Tom McClintock = Ronald Reagan of 1966

"2) is so very, very principled -- so confident that his views are correct (and they are), so unconcerned of whether others might incorrectly disagree with him -- that it actually works against his ability to pal around with undecided voters, liberals, etc., making him seem aloof, even though he isn't."

You may be right, and if so, he's in entirely the wrong profession. Maybe he should be an auditor.

The art of politics involves persuading people. In the case of California these days, it means a Republican MUST MUST MUST persuade some independents and democrats to vote for him.

Back to the auditor thing. I worked in corporate financial management. We always had some brilliant accountants and analysts that we could NOT take to speak with senior management.

Although these individuals were highly competent, they came up short on seeing "big pictures" and integrating their contribution, to the larger tasks of the organization.

I'm not saying McClintock is that dry and single-mended. I will say that his doggedness in having all the right policies (which I grant he may have) has perhaps been developed at the expense of having a pragmatic political scenario, for getting those ideas accross to voters, and enacted in legislature.

Similarly, he has come up short of money. Bad planning by him.

Ronald Reagan had charisma and he was never arrogant. That kind of puts him in a different league from Mr. McClintock from what I've seen of him.

Isn't that the truth! Very well stated! IMHO McClintock is NO Ronald Reagan!

Getting really sick and tired of everyone being talked about as the next Ronald Reagan -- there was one Ronald Reagan and I doubt if I see another one like him -- he was one of a kind and this Country was fortunate that he became President when he did to turn the Country around!

Hate to say this but you are voting on the successor to Davis when the recall goes through so how splitting the Republican vote is a good thing is beyond my comprehension.

Republicans need united when they go to the polls to oust Davis and pick a successor. Simon was a man of character when he realized that he couldn't win and didn't want to split the vote.

"Ronald Reagan would never have split the Republican vote, thereby electing a Democrat."

Of course, Reagan was man enough to run in the Republican primaries. It's easy to claim to be a Republican like Arnold does and yet run only when he doesn't have to face the Republican electorate. Why didn't Arnold run for governor or some other office in 2002? Or why doesn't he run for the Senate in 2004? Could it be that Arnold knows that he's a pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage, anti-gun, pro-big-government LIBERAL and as such he would never beat a true Republican like Tom McClintock in a Republican primary, even in California? Arnold Schwarzenegger is like former Congressman Tom Campbell, who was so socially liberal that he got the state legislature to adopt an all-in primary format, later declared unconstitutional, because he knew it was his only chance to be nominated by the GOP statewide---and then got b1tch-slapped by Diane Feinstein in the general election. Arnold's "Republicanism" is also like John McCain, who only won primaries in states where Democrats and independents could vote for him in the supposedly GOP primaries, but who lost bigtime among registered Republicans---some Republican that is! Arnold wants to keep the Kennedy Dream alive by tricking conservative and moderate Californians into thinking that their vote would be "wasted" on Tom McClintock, the only non-liberal with a chance, and Arnold fight it out with Bustamante over the liberal vote. But if all Californians vote for the person with whom they agree on the most issues, Tom McClintock will win in a walk.

"if all Californians vote for the person..."

Back in realityland. only Arnold or Cruz can win. Choose.

And if all conservatives - Simon supporters, Ueberroth supporters, and the misguided conservatives who are backing Arnold - were all to unite under the one candidate who best reflects their values, Tom McClintock, we could all win one last one for the Gipper on his home Turf.

HELLO! What were you KA conservatives doing the last several elections??!! Were you not united behind one candidate each time and LOST? Face it, you guys don't have enough votes.

McClintock is a career politician who has caught the desease they all seem to get. That's why he won't drop out. It's about TOM, not about the best interests of the party or people.

"Back in realityland. only Arnold or Cruz can win. Choose."

If the California recall election had a run-off between the top two finishers, and Bustamante and Schwarzenegger finished 1-2, then you would be correct, Californians would have to choose between the two liberals (as they had to do in the 2001 LA mayoral election). However, goven the fact that there are more than two candidates in the ballot, you are starting off from a faulty premise. Whoever gets a plurality of votes will win, and if conservatives and moderates vote for Tom McClintock, he will win handily because (i) moderates and conservatives outnumber liberals in California, and (ii) even if liberals outnumbered moderates and conservatives, Bustamante and Arnold will split the liberal vote. Now all we have to do is convince conservatives such as yourself to support McClintock for governor. Let Arnold and Bustamante fight over the transsexual vote; McClintock will do common-sense Californians proud. We need to support the one guy who will stand up for conservative values and who will not raise taxes, whether income, sales, property or estate. Tom McClintock is our only hope.

