[jyl]

He won the election thanks to his Hollywood star power, voter anger at Gray Davis, lots of money, and a heaping load of ridiculously unrealistic campaign promises, bordering on lies. For example, telling the voters that he could balance the state's budget simply by "cutting fraud and waste", which is totally false.

As Governor, his main accomplishment so far has been to apply some huge bandaids to the state's budget, in the form of massive bond issues that simply postpone the big financial crunch by a couple of years.

Some of the thngs he is trying to accomplish make a lot of sense, in my opinion. Having an independent commission determine legislative districts will prevent gerrymandering by party in power (currently, the Democrats) and should lead to genuinely contested legislative races and more centrist legislators. Reducing the power of public employee unions will remove some of the obstacles to reform of our educational system. I hope he gets his way on many of his priorities, and I plan to vote that way in the special election (if we have one).

However, I don't see him tackling our basic budget imbalance. In addition to the band-aids mentioned above, he's been taking money from local governments so that our cities are struggling to keep libraries and fire stations open. He may insist that higher taxes are not an option, but in the end taxes are being raised anyway - local sales and parcel taxes - by the cities that can afford it. Other, poorer cities are simply losing their public services. Many school districts have been eliminating their sports, arts, music, after-school, etc programs.

He's been surprisingly bad at public relations, for a Hollywood actor and a very smart businessman. It seems like he's relied simply on his star power, and now he needs to get smarter.

Basically, I'd give him a C+ grade.