Political India: Engaging America

From The Hindu

Arnold Schwarzenegger terminated his stint of more than eight years as Governor of California on Monday, leaving the fiscally beleaguered state with a $28 billion budget shortfall after failing to deliver on his early promise to “blow up the boxes” of its government.

The Austrian-born former body-building champion and Hollywood megastar, famed for his role as a killer robot with a heart, left the gubernatorial seat with a mixed legacy.

Among his notable successes was the passage of a climate change bill that sought to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and required a third of California's energy to be based on renewable sources by 2020.

However he suffered a major electoral defeat two years into his term – followed by declining popularity ratings that culminated in a low of 23 per cent this week – as a raft of budget austerity measures that he proposed was defeated in a ballot.

The measures were primarily opposed by labour unions, who sought to resist his attempts to impose a budgetary spending cap and create a new legislative redistricting panel.

“Picking a fight with the teachers and nurses [unions], or choosing to do redistricting in the manner in which he chose to do it; all of those things were misspent capital,” said Don Perata, a former Democratic California Senate President, in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Perata added that the former Governor would have been more successful if he had introduced his reform proposals earlier in his term, when he was more popular.

While Mr. Schwarzenegger managed to get re-elected in 2007, matters only got worse from there with the California economy reeling from the effects of the global economic downturn beginning in 2008. As he said in his final address on Saturday, California faced no shortage of upheavals during his term, including the worst recession in 80 years, floods, oil spills, a raging firestorm, mudslides and earthquakes.

Even as California bucked a national trend to vote a Democrat, former Governor Jerry Brown, in Mr. Schwarzenegger’s place, the “Governator” reflected on his administration’s achievements over eight years.

Emphasising the transformation of the state into a haven for clean-tech investments, he said “The opportunity to give back something as Governor has been an immigrant’s dream come true... and history will be the final judge of my administration’s record.”

Perhaps, but this would appear to be one state that even the most muscle-bound action superhero could not fix.

Labels: Arnold Schwarzenegger