Arnold and Maria are Splitsville

John Seiler:

It’s too bad that ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, are splitting up. That’s their personal business.

But it’s worth remembering that Maria dominated Arnold during the last five years of his governorship. Californians thought they elected a fiscally responsible, moderate Republican. But after he lost his slate of reform initiatives in November 2005, she took over and turned his administration in a radical, Democratic, Kennedy direction. Maria-Arnold lurched much further to the left than the Democrats Arnold defeated: recalled Gov. Gray Davis and 2006 election challenger Phil Angelides.

So much for the will of “the people” that Arnold always was chattering about.

The evidence of this is provided in the book, “The Governator: From Muscle Beach to His Quest for the White House, the Improbable Rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger,” by Ian Halperin. I reviewed it here on CalWatchDog.com last November. Here’s the key section from the bio:

And as she watched her husband eviscerated in the media and his approval ratings plunge for listening to the Republicans who had forced him to the right [with the Reform Platform], Maria was no longer content to sit around and play the smiling wife….

Maria couldn’t stand the Republican strategists, who she believed had hijacked her husband’s agenda and turned him into somebody she didn’t recognize anymore. She knew from the beginning that the special election was political folly, but she had been shut out of the loop repeatedly. Now it was time to exorcise the men who she believed were bringing her husband down in an idiotic power game they couldn’t possibly win….

Before long, Democrats had filled a number of key posts and were playing a vital role in guiding state policy. Many of the old Republicans were still around, but their role was greatly diminished.

“The Republicans would watch these Democrats with a free run of the governor’s office and it’s like they knew they were licked. They would call the Democrats surrounding Arnold ‘the posse’,” one statehouse staffer told me.

One of the first orders of business was mending fences with Democratic leaders in the Legislature. Maria counseled Arnold to make friends, telling him, “It shouldn’t be to hard to get into bed with the Democrats. You sleep with me every night” — a joke he would later recycle at rallies.

Maria took over and put Susan Kennedy (no relation), the far-left cabinet secretary under Davis, in as Arnold’s chief of staff. So after two years, Maria-Arnold overturned the recall — the will of “the people” — and put the Davis regime back in charge. Susan Kennedy became so powerful was called “the little governor.”

A couple of months later, Maria-Arnold signed into law AB 32, the jobs-killing global warming bill. Halperin writes:

Robert Kennedy Jr. [Maria’s brother] would later admit his direct role in crafting the legislation, “which Arnold read and then adopted.”

Then Maria-Arnold went on a wild spending binge that is the true cause of today’s budget deficits. When the economy crashed in 2008, and tax receipts along with it, in 2009 he signed into law a record $13 billion tax increase.

He left office with California’s economy in a shambles and its state budget perpetually in deficit.

Arnold is back doing movies, and Maria has her own projects. But together, the Maria-Arnold co-governorship “terminated” California.

May 10, 2011