Arnold slams Republican hypocrisy, tea party "going nowhere"

Appearing on ABC's "This Week" this past Sunday with Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Ed Rendell, California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called out his own party for being the party of "no" and for their blatant hypocrisy on the Stimulus Package. Schwarzenegger made an example of former Massachusetts Republican Governor Mitt Romney for outright lying at last week's CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), that the stimulus bill hadn't produced a single "net" job gain:

I find it interesting that you have a lot of the Republicans running around, and pushing back on the stimulus money and saying, 'This doesn't create any new job,' And then they go out and do the photo ops, posing with the big cheque and they say: 'Isn't this great, look at the kind of money I've provided for the state and this is money to create jobs, and this has created 10,000 new jobs, this has created 20,000 news jobs, and all those kinds of things.' It doesn't match up.

I don't want to beat up on my Republican colleagues but I think it is kind of politics rather than thinking about one thing, and this is: 'How do we support the president? How do we support him and everything we can in order to go and stimulate the economy back and think about the people and not the politics?'

Anyone that says this hasn't created a job, they should talk to the 150,000 people getting jobs in California, from the private sector and also from the public sector.



Governor Schwarzenegger also appeared on Greta Van Susteren's FOX News show last night, and said he believes the tea party will "twinkle and disappear" as the economy improves. Van Susteren attempted to get Schwarzenegger to take back his earlier criticisms of the tea party, intimating that he was misquoted. But Schwarzenegger called the tea party "an expression of anger and disappointment" and derided its lack of momentum or solutions:

People meet. They talk about it. What can we change? How? And it's all healthy and it's all good. But I'm just saying they're not going anywhere with it because nobody is coming up and saying, Here's our candidate, here's our solution, here's what we're going to do, and have a whole policy debate over the various different issues. So this is why I think, in the end, when the economy comes back, I think that the tea party will disappear again. It will, you know, twinkle and disappear, and that will be it. So that's exactly what I feel about it.

Van Susteren then attempted to get Schwarzenegger to bash the President Obama's Stimulus Package, "What about people who are slow to benefit from the results of America's first steps toward an uneven recovery?"

The Governor however didn't fall for it:

SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, to give you an example, in 2008, we passed redistricting reform. Do you see any effect of it today in California? Absolutely not. It's two years later and we still see no effect because the district lines will be drawn in 2010 now and they would have an effect maybe in 2012, a little effect. In 2014, then you will see more effect. You don't go and have changes like that and have an effect from one day to the next.

VAN SUSTEREN: So give me an idea -- so...

SCHWARZENEGGER: It doesn't happen. Sometimes those things take a long time. There's people that have treatments for an illness over a period of a year, of two years and three years. So you can't expect (ph) and just say, Those doctors are all no good. Forget about it. Go to a different team because they haven't helped, and so on. There's certain things that take a long time. To move government, to move this big thing, it's like the Titanic. You know, you see the iceberg there, so sometimes you cannot move fast enough. In better times, you have, you know, some movement and people change their minds and then something else becomes very important. I think that the most important thing, no matter what state you're in, or if you're in charge of the federal government, you got to concentrate on one thing and it is creating jobs and bringing the economy back. That's the most important thing right now. All the other stuff, people don't even want to focus on it. We can talk about it and I think it's important to talk about. But I think people want to see action. And I think what we have to do is -- and that's why I say every governor in a state, if you're a Democrat or a Republican, every Senator, every congressman, everyone out there in politics has to work together to get the economy back. What is unhealthy is to fight each other continuously because it does not make the country move forward. If you have all the debates, you have all the arguments, maybe it's good for politics, but it is definitely not good to get people back to work and to get the economy going.

Good for Arnold, as he isn't your typical meathead Republican and doesn't walk in lockstep with Rush Limbaugh. Arnold is a liberal Republican who keeps displaying more pragmatism and practicality.