ARNIE AND THE GUARDS….You may be wondering what I think of yesterday’s announcement by the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. (i.e., the prison guards union) that it plans to launch a recall effort against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Answer: I laughed. Yes, Arnold’s approval rating has been steadily shrinking because of our ongoing budget crisis, but there’s still one group in California that has him beat on every possible metric of unpopularity: the prison guards union. They may have a lot of money, but the idea that the public will follow their lead on much of anything is risible.
Or so it seems to me, anyway — but I’ve been wrong before. And maybe I am again. Still, this seems more like a negotiating stunt than a serious recall effort. Schwarzenegger deserves eternal opprobrium for his cynical (and vastly underappreciated) role in causing the exact budget crisis he’s now trying to dig himself out of, but I still won’t take the guards seriously on this until I see platoons of signature gatherers deployed to every supermarket within a ten mile radius. I’ll let you know when that happens.
