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Since thousands of volunteers who support the re-election of the Governor read this page every day, this seems like a good time to start to have a dialogue about that will happen in Sacramento when Arnold is re-elected by the voters! Given his very wide lead at the moment, and how his opponent Phil Angelides can’t seem to put it together, I think that everyone who prefers to see Governor Schwarzenegger in January and not Governor Angelides can start to look at the rest of the picture — what kind of environment will Arnold Schwarzenegger be operating in when he returns? (This is not an opportuntiy to slack in your hard work, by the way, but rather an invitation to start to think about the bigger picture).
For core Republican voters, I would submit that besides whom we elect Governor, there are two major areas in which we need to focus. One is the defeat of all of spending measures on the November ballot (this includes both the measures that raise taxes to spend, and also the measures that would put our children in debt in order to spend) — and the other is electing down-ticket Republicans into statewide office.
We will be talking about the importance of the down-ticket races in another commentary.
The following statement is very important. It is okay to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger on the November ballot and then reject all of the bond measures that he is touting along with ulta-liberal Democrats Senate President Don Perata and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez.
Yes, the Governor pledged in his State of the State address way back in January that he would put an infrastructure package before the voters. But the package that he proposed already had a lot of flaws, and that was before the legislature-sausage factory ate up his proposal and produced a different one — one that while borrowing less, contained much more ‘non-infrastructure’ (yes, much of the borrowing is to support more liberal social-engineering programs, not brick and mortor infrastructure), and did not contain many promised safeguards including a cap on the state’s debt limit, or expansive reform of CEQA laws for any of the spending associated with these borrowed dollars. Public opinion survey data guided the Governor in the direction of needing to ‘show the voters’ that he could work with the Democrats and put something on the ballot — and we all lost out as the Democrats successfully took advantage of the Governor’s political need by jamming him with a pork-laden, reform-light pacage.
So as we gear up for the final push to the general election, it is important that anyone who is working to re-elect the Governor also, with vigor, oppose not only every tax increase on the November ballot, but also oppose every bond measure on the ballot. Remember that our problem in Sacramento, like in Washington, is with SPENDING. Let’s focus not on where this money comes from (taxing revenues or indebting Californians for a generation) — but on the fact that the politicians in Sacramento already have an annual budget of $100,000,000.00++ (more than 100 billion dollars) to finance state government! In other words, you are already paying enough taxes to finance a lean but effective state government AND also a very, very considerable ‘pay-as-you-go’ infrastracture development and rehabilitation program (as was championed by Assembly Republicans last Spring).
We want to make sure that Governor Schwarzenegger, who has made the center-piece of his re-election campaign his opposition to any higher taxes and fees for Californians, goes back to the State Capitol in January in an environment where he can tell the liberals in the legislature — "The people have spoken, and they have rejected spending. Look, I worked with you to try that route, and our plea to finance needed infrastructure investments via borrowing was turned down. We must now look at how to build the roads, and bring California into the 21st Century, using the money we already have. We can do this if we can turn the same spirit of cooperation from last year towards this task. We must go through the entire state budget and ask for each program, ‘Is this more important than infrastructure?’"
You may see or hear the Governor offering his support for the borrowing — keep in mind that his polling shows that he wins by bigger numbers if he appears to the electorate to be bi-partisan (such as appearing with Perata and Nunez). Don’t let the Governor’s need to campaign to the middle sway you from giving the Governor the tools he needs to take on Sacramento spending (by rejecting the spending).
We are only going to be able to arm Schwarzenegger to engage in that kind of debate with the legislature if we all take a leadership role in seeing that ALL of the spending on the November ballot is rejected. That includes Phil Angelides and his fellow liberals. But is most especially includes all of the tax hikes and bond debt proposals on the November ballot.
So please join me in voting for Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republican ticket, and voting NO on the taxes and the bonds. That is the only combination of choices before us on the November ballot that has a chance of stopping government growth in its tracks, and starting down a path towards fiscal sanity in state government.
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