Jilted?

Like a car wreck on the freeway, I can’t help myself when it comes to reading these sort of posts on the Flash Report.

What comes across is Jon Fleischman’s sense of betrayal that Arnold mislead him and other conservatives.  And how Jon believed in Arnold.  Jon sounds like a jilted woman talking about her former cheating boyfriend but still pining for him somewhere down the road.  The soundtrack to this post is “Baby Come Back.”

Jon writes:  I must tell you, as someone who endorsed, supported and encouraged others to do the same for Arnold Schwarzenegger in the recall election of 2003, and his re-election in 2006, I am starting to feel like a chump. It’s not that I am mad at him, it’s more like I am hurt. I feel like he made a promise to all of us, and now he’s not keeping his word.

Now we look at this state budget stand-off, where the Governor has had a chance to bring everyone together to resolve issues, instead he has been attacking State Senators from our own party. Instead of using his constitutional power to call of the legislators back from their vacations to come up with a budget that is balanced, and makes a few more (modest) programmatic changes to better prepare us for out-year deficits, he is acting as an agent of the very same special interests that he vowed to “sweep out” of the State Capitol during the recall election.
 

Since the theme of this column is credibility, let’s go to the assertions that I am hearing that the Governor isn’t “bashing” Republican Senators at all (as he travels around the state, using innocent victims of the budget stalemate as political props in the districts of GOP Senators — disingenuous when he knows that Republicans have proposed a $10 billion authorization to pay these folks during the impasse).  (Note: This is the line in the sand the Democrats have drawn; it’s one Republican vote holding everything up and its Republicans who continue to move the goal posts that make passing the budget a problem, combined with a lack of trust they have in their own party’s governor to whittle away at the budget. It is not disingenuous but rather the inability of Republicans to see the real people behind the numbers that their action is hurting.)
And then Jon draws an analogy to Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech that makes no sense at all.  And why do conservatives continue to bring up Ronald Regan at every opportunity?  The man is dead. The man was last president nearly 20 years ago after having been elected nearly 30 years ago.  And Ronald Reagan’s optimism is absent from this party that has only one idea left to sell themselves to voters, and that is fear.  Fear of new taxes, fear of budget deficits; fear of universal health care, fear of terrorism, fear of developers seizing property while seeing an unspoiled environment as a new place to drill or mine, and fear of gays and lesbians who want to destroy the institution of marriage by getting married.  And a fear of all things liberal.

And here’s the money shot; the 3AM, drunken phone call of “I hate you, you ruined my life, I never want to see you again, but there is always hope for us baby” wrap up.

 I have had a lot of verbal and e-mail dialogues with those who, like me, worked hard to elect and re-elect this Governor. None of these conversations have ended on a happy note.But today is a new day, and I know that this Governor has it in him to change his tactics, and bring everyone together to craft a budget that can meet the constitutional two-thirds requirements in both chambers.  But that starts by using carrots, not sticks, with your own party’s legislators.  And, of course, it requires credibility.

Arnie…sniff…call me.