Arnold, President Obama, and the Rhythm of American Politics

An interesting interview with Governor Schwarzenegger, Republican of California:

Excerpts:

Tea-party-style voter revolts are just part of “the rhythm” of American politics, he said.

“I’ve been the victim of that myself,” he observed. “People change very quickly, and you can’t complain because that’s the way people are....
“Obama was a great candidate. He speaks well, looks good, he’s articulate, he’s smart, blah, blah, blah, all these kind of things. They went running towards Obama: ‘Here’s our savior.’ They hated Republicans. So then Obama gets to office and talks about the things he promised. ‘We’re going to stimulate the economy.’ Well, wh-wh-what is this? Is this handouts? So everything that is put on the table is being fought as if he’s going against his promises, which he isn’t. But that’s the way it works, and it’s a very odd thing.”

Did Obama make a mistake, using all his capital on health care?

“He let other people do the negotiating,” Arnold replied. “If you want to travel around, if you want to put fires out all over the world, O.K., but you’ve got to be there for those negotiations.”

James Cameron’s Terminator likes to look at the big picture, or the “master shot,” as he puts it. And his own master shot shows him jumping from bodybuilding champ to top movie star to governor, scaling every peak “with tunnel vision.” He overcame movie focus groups that said, as he recalled, “Jeez, he scares the hell out of me, I feel like I’m in Germany and the Nazis are back.”

He speculated that Democrats and Republicans were too scared of him to pass a law allowing immigrants to run for president, but if they had, he would have jumped in — “because it’s there.”

Full Interview from Maureen Dowd's NY TIMES column


Record number of Americans Unemployed - Very hard hit are young people, particularly inthe African AMerican community, who have relied on part-time employment as a stepping stone to full-time work and as support while pursuing higher education and additional training.