"An Action Star with Feet of Clay"

"Schwarzenegger's very first gubernatorial act, rescinding a rise in the car tax, was his greatest failure of imagination, instantly blowing a nearly $4-billion annual hole in his budget.
"Schwarzenegger had telegraphed this step during his campaign by dropping a wrecking ball on an Oldsmobile spray-painted with the words 'Davis Car Tax.' Yet in following through, he made himself Exhibit A for the adage, which I've just coined, that politicians always become prisoners of their own panders. (cf. immigration and Whitman, Meg.)
"The consequent revenue gap poisoned Schwarzenegger's entire administration. He could never fill it, because his imagination hadn't registered the basic truism that in California it's very easy to take a wrecking ball to an old tax but almost impossible to enact a new one. Of the state's currently estimated budget gap of more than $25 billion, 100% would have been covered by an unwrecked car tax."

In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik writes an obituary for Arnold Schwarzenegger's governorship.