Schwarzeneggerism has taken over GOP and TEA PARTY.

The attitude that former Governor Schwarzenegger displayed while Governor in California has spread to the Republican GOP , and has crept into the Tea Party Movement .  

We know that the strategies proposed by the GOP’s gubernatorial candidates won’t work because they are essentially a retreat of the last seven years of failed policies –  of Schwarzeneggerism without a human face.The GOP has become the party of NO and the Tea Party began in California way before it was brought to national spot light by FOX NeWSes like Glenn Beck . It's no wonder to me that much of the current Republican attitude comes right out of the rule book of Arnold Schwarzenegger who was really  **BAD as  governor from the start (@). He was elected by a mob of angry American voters who ousted Gray Davis .Schwarzenegger’s political success. In 2002 the California Republican Party, still suffering from the anti-immigrant fervor cooked up by former Gov. Pete Wilson, failed to win any statewide offices for the first time since 1882. Yet just one year later Schwarzenegger led a recall effort against the fiscally reckless and managerially incompetent Democratic governor, Gray Davis, beating out the nearest Democratic challenger for the newly vacated position by a margin of more than 2 to 1. Even as Republicans nationwide took a drubbing in the 2006 elections, losing both houses of Congress and the majority of governorships for the first time in 12 years, the bodybuilder-turned-actor, running in an increasingly blue state, smashed Democrat Phil Angelides by a ridiculous 17 percentage points. (For more on how Angelides still managed to push California closer to fiscal disaster, see Jon Entine’s “The Next Catastrophe,” page 20.) (@3) How to pay for all this during what the governor has declared a “financial emergency”? Partly by rattling the tin cup outside the White House. Schwarzenegger was one of the first governors to hit up Washington for some of that fat bailout money gushing from the Oval Office.

Republicans in 2009 are in a mess of their own making. If they interpret the Democrats’ sweeping victory as a clarion call to foray further into religiously inspired, Terry Schiavo–style politics that uses government as a lever to manipulate and control other people’s lives, then they will deserve their exile from power.

But it will take more than just eschewing cultural conservatism and adopting the Democrats’ interventionist economic approach to refresh the Republican brand. There is room right now for an opposition party that emphasizes what the governing party does not: freedom, as both the ultimate goal and the means to achieve it.

Back when he was taping testimonials for Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, Arnold Schwarzenegger looked like the kind of person who would indeed choose freedom if given a chance to govern. Instead, he punted on the radical, government-reducing reforms offered to him by his own box-exploding California Performance Review and learned to love—or at least perpetuate— (@ 2) the very bureaucracy he was elected to confront. That’s not a blueprint for 21st-century Republicanism. It’s just George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism with a Hollywood face.

   Schwarzenegger may have also "inspired" Wisconsin's own Governor to lash out at the Unions by going over the People and taking away bargaining rights of Unions  . In December 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faced a group of nurses protesting his decision to maintain large staffing ratios in hospitals. He blithely called them “special interests” and said, “I always kick their butt.”  Soon he was facing a challenge from the 5-foot-tall and very effective head of the nurses’ union, Rose Ann DeMoro, who ultimately made him eat his words. The governor learned that conservative rhetoric against unions was no match for the public’s approval of police officers, trash collectors, nurses and others who keep the lights on and the doors open..

Chief among the things Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg have accomplished is winning elections. Republicans took an even worse drubbing in November 2008 than in November 2006, and as I write are neck deep in a civil war over the party’s future, with cultural conservatives rallying behind controversial Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to represent what is now the largest voting bloc remaining inside Ronald Reagan’s diminished big tent. To the less-than-casual observer who has a distaste for social conservatism (i.e., the average journalist), the only way forward for the Grand Old Party in the 21st century is a kind of moderate Schwarzeneggerism. “Pragmatic Republicans like [Florida Gov. Charlie] Crist, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and even conservative Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal,” Time’s Tim Padgett wrote after the 2008 elections, “will likely be the phoenixes that rise from the GOP ashes of 2008.”

If that’s true, Republicans may be worse off than we thought. It’s not that Schwarzenegger is wrong about de-emphasizing or even rejecting elements of social conservatism. Expending political energy on making sure same-sex couples cannot be legally recognized as married, as  (@4) Republicans continue to do with short-term success in California and elsewhere, is both bad policy (by consciously restricting the freedom of a disfavored minority) and lousy politics. The under-30 generation does not much comprehend political animus toward gays and ethnic minorities. As a result, voters between the ages of 18 and 29 are abandoning Republicanism in near-record numbers. Forget the youthful, cross-cultural Barack Obama; the 18-to-29 vote went 63 percent Democrat to 34 percent Republican for the House of Representatives. If Republicans aren’t careful, they’ll go the way of newspapers, becoming something only old people are interested in.

 NOTES TO ARTICLE: 

 ** How does Schwarzenegger defend this sorry record? In part, by blaming Republicans. “I think the important thing for the Republican Party is now to also look at other issues that are very important for this country and not to get stuck in ideology,” he said on CNN five days after the election. “Let’s go and talk about health care reform. Let’s go and…fund programs if they’re necessary programs and not get stuck just on the fiscal responsibility.”

 (@)The 'angry mob of voters' this is an allusion to the TEA PARTY MOVEMENT. This 'movement'  was in it's infancy in California when the 'recall' election got it's shot in the arm . I blame the voters for the Mess in government . The Tea Party is not your ordinary folks who want to change the system , but it's a right wing movement that has crippled the national government from functioning . As a conservative I don't ascribe to the ideology of the TEA PARTY as of this writing  The Tea Party  has  fallen under the wing of the RELIGIOUS RIGHT which echos the the same mob mentality that shook California into a recall election . (@2) This is the Tea Party (@3) Gov. Schwarzenegger should have asked Obama for more, MONEY  when President Obama shelled out the stimulus money . During the many budget debates with the Democrats , and his calling them "Girl y Men" Arnold stood the ground as an anti-tax Governor cutting money from Education , But the spending splurge also requires new taxes, according to the governor: a “temporary” 1.5-percentage-point increase in the 7.25 percent sales tax, an increase in the number of services covered by the sales tax, higher taxes for alcohol and oil production, and so on., If you note this vary same ploy was being carried out in WASHINGTON D.C.by President Obama while trying to negotiate the Debt ceiling .YES using the Vary Gimmick used by Schwarzenegger in California . (@4)  I am sure the Tea Party is a force we will hear about in the next decade if American Politicians don't fix the nations economic problems...which was taken at an early tea party and thus suggests that a single clueless demonstrator might be responsible for everything. But if anyone heard the word in this context before that picture started circulating in late February, 2012  I'd be interested to see your citation.