AHNULD!

Not just a victory but a landslide. Mickey explains far better than I why this is a good thing. Roger Simon gets the basic point: the Eagle revolution. It’s a potentially excellent development for the state of California, for punishing a certain type of interest-group-beholden Democrat, and really, really good news for the future of the Republican party nationally. (Can you imagine how gloomy Alan Keyes is this morning?) Money quote:

Bruce Cain, the overquoted Berkeley professor, was just on television sneering that the recall doesn’t get California any closer to solving its problems. What an idiot. Schwarzenegger as governor will have weapons Davis doesn’t have, the most important of which is the ability to go over the heads of the legislature and rally public support–behind an initiative, if necessary. He might even be able to threaten to go into legislator’s districts and campaign against them (although the state is so heavily gerrymandered there may be no unsafe “swing” districts left). You want to amend the state Constitution to get rid of the paralyzing requirement that two-thirds of the legislature approve any budget? Schwarzenegger is the man who can do it. You want a tax increase if cutting the budget isn’t enough to close the deficit? Schwarzenegger’s the man for that too. As a nominal Republican, he is in a position to attract at least some Republican votes for a budget package that includes both taxes and cuts. And if even an anti-tax candidate like Schwarzenegger tells the voters some increases are needed, they’re more likely to accept it from him than from a Democrat whose first instinct is to pay whatever it takes to avoid public employee layoffs.

But Arnold also shows that Eagle politics can work – fusing low-tax conservatism with social tolerance and a tough foreign policy is the great missing politics in America. We may have just found our first truly charismatic candidate.