global superstar has become a highly effective governor, and plenty about how his liberal-to-moderate social views are giving his conservative party ulcers.
Neither of these predigested storylines is incorrect, of course. Wall Street is so approving of the governor's steady hand (he switched off the autopilot left on by Gray Davis and the long-ruling Democrats in the California Legislature, slashing expected spending for 2004-05 by $8 billion), that Standard & Poor's has just upgraded California's credit rating from triple-B to A-minus stable, the third upgrade from a rating agency in four months. Moreover, Mr. Schwarzenegger is pushing an unprecedented effort to force performance measures upon the state's moribund, 325,000-strong bureaucracy. And he's endearing himself to Californians by moving to keep a series of campaign promises, from rolling back a terrorist-friendly law that handed unrestricted driver's licenses to illegal aliens, to wresting away the corrupt workman's compensation system from the doctors, lawyers and uninjured workers who milked the state dry.
Mr. Schwarzenegger has done all this while failing to toe the GOP line on issues including abortion and the environment--and boy, does that bother the media! In a teleconference last month, the national media peppered his staff with disingenuous questions about how he gets away with being pro-choice. The precooked überstory, which journalists are determined to tell, is that Mr. Schwarzenegger is a facade for George W. Bush, painted onto the podium in New York last week to lure moderate voters to the polls and obscure the party's true troglodyte nature. |
