Just when you thought California politics couldn’t get any weirder, it does. It just goes to show that Hunter Thompson is right: “when the going gets weird the weird turn pro.” That Arnold Schwarzenegger is running as a Republican gubernatorial candidate in the California recall election is weird enough for anyone. Add to the mix that investor Warren Buffett has joined the Schwarzenegger campaign as financial and economic advisor and it just about pegs the weirdness meter.
And then you have to add Shrub into the mix, arriving in California today probably more confused than usual. His handlers must be pulling their hair out trying to divine whether or not Bush should actively support Schwarzenegger. There are positives and negatives, but as a dry drunk Bush will likely lean toward betting the farm on Schwarzenegger in the hope that California’s 54 electoral votes will be delivered next year.
If this were a cartoon, the ah-oog-ah horns would be blaring and the indicator on weirdness meter would be pulsing red, on the verge of exploding. Characters’ eyes would be bulging, and there would be Acme shipping crates littering the landscape. But this isn’t a cartoon; it’s real life and worse than a bad acid trip.
Schwarzenegger presumably supports tax cuts for the wealthy, elimination of the estate tax, and not requiring corporations to expense employee stock options. Presumably because the candidate has refused to answer policy questions from the media. Bush has to be thinking how can he lose with this guy. But then there’s Proposition 187 that limits services for immigrants in California. Schwarzenegger supports it but Bush opposed it to attract the Hispanic vote.
But how does Warren Buffett play into all of this? After all, he’s one of the most outspoken critics of Bush’s tax cuts and opposes the elimination of the estate and investment dividends taxes. Today’s Washington Post reports that “Buffett recently wrote that Bush’s tax cuts have lowered his effective tax rate to 3 percent while leaving his receptionist paying 30 percent of her income in taxes.” Furthermore, techies in Silicon Valley make the sign of the cross with their forefingers whenever so much as Buffett’s name is mentioned because the second-richest man firmly believes that corporations should be required to record employee stock options as expenses. But for Warren Buffett, the bottom line speaks loudest and he’s chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. which holds what the Washington Post calls a “considerable stake” in the state of California.
Pragmatism always trumps altruism.
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