Ah-nold!

When Hillary Clinton was elected senator of my state, New York, I cursed loudly and often about the stupidity of the body politic. Hillary was nothing but a celebrity; a woman famous for being the abused wife of the President.

�Ahhhhh,� people would say to me. �But she deserves this because Bill was so bad to her. And she cares about New York.�

It made me crazy. Care and celebrity don't equal competence. And that's what so irks me about celebirity politics. It cheapens the electoral process by making allowing celebrity to trump good ideas and experience.

That stated, I�m tickled to death to see Arnold Schwartzenegger stepping into the recall race in California. I have also developed a visceral hatred of spineless career politicians whose blow-dried looks and focus group-tested rhetoric are absolutely mannequin-esque. Incumbent Gov. Gray Davis has spent his entire career being a bloodless suck-up to every special interest grievance group in the state. Couple that with his total lack of nerve confronting the electricity crisis a few years ago (and his Socialist tendency to try to fix prices at the wholesale level) and you have the current state of California�s finances. Arnold, by not being a career politician � read �by not needing to raise money for re-election� � will have the backbone to attempt to do what he says he wants to do: lure businesses back to California that been chased out by confiscatory taxation and Byzantine business regulations. If you factor in that he�s recruited a lot of former Gov. Pete Wilson�s team that ran Sacramento, he might actually pull it off.

And that would be a good thing. Watch for Arnold poll numbers to come out this weekend and scare the hell out of the Democratic Party, causing them to become hysterical.

dpny