The Governator: A Recipe for GOP Disaster?

A popular theory amongst political junkies is that the future of a Republican party with any hope of electoral success lies in the model of Arnold Schwarzenegger - a tough-talking leader who promised to generally avoid the termination of liberal social causes, while slashing government excess like a futuristic cyborg with a machete. Unfortunately, Ahhhnold was apparently reprogrammed before he took office, because instead of taking a machine gun to California's bureaucracy, he protected it like it was a young John Connor. And this paragraph is now over, because I am officially out of Terminator puns.

Anyway, the problem with Schwarzenegger is that his economics have been suspiciously similar to those of another Republican who promised fiscal sanity - George Bush. California's economic woes have, in fact, become so bad that the state is now making national headlines because it could go completely bankrupt. So what's left to attract those who describe themselves as "conservative"?

Schwarzenegger blew into office decrying California’s bloated budget, vowing to “blow up the boxes” of Sacramento’s bureaucracy, and promising to never again let the Golden State go near Gray Davis’ record-setting $38 billion deficit. Five years into the Schwarzenegger era, the budget has ballooned from $100 billion to $145 billion, and the state’s legislative analyst announced in November that California was facing a deficit of $28 billion. Bond market ratings assess the state as a bigger lending risk than Slovakia. And those bureaucratic boxes have remained largely intact.

But it will take more than just eschewing cultural conservatism and adopting the Democrats’ interventionist economic approach to refresh the Republican brand. There is room right now for an opposition party that emphasizes what the governing party does not: freedom, as both the ultimate goal and the means to achieve it.

Back when he was taping testimonials for Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, Arnold Schwarzenegger looked like the kind of person who would indeed choose freedom if given a chance to govern. Instead, he punted on the radical, government-reducing reforms offered to him by his own box-exploding California Performance Review and learned to love—or at least perpetuate—the very bureaucracy he was elected to confront. That’s not a blueprint for 21st-century Republicanism. It’s just George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism with a Hollywood face.

There are, in fact, a large number of voters who understand that a constantly-expanding balloon of government debt will, sooner or later, affect the everyday lives of normal Americans in very bad ways. These voters are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the GOP because of records like Arnold's. If the Republican party becomes known for the fiscal policies of California, or, indeed, the Bush administration, it will have extreme trouble in anything but the reddest of red states.