…and boy are my arms tired! Zing!¹

Err, anyway. So on the flight back from Los Angeles I sat next to a rather large man. We chatted about Sports Night and 802.11b versus 802.11g, but things got a bit more interesting when I asked whether he had been in LA on vacation or business. “Business,” the man said. What kind of business? Turned out he had been a delegate at this weekend’s California Republican convention. At that point I had to ask, “So who do you like, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tom McClintock?” Turns out he was a McClintock fan. McClintock is a “good man” who “knows what he’s talking about,” while Schwarzenegger is “way too liberal.” Hmmm. Perhaps my seatmate was, like me, unimpressed by Schwarzenegger’s platitudes about solving the state budget problem by “auditing the books and cutting waste.” After all, if you’re campaigning to yank an official from office because of his bad policy decisions, at the very least you ought to have some concrete plans on what you’d like, do differently and stuff.

I should point out that a good friend of mine has told me that I’m totally wrong about this and that concrete plans are for suckers. The argument goes like this: since everyone in the race is going to lie like hell about what they’re going to do in office, you might as well base your vote on personality alone. Pick someone who’s tough. Someone who will shake up the status quo. Send a message. Kick ass and take names! The counterargument is that media personalities are manufactured just like anything else, and that when it comes to divining a candidate’s true personality, you might as well try phrenology over press clippings. I suppose my friend and I are both back at square one.

So the key question these days is: will the Republicans split their vote and end up losing to Cruz Bustamante? One likely scenario is that Cruz Bustamante will win, but the total of the votes for McClintock and Schwarzenegger will exceed Bustamante’s. And thus we Democrats will be able to feel smug about fending off a Republican takeover, and the Republicans will be able to feel smug about how they would have won if not for that blockhead [McClintock|Schwarzenegger] staying in the race. (Of course the latter reasoning conveniently ignores the fact that V_M + V_S is almost certainly greater than V_(M+S), but hey, minor detail.) Anyway, I asked my seatmate if he was worried about this vote-splitting problem. He admitted that yes, he was, although he was hoping that Schwarzenegger would drop out. Heh. That seems unlikely — Schwarzenegger strikes me as, if nothing else, a ferocious competitor. Then again, I can’t be sure… I haven’t examined the bumps on his head.

1. Okay, so that wasn’t a tech writer joke. Nor was it much of a joke at all. Hey man — it’s my journal, back off.