Do you think Arnold was lousy CA Governor because he was too liberal or too conservative?
Arnold was a failure because he had no clue what he was doing. He was like a bull in a china shop, think that his Hollywood charm could substitute for actual governing. His disastrous special election that he called when the legislature refused to pass his per projects cost the state millions for no gain. If you want to get to the root of our state problems; it’s not the legislature or the Governor (look carefully, we have a pretty even balance in the Assembly and Senate, and more often than not Republican governors.) No, our problems come from Prop 13. This “tax revolt” took control of property taxes out of local hands, destroyed our ability to react to changing times, tied state revenues to income and sales taxes, and instituted a requirement for 2/3rds majorities on spending bills that guarantees an impasse over the budget every single year.
Doug B is right. Pro 13 is the root of California’s problems because the 2/3 requirement to raise taxes makes it almost impossible to raise taxes, and the Republican caucuses in the state legislature have been abusing the power that gives them. Schwarzenegger is not quite as bad a governor as people sometimes say he is. Sure, he hasn’t done everything right, but a lot of his problems are because the system made it impossible for him to get anything done. When people talk about how Gray Davis sucked because he raised the vehicle license fee, they forget that he had lowered it earlier because the state had a surplus. What he should have done was never changed the VLF in the first place so that the state would have built up a bigger surplus, and then he could lower it later.
