Schwarzenegger Interview Explains California’s Decline

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term years in office, 2003–11, remains one of the most consequential for California since 1991. That was the year Republican Gov. George Deukmejian left office and was replaced by moderate Republican Gov.

Pete Wilson, who promptly increased taxes and went to war with the conservatives in his party over those tax increases, badly wounding the party. The Media Is Helping Schwarzenegger Rewrite His Governorship Schwarzenegger Once Again Compares Jan. 6 to Kristallnacht But it did permanently increase general-fund spending.

So when the deficits hit again when he was governor, in 2008, the program inevitably became part of the budget crisis, contributing to the ensuing budget cuts and record 2009 tax increase of $13 billion. Prop. 49 was a practice run for governor, as Mr.

Schwarzenegger crisscrossed the state promoting the initiative, which garnered 57 percent of the vote. It was one of the worst cases of what’s called “ballot-box budgeting,” in which powerful special interests, in this case an ambitious governor wannabe, tie up budget spending for their own priorities. This prevents the Legislature from doing its job of weighing the state’s many needs and deciding priorities based on compromise.

“So people mentioned it a lot of times, but when the recall happened I said this is perfect, because I’m not right wing, I’m not left wing, I’m in the middle. That doesn’t play well in California with the primaries, because you have to be really to the right as a Republican. I said this is perfect: There’s a recall election, there will be no primaries, there will be no problem, I can go directly to the people and I can go and win.

All I have to do is tell them my plan and be convincing. And that’s exactly what I did. I said it’s between me and the voters.

” That’s a distortion. For one thing, Gov. Pete Wilson, elected in 1990 and 1994, was a moderate Republican.

Indeed, one of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s mistakes was hiring a lot of Mr. Wilson’s associates, who had promoted the latter’s disastrous, “moderate” tax increases with Democrats in 1991.

Moderates also won the GOP nomination with billionaire Meg Whitman in 2010 and in 2014 with economist and banker Neel Kashkari, now a member of the Federal Reserve Board. During this period, the only conservative the Republicans nominated for governor was Bill Simon in 2002. The late Mr.

Friedman obviously was not a “moderate,” but one of American’s foremost free-market economists. About that same time in the 1990s, Mr. Friedman visited us at the Register.

I remember him saying he was impressed by how much Mr. Schwarzenegger knew about free-market economics. I also distinctly remember many conservative Republicans voting for Mr.

Schwarzenegger precisely because he gave the impression he would govern as a conservative. I told them I was skeptical, and state Sen. Tom McClintock (now in the U.

S. House of Representatives) was better, but they replied, “I like McClintock, but he can’t win. ” Well, once in office, Mr.

Schwarzenegger applied Mr. Friedman’s free-market principles for two years, then spent five years increasing government, increasing taxes, and leaving the state worse off than in 2003, as I detailed in my aforementioned Epoch Times article. His touted “moderate” schtick also allowed him to avoid helping real Republicans, such as Mr.

McClintock, who came close to winning for lieutenant governor in 2006, garnering 45 percent of the vote to 49 percent for the winner, Democrat John Garamendi. If Mr. Schwarzenegger had teamed up with Mr.

McClintock and run on a unified party ticket, Mr. McClintock could have won, setting up his own position as successor in 2010. But Mr.

Schwarzenegger’s 2006 campaign precluded that. That continued how, in this interview, he never mentions the Republican Party in anything but a negative light. Mr.

Schwarzenegger’s attacks on his own party left it a wreck on the side of the political road, turning California into the one-party state it is today. “I walked by the television set, and I heard our new governor will be Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said. “When I heard that on the news, I literally had tears coming down my eyes.

It was the most powerful thing that I had ever felt or heard. I am going to become the governor of a state that has 40 million people, it’s the No. 1 state in the United States, it’s the fifth-largest economy in the world.

I am going to be the governor. ” “And that’s why I tell people you can call me whatever you want, but don’t call me a self-made man,” he said. “There were 5.

8 million people who voted for me to be governor. Each one of those people made me governor. ” “We found something in common, which is smoking, and we smoked our stogies, took our jackets off, took our ties off, and we were sitting there and saying what are you working on? So we started working together.

So this is what we did, and we got a lot of the things done because of the smoking tent. ”.