Trump presidency looks a lot like early Schwarzenegger governorship

[yurbud]

In both cases, Republicans got their guy in office even though the vast majority of people didn't like the conservative policies they were about to enact.

In California, it some political machinations and sleight of hand that made Cirque du Soleil look like a slug crawling across the sidewalk.

With Trump, it was some combination of a political traffic accident and machinations.

Like Trump, when Schwarzenegger started governing like a hard right Republican, he was met with overwhelming opposition.

Ultimately, Arnold had to back down quite a bit, hired a Democratic consultant, and started governing like a conservative Democrat, so he could at least get re-elected and finish his time in office without ruining his brand so much he couldn't act anymore.

I'm not sure if Trump has that out.

He is either going to quit or be removed.

But the public pressure could make the Republican PARTY back down.

Wouldn't it be nice if the REPUBLICANS became the party of incremental change and DEMOCRATS made broad, sweeping reforms that lasted for decades?

[Turbineguy]

1. And the republicans

stabbed Schwarzenegger in the back too.

[still_one]

2. I don't agree with you bud. Schwarzenegger was never like trump. Yes, he messed the state up

financially, and won because of the circus atmosphere during the recall garbage perpetrated by the republicans taking the blame for energy costs based on the deregulation caused by the republicans. However, on social programs, Schwarzenegger, was no trump, though he messed the state up financially big time, and Jerry Brown bailed us out.

[yurbud]

5. Do you mean Repubs putting blame for energy cost on Davis?

the recall garbage was the only way they could get a Republican governor in who had a chance of winning re-election.

No one acceptable to general election voters could make it through the GOP primaries, so they had to do that recall as a hail Mary pass.

[still_one]

12. Yup, you nailed it

[Wounded Bear]

15. Europeans in general tend to look like Center-Right Democrats in the US...

or at least they used to before the current sudden lurch to far right politics fomented by Putin.

Schwarzenegger was almost palatable to many Dems. California had a long history of minority Repubs forcing the state to the right using hostage tactics. They were the first state to vote in the crap where it needed super majorities to do mundane shit like pass an annual budget. After many, many years of that shit, they finally voted in a Dem super majority and the economy has been humming ever since.

No difference between the two parties? Not buying it.

[grantcart]

3. Not even close

To begin with Grey Davis was a terrible Governor. He allowed the power companies to take over the power system and gouge the state power prices. Large parts of California had their power turned off.

Schwarzenegger never tried to govern like a "hard right Republican". He tried to find common ground but was sabotaged by hard right Republicans in the California legislature.

I watch Schwarzenegger closely and I have NEVER seen him engage in tribal politics dividing the races or against undocumented workers.

[yurbud]

6. the GOP engineered that electricity deal and blamed Grey Davis for a problem they created

[grantcart]

8. It was engineered by particular companies

You make allegations without citations

Who in the GOP was involved.

Davis was blamed by everyone for not getting on top of it. Having your electricity cut tends to make people angry.

I met Davis a couple of times and liked him a lot personally but he was not an effective chief executive, not everyone is. He would have been a good legislator.

[yurbud]

9. deregulation, plus Bush/Cheney refusing to enforce regs still on the books... and publicly blaming..

Saying whether the Bushies or the energy companies were in the driver's seat is kind of chicken and egg thing; either way, they were working hand in hand.

But those publications failed to put the timing of the meeting into context. Had they done so, it may have saved Gray Davis’ job. If they dug a little deeper, they would have found that while Schwarzenegger listened to Lay’s pitch on why California shouldn’t abandon deregulation, one energy company was nailed by federal energy regulators for shutting down it’s power plants to create an artificial shortage and boost wholesale prices in the state.

The discovery, however, was kept secret by federal energy regulators so Vice President Dick Cheney could release his National Energy Policy in May 2001. Had federal energy regulators released the evidence of the manipulation that took place in California it would have certainly derailed Cheney’s energy policy since it called for deregulating energy markets nationwide.

However, while Schwarzenegger shook hands with Ken Lay, former Gov. Gray Davis was lobbying President Bush and Cheney for price controls on soaring electricity prices. Bush and Cheney publicly blamed Davis for the crisis, saying he was too slow to act and dismissed his claims about an energy cartel manipulating the state’s power market. That, in part, skewed public opinion and left many in the state thinking that the crisis was Davis’s fault.

But, two years later, following Enron’s bankruptcy, evidence emerged proving Davis was right. Energy companies were manipulating the market and were responsible for skyrocketing prices and blackouts. After I connected the dots, showing how Schwarzenegger allowed himself to be courted by Lay, I asked him about the meeting at the Peninsula. Schwarzenegger said he didn’t remember.

http://projectcensored.org/13-schwarzenegger-met-with-enrons-key-lay-before-the-california-recall/

[grantcart]

14. You are completely off the point of your OP

The point is not did the GOP back bad policies, your point was that Schwarzenegger is the same as Trump. That is not only not based on any real facts it actually normalizes Trump.

