Well, shoot. Awful glad today that I’m not a Calfornia native anymore. Stuff like these ballot defeats really gets me down.

Voters overwhelmingly defeated Proposition 76, the governor’s centerpiece proposal to slow the growth of state spending. Proposition 77, which would have redrawn legislative and congressional districts, was knocked down by a similar margin.

Failing by slimmer spreads were Proposition 74, a plan to make teachