Terminating the recall revolt.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in the California recall election came about because of a revolt by that state's long-suffering middle class. Wrung dry by taxes, choking on business-killing regulations, inundated by cultural pollution, and overrun by illegal immigrants, California's productive, law-abiding population finally had enough.

Unfortunately, as William F. Jasper predicted in these pages (see "Recall Revolution" in our October 6 issue), the Republican establishment used Schwarzenegger's candidacy to hijack the revolt. Rather than advancing the cause of limited government and personal responsibility, Schwarzenegger's victory heralds the final repudiation by the GOP of its social conservative base.

George F. Will perfectly cast Schwarzenegger as "a man who is, politically, Hollywood's culture leavened by a few paragraphs of Milton Friedman." For the GOP branch of the Establishment, this is a winning formula, in that it can hold genuine conservatives at bay.

"How he won tells me that his message--he's both fiscally conservative and socially inclusive and moderate--was one that appeals to the middle," former liberal Republican New Jersey Governor (and EPA head) Christine Todd Whitman told the New York Times.

Translated: "fiscally conservative" means "willing to raise taxes, amid noises of anguished reluctance"; and "socially inclusive and moderate" means "pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, and tolerant of everybody but religious conservatives."

Whitman insisted that the strategy embraced by Schwarzenegger is "a national thing." William Weld, the former liberal Republican Governor of Massachusetts, agreed with Whitman. "There's a lesson here for the national party," Weld told the Times. "This absolutely takes the curse of the stereotype off of Republicans that the opposition seeks to hang around their necks."

Writing in the October 20 issue of Time, essayist Andrew Sullivan, a self-described "gay conservative," referred to Schwarzenegger's win as a "truce" in the culture wars, a synthesis of "the bohemian and conservative aspects of the culture of which he was a part." An October 15 Salon essay by liberal activist Ronald Reagan Jr. favorably notes of Arnold: "He's pro-choice [that is, pro-abortion] He made his name posing in micro-briefs in front of a lot of gay male fans. He emerges from that bastion of left-leaning sin and depravity, Hollywood. Yet he polled over 60 percent in [conservative stronghold Orange County], stomping the [day-lights] out of right-winger Tom McClintock."