The Little Brown Reader

It is easy to count the reasons why Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory may be a special case, without wider significance. He won partly because of his exceptional celebrity, and partly because the recalled governor, Gray Davis, had all the popularity of a cat at a dog show. That circumstance may not repeat itself very often. He won as an outsider in a state that is peculiar anyway, in an election that was more than peculiar, when voters were uncommonly angry with elected officials.

Yet the fact remains that Mr Schwarzenegger has instantly become the second-best-known Republican in the country. He has become governor of a state with 55 Electoral College votes—a state, moreover, that many Republicans had almost written off (Al Gore won California by 1.3m votes in 2000, and 44% of Californian voters now register as Democrats, compared with 35% as Republicans). He brought a disaffected cohort of voters into the electoral process and into his party. Republicans would be foolish to write this off as merely another weird consequence of Californian voters spending too much time in the sun.

The key to the wider meaning of Mr Schwarzenegger's victory lies partly in his policies—much more liberal than those of most Republicans—and even more in the kind of person he is, including the sexual accusations that surfaced in the last days of the campaign. He is the first nationwide political figure to have embraced the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s (in its weaknesses as well as its strengths) and still stayed a Republican.

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