Charles Riggs wrote: >You engage in the same elitist >snobbery that the left did when they dismissed Arnold as just another >face, by assuming that he can't POSSIBLY do that job because he's an >actor.
Not at all. Acting success is not a bar to doing the job as a political leader- it just isn't sufficient to indicate anything at all. If a person had a Nobel in chemistry it would certainly be more indicative of intelligence and hard work, but we wouldn't think it qualified the person to be a leader of government. So why is success as a bodybuilder and the ability to utter lines such as "hasta la vista baby" an indicator of success solving California's budget problems? >Arnold won because HE understood what the electorate was saying to >the politicians. He won because Davis was a cold fish, widely disliked, and people were anxious for an alternative. Then he ran a clever campaign repeating lines from his films, and people are dumb enough to equate that to something meaningful. We may be lucky and he will turn out to be wonderful. He may be able to wave a magic wand and overcome the effect of voter-passed initiatives that limit the ability of government to raise revenue while earmarking the majority of the revenue that is raised for spending over which politicians have no control. He really may be able to roll back the vehicle registration fee increase that generates about $4 billion that the state sends to local governments for police and fire protection, libraries, parks, and other services, while finding other state money to continue funding those services. For the sake of my state I certainly hope so. Its just that his background and his campaign, which carefully avoided any debate where we might have learned something important about him, have given us nothing to go on. When I evaluate a candidate, I'd prefer more substance than simple repeating of lines from violent action movies. The most memorable line from the one debate he did attend was a veiled promise to stuff Ariana Huffington's head down a toilet. If we are reduced to enjoying things like that while ignoring the stories of the many women who finally had to guts to tell about his physical assaults on them, then I guess we get what we deserve. Bill ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