"Tom McClintock is our only hope."

I'll be sure to post this to you the day after the election.

and the misguided conservatives who are backing Arnold -

At 35% that's the biggest block of Conservatives.... Hmmmmmm..... How you propose to change the misguided's mind?

Heck at 11% of the Conservatives Cruz gets a larger percentage than Arnold does of the Liberals at 8%..... Strange numbers floating around in this election so far....

You are right. There is no Ronald Reagan in this race. Go Arnold Go!

I agree they appeal to different voters.... but your contention doesn't comport with the polling data...


			––––––– Among Likely Voters –––––––
		LV 	DEM 	IND 	REP 	LIB 	MOD 	CON
Bustamante	35 	65 	20 	8 	64 	38 	11
Schwarzenegger	22 	7 	20	39	 8 	19	35
McClintock	12 	4 	10 	21 	 1 	 8	24
 {end snip}

Heck at 11% of the Conservatives Cruz gets a larger percentage than Arnold does of the Liberals at 8%..... Strange numbers floating around in this election so far....

Were you not united behind one candidate each time and LOST? Face it, you guys don't have enough votes.

You would be right except Arnold has a chance of picking up a fair percentage of crossover votes. No Republican would crossover for Bustamante and no Democrat will crossover for McClintock. McClintock's disgraceful desire to be governor where he TRULY does not have enough votes only makes him look totally selfish in my mind. McClintock can bring in votes just as Simon did last time ... no crossovers to "pump up" the Republican side!

""Tom McClintock is our only hope."

I'll be sure to post this to you the day after the election."

If McClintock wins, then I would have been right all along. And if Bustamante or Arnold win, then it will be more of the same for California, just as if Gray Davis was still Governor, and given that California would still be hopeless, I would be correct as well.

This is an election, not an exercise in vote-counting. The election hasn't occurred yet, so conservatives can still change the destiny of the state. Remember Lawrence of Arabia: "Nothing is written."

Grand Old Partisan, you're a student of our party's history, and you should know better than anyone that there is no way that electing a RINO such as Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California will result in Californians going on to electing real conservatives in the future. Exactly the opposite result is more likely. Before a RINO gets elected governor, real conservatives can win even in liberal states, since voters look at the totality of the candidates' views and may like more of what the conservative has to offer than what the liberal has to offer. For example, a conservative may be able to get votes from many blue-collar workers (who may agree with the conservative on social and foreign-policy issues, although not on economic issues) and also from many pro-choice, anti-gun suburbanites (who may agree with the conservative on economic and foreign-policy issues, although not on social issues). However, when the purportedly conservative party (i.e., the GOP) nominates a social liberal, this is seen as a sign that social conservatives are not "electable," and gives credence to the leftists' canard that conservative Republicans are "extremists" and are somehow comparable to the Taliban. Even worse, if a RINO serves as governor and implements policies that one would normally expect from a Democrat, it results in (i) conservatives becoming disenchanted with the political process, which usually carries over to future elections (the fact that independents and Democrats would vote for the incumbent RINO in his reelection is of no help 4 years later), (ii) the electorate and the media expecting "mainstream" Republicans to be like the RINO they're used to seing, and anyone to the right of him would be labeled an extremist (when a RINO wins, only an even more liberal RINO can succeed him---think Ryan replacing Edgar in IL and Celluci replacing Weld in MA), and, by virtue of (i) and (ii), we see that (iii) it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that only a RINO is "electable" in that state. It takes years to cleanse a state's Republican Party of the stains of a RINO governor, and until it recovers the party is doomed, especially since any attempts to move the party back to its traditional position is pooh-poohed by those who cling to the notion that if we nominate a "more electable" candidate, surely he or she will lead the party to greatness.

