Last Action Zero

The reviews from the GOP base have poured in, and the conservative supporters that were instrumental in putting Arnold Schwartzeneggar in the California governor's chair have given his hiring of arch-lefty/lesbo sodomarriage extremist and ex-Gray Davis lieutenant Susan Kennedy a vehement thumbs-down:

Top California Republicans are wondering if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is moving left politically following his appointment to chief of staff of Susan Kennedy – a leading liberal activist and former aide to Democrat Governor Gray Davis.

"We're not moving anywhere," Schwarzenegger says, insisting that he is continuing to go "in the same direction."

Some of his Republican colleagues wonder what direction that may be.

"I'm getting more e-mails off of this [the Kennedy appointment] than I do for Viagra," said Mike Spence, president of the California Republican Assembly, in an interview with the L.A. Times....Asking if there isn't "even one Republican in the state to be qualified as chief of staff?" Spence said. "I think the Kennedy thing was just the last straw."

Hugh Hewitt has said on his radio program that this appointment is, and I quote, "insane." It would be like, and I quote again, "George W. Bush pink-slipping Andy Card and tapping Nancy Pelosi as his replacement." Can Ah-nuld really not know that in politics, everything you do sends a message to somebody, particularly if you're a moderate Republican whose oft-burned supporters have never been entirely comfortable with you? And that the message this Kennedy - note the name - hiring sends is, in essence, a white-flag waving to the Gollyfornia Left?

You would think that the Governator would also realize that he would probably help himself more with this appointment by being honest about the change in policy direction it clearly represents, instead of offering up double-talking BS defenses of it like the following:

GOP officials aren't alone in their criticism of the appointment, as Schwarzenegger discovered during a radio talk-show appearance with conservative host Roger Hedgecock on San Diego's KOGO radio station.

Said Hedgecock "You have once again stirred up everyone in the whole state with this announcement. This woman seems completely incompatible with any Republican principles."

Not so, said the governor, who described Kennedy as "a pro-business moderate" who had supported him on all of his doomed special-election ballot initiatives, including one which was fiercely opposed by Democrats because it would have put a limit on spending.

"All of the things that I have done in the last two years she believes in and actually said many times to me during the last two years that she has become a big fan of mine because of the things that I do," he told Hedgecock. [quotes and emphasis added]

Well, now. There are two possible ways to interpret Schwartzeneggar's comments. One is that he's a gullible sap who is so vulnerable to ego stroking - a process he has undergone more or less perpetually in Hollywood - that his philosophical discernment (never, given his ideological flaccidity, all that robust in the first place) was easily overpowered by a left-wing activist who wanted back into the upper echelons of power and knew just the way to get there.

The other is that he has had his fill of crusading for "the people" and is assimilating into the menshevik state establishment he couldn't defeat - or that, as George Neumayr believes, he was a part of all along:

The door behind which Schwarzenegger kept his de facto Democratic ideology has long been ajar and visible, but now he has kicked it wide open, and not even craven, win-at-all-costs Republicans can ignore it. Susan Kennedy herself blurted out the basic truth about Schwarzenegger: "I think a moderate Democrat and a moderate Republican - there is not a lot of light between us."

This point had been made during the Recall, but California GOP officials, relying on the usual "Big Tent" song-and-dance and shallow pragmatic arguments, cast it aside. They were given a choice between a meaningful victory with real Republican Tom McClintock or a hollow victory with a de facto Democrat, and they chose the latter. One immediate problem was solved, but multiple new and longterm ones were created....

There's just one tiny problem with that analysis - McClintock would have lost, and handily. "Electability" was the case for Ah-nuld from the beginning of the Recall campaign, and Republicans, above all else, wanted to win. Now that he has - finally - gone native, they can hardly claim, with any convincing level of credibility, to be shocked by it. That's why I said the other day that I gave Schwartzeneggar credit for battling the Dem establishment in Sacramento for as long as he did - I never thought he'd seriously take them on at all.

Mike Spence speaks of "a conservative revolt....brewing [that] will likely upend the 'French wing' of the California Republican Party," but I'm afraid the die is cast. They can draft McClintock again or re-run Bill Simon, who couldn't even beat Gray Davis. But the fact is that what they really need is another Ronald Reagan, and they don't have one. So they're stuck with Danny DeVito's "twin brother" for as long as he wants to be there. And the support Ah-nuld loses from the Right will simply be made up from the Left - which is why, I have to think, that he went out and recruited somebody like Susan Kennedy in the first place.

What's the moral of this sad story? That, as the massacre of the Governator's ballot initiatives decisively reiterated, Gollyfornia is a "blue" state. Which is why I concluded the other day what I will repeat here: it appears that nothing, not even the Last Action Hero, can save the Golden State from itself.

UPDATE 12/5: John Fund speculates whether Ah-nuld has jumped the shark.