Ehrlich's been a pretty crappy governor in Maryland. What has he done, other than trying to get legalized slot machines?
Yeah, well, they left off Arnold too, so not every sh**tty governor was able to make the sh**tty governor list.
Arnold isn't a bad governor. Arnold’s problem is that having been elected on a platform to reform the state and convert it from being a national “basket case”, he now finds himself unable to push forward the very reforms he was elected to enact… which to my mind is pretty bizarre, all the same if California wants to vote against its economic interests and try and maintain some kind of one party dominated, social market never land… then they can go right ahead.
I should stress that California isn’t the only state with problems originating from a long period of one party rule, corruption, high or low taxation and poor public services… Texas and Ohio both spring to mind.
Meanwhile Arnold’s actual running of the state, the defeat of the initiatives aside, has not been bad in of itself, he’s competent and his administration is relatively “clean”, in contrast to governors like Taft, Fletcher, Blagojevich etc… who deserve to be listed amongst the countries’ worst. And I repeat that how and effective and popular governor like Sanford was listed as one of the worst in the country baffles me!
Returning to the issue of the reforms proposed by Arnold in his propositions, it was the same kind of test which Mark Warner had faced with helping Virginia’s education system and overcoming a big republican majority in the state house and senate… I would argue that Arnie’s task was even harder, but California needs reform urgently and so far all his opponents can offer is farcical arguments that the status-quo is working, unlike Warner and other governors Arnie would seem to have failed this big test of imposing your program over often stiff opposition.
