Actually, I thought Ah-nold did the worst of the 5. I thought Bustamonte came across really well. I mean, I haven't paid much attention to him, but he came across as calm and respectable. Arianna, of course, was awesome. She had many more great comments than I could remember to relate above. The Green candidate, whose name escapes me, was good as well. Stayed on message and didn't seem to wacko-lefty. So, I liked him. McClintock probably couldn't be more different from me, policy wise, but he struck me as a straight-shooter, i.e., he says what he truly believes. So, while I may vehemently oppose most, if not all, of his views, he struck me as someone that one could work with. Granted, I don't know how willing he is to compromise (probably not at all), and I wouldn't want him as govenor, but I can see how he could (not saying is) be a decent colleague in the legislature. Ah-nold continues to underwhelm me. He took a bunch of pot-shots at Ariana, most of which fell flat. He such a lame candidate anyway.
There are several policy related things I could go off on, but don't have the mental energy to, at this point. The one thing that did bother me a lot, however, was the Republican contention that California is hostile to businesses and that we are losing businesses to other states. Specifically, McClintock said there were 4 things (legislation, administration, and two other -tions that I can't remember) that were driving off businesses. The thing is, all these conditions haven't changed since the downturn in the business cycle. In other words, the dot-com boom occured, despite this supposed anti-business climate in CA. The republicans are arguing that we observed variation on the dependent variable of job creation/loss, but did not see variation on the independent variables that feed in to this "anti-business climate." This indicates that there is some other, unaccounted for, variable(s) that explain this supposed flight of businesses. Maybe the business cycle, maybe big tax cuts at the federal level, or whatever.
Man, the Republicans would fail my intro to statistics course.
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