Scoffers and skeptics who belittled and mocked Arnold Schwarzenegger when he became California governor have been biting their tongues, if not simply eating crow.
The onetime bodybuilder-turned-actor has disproven the two main criticisms of his entry into politics.
First, he's not a robotic emissary of George W. Bush's ultraconservatism. He championed California's approval of huge funding for stem cell research—anathema to the Bush claque—as well as new and tougher pollution standards.
Second, he's shown uncommonly keen and natural instincts as a political leader, rallying Democrat legislators to his side, but forcing their hand through appeals to the public when the opposition tried to be contrary.
Now Gov. Schwarzenegger has shown boldness again, attacking another sacred cow of rightwing politicians: prison reform.
Schwarzenegger's approach involves virtue as well as practical economics. Half of the inmates in the $6.3 billion California prison system are returnees after only a few years of freedom. The governor wants more programs that rescue inmates from lives of crime.
"Corrections," he says repeatedly, "should correct."
This is something new for the political class, many of whom champion mandatory, long sentences as part of their tough-guy election year personas.
But realists such as Schwarzenegger understand the drain on public funds as well as wasted human resources of grandstanding prison policies that discourage rehabilitation.
Maybe the actor no one took seriously as a politician will achieve another first: ending the lock-'em-up-and-throw-the-key-away attitude about inmates.