Let's look at California before social liberal Pete Wilson was elected Governor. George H.W. Bush carried California in 1988 (the 9th Republican presidential candidate in 10 elections to carry the state, by the way), so California was still willing to elect pro-life Republicans. Why would it be necessary to nominate a RINO like Pete Wilson for governor in 1990? But the GOP did, and Wilson won, and it resulted in (i) Feinstein and Boxer getting elected in 1992, (ii) Clinton carrying California that same year, and (iii) the GOP continuing to lose strength in CA in 1994 even though it was a big year for the party in just about every other state. Wilson's governorship made sure conservatives would have nobody to vote for. And CA isn't the only state where RINO governors have made the state more Democratic---the same thing happened in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey in the 1990s. All four of those states were a lot more Republican when they had Democrat governors than they were after the RINOs got elected (e.g., Bush 41 got 45% in MA, 47.5% in NY, 52% in CT and 56% in NJ in 1988 under Democrat governorships, but Bush 43 got 32.5% in MA, 35% in NY, 38% in CT and 40% in NJ in 2000 under RINO governorships). Now, I'm not saying that residents of these states would be social conservatives if not for the fact that they had RINO governors, but I do believe that the Republican presidential vote dropped by between 12.5% and 16% in these states largely because having RINO governors convinced residents of these states that social conservatives are automatically "extremist" and thus not worthy of their vote.

So, if you want California to go back to having a real Republican Party, you need to support Tom McClintock and not a RINO like Schwarzenegger. That's what history has taught us. If we forget the lessons of history, we are condemned to repeat the same mistakes. Let's not let it happen in California.

Would that you spent as much time campaigning against Cruz Bustamante as you do against Arnold Schwarzenegger.

how splitting the Republican vote is a good thing is beyond my comprehension.
Republicans need united when they go to the polls to oust Davis and pick a successor.

I think having both AS and TM as candidates will increase turnout and help shape the campaign/debate/advertisements/news, which benefits us more than the detriment of splitting the vote. Each candidate draws his own supporters to the polls, groups which include people who aren't registered Republicans.

If either AS or TM dropped out, the debates may shift leftward (with less time for GOP platforms) and Davis/Bustamante/unions could slime the GOP frontrunner with Davis' time-tested strategy. Both TM and AS contribute to the right direction of this election, and their candidacies help prevent Republicans from staying home on Oct 7th.

On an unrelated note, I heard on KNX today that private polling by Simon showed
Schwarzenegger 31%
Bustamante 25%
McClintock 17%
Ueberroth 8%

Grand Old Partisan, you say that "Ronald Reagan would never have split the Republican vote, thereby electing a Democrat."

So--here's McClintock's choice: he can stay in the race and thereby possibly split the Republican vote -- thus electing a Democrat (Bustamante).

Or he can get out of the race and thereby unite the Republican vote -- thus electing a guy who might as well be a Democrat (Schwarzenegger).

Why are all you "conservatives" so defeatist and so ready to abandon your principles? Rather than worrying about "splitting" your vote, why not unite behind a true conservative--McClintock. Until you people are ready to do that, do not look for conservative principles to ever be put into practice in California (or anywhere else, actually).

I am so darn tired of hearing lines like: "Californians will never elect a real conservative so we must go with the least offensive liberal." Instead of whining about how a conservative can't get elected in the state, get out and work for one this time around, and see what can happen. We came very close to winning last time around, with Bill Simon, an utter doofus of a candidate, who ran a totally lame campaign. We can win with an articulate and smart guy who knows the political territory like McClintock.

I don't know why I'm always hearing that McClintock should be a "good Republican" and not divide the party? That he should be a good little boy and fall in line behind Schwarzenegger? Why does "unity" only go one way? Why doesn't somebody ask Schwarzenegger to prove that he's a good Republican by deferring to McClintock, the one guy with the experience and smarts for the job.

Heck at 11% of the Conservatives Cruz gets a larger percentage than Arnold does of the Liberals at 8%..... Strange numbers floating around in this election so far....

The numbers were from the recently released LAT poll, which I haven't examined closely. Were the "conservatives" self-professed or categorized by their answers to other questions? Among the supplemental Latinos (to total 125 Latinos), there could have been some "conservatives," but that ethnic group disporportionately favored Bustamante. Someone pointed out that Bustamante was introduced in the survey as the only major Democrat in the election, while other candidates (including Schwarzenegger) did not get the benefit of such an endorsement. Also, the margin of error was +/-9%, which is very high.

'Unity" should go the way of the Republican front-runner, who is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Naw margin of error was +-3.... the 9 was on the latino adds..

http://images.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2003-08/9130937.pdf

The poll questions and answers.......