Arnold's California

Arnold is easily my favorite politician at the moment. He's fearless, bold, and intelligent. In January, rather than keeping his focus strictly on the budget, he opened up a multi-front war, to the surprise and consternation of his opponents. (whole article here - it's great)

• He wants a rigid limit on state expenditures that would impose across-the-board cuts when spending exceeds revenue.
• He proposes to change the state pension system by replacing defined benefits with individual accounts for newly hired workers, patterned after private-sector 401(k) accounts and in the spirit of Bush's Social Security plan.
• He is defying the education establishment and the California Teachers Association by backing merit pay for teachers and a change in tenure requirements.
• He is at war with the California Nurses Association over staffing ratios at hospitals.
• And in a battle other states are watching closely, Schwarzenegger wants to take the power to draw legislative and congressional district boundaries away from the legislature and put an independent panel of judges in charge of redistricting.

For those of us worried he wouldn't be conservative enough: "No one has ever raised taxes and solved the problem, nor will we solve the problem," he said. "We don't have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem."

Music to my ears.