Let's put it at the 5th grade level


Democrats - Good

Republicans - Bad

Trump - UnAmerican and evil. Nothing Schwarzenegger did (while he was married to a Kennedy) is comparable in any way to the evil that Trump did.

Citing bad policy of the GOP and/or Schwarzenegger does not, in fact, change the narrative. What Trump is doing does not compare with anything that was done by anybody else.

[yurbud]

7. Arnold didn't play the race and anti-gay cards here in CA because they knew it wouldn't fly but...

Last edited Sun Feb 12, 2017, 01:23 PM - Edit history (1)

he did present budgets with Republican level cuts, which tells you what those at the top of the party care about: cutting their tax burden and making sure that any money that does make it to government coffers ends up in their pockets instead.

[grantcart]

10. You start with a conclusion and don't really care whether the evidence supports it

Your sentence doesn't even make sense:

He played the race and anti-gay card here . . . because they knew it would fly

But even if you straighten out that sentence it completely undermines your OP premise that Schwarzenegger is the same as Trump.

Trump has run a tribal campaign of overt racist statements against Hispanics, bigotry against Muslims and a campaign of hatred against veterans, and a whole host of individuals including the father of a fallen soldier.

He is now using law enforcement officers to destroy American families. None of that was comparable to Schwarzenegger's term as Governor.

None of that compares with the budget which was the result of Schwarzenegger and the Democrats working with 10 Republicans. You ignore the fact that Schwarzenegger had a much easier time coming to agreement with Democratic legislators than he did with Republicans

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/19/local/me-budget19

SACRAMENTO — As state senators spent a second frustrating day locked inside the Capitol, Democrats and the governor began closing in on a deal with a GOP holdout that had the potential to resolve California's fiscal emergency.

The agreement would involve Sen. Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria providing the final Republican vote needed to pass a spending plan with billions of dollars in tax hikes in exchange for the Legislature's rewriting election rules that Maldonado says are stacked against political moderates like himself.

The election law changes, which would undermine the influence of political parties and the special interests that fund them, are unpopular with Democrats. But they say they are willing to deal. "My caucus understands we have to do some things we don't like," Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) said.

. . .

"We should reopen negotiations and we should pass a no-tax budget," Hollingsworth said. "The majority of the Senate Republican caucus said we want to stand for a no-tax budget."

But the coup appeared to have marginalized him and the 10 other GOP senators who have already cast their lot against new taxes. Democrats and the governor refocused their efforts away from the caucus leadership and on the small group of GOP dissidents who have signaled they are prepared to vote for the package.

[yurbud]

11. sorry, it was a typo. I meant to say DIDN'T

[yurbud]

13. that fits my point: Arnold was able to change to hold onto office...

I doubt that Trump has that wiggle room.

[grantcart]

16. Here are the facts

Schwarzenegger ran initially on a right of center, but not radical, campaign

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/08/27/schwarzenegger.views/

He was able to govern by compromising with Democratic legislators and splitting the Republicans

He not only won the recall election but won 3 years latter:

Schwarzenegger ran for re-election against Democrat Phil Angelides, the California State Treasurer, in the 2006 elections, held on November 7, 2006. Despite a poor year nationally for the Republican party, Schwarzenegger won re-election with 56.0% of the vote compared with 38.9% for Angelides, a margin of well over one million votes.[73] In recent years, many commentators have seen Schwarzenegger as moving away from the right and towards the center of the political spectrum. After hearing a speech by Schwarzenegger at the 2006 Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom said that, "[H]e's becoming a Democrat [… H]e's running back, not even to the center. I would say center-left".

He NEVER ran a tribal campaign like Trump and when you suggest that the two are similar you are actually normalizing Trump by making it look like he is just another Republican, which he is not.

Your OP has been disproven in its separate elements and its general conclusion you should delete it.

[ghostsinthemachine]

4. Almost a mirror image. His campaign resembled AS(S) too

Neither had a fifth grade civics knowledge of how the Govt runs. Both thought they could just do things. Both bullied their aides, the public, legislators, and anyone they disagreed with.
Deep in the pocket of big oil, the banks, etc (the good thing about AS was he did take climate change seriously).
The great thing about Ahhhnold's term here was no Republican will ever be elected to statewide office ever again in CA. Let's hope that will happen nationwide at the end of this debacle.

[yurbud]

17. Demographics were already going to kill the GOP, which is why they needed Arnold

he was their last hurrah, and why they tried to sell their "post-partisan" snake oil, which some centrist Dems sometimes reached for too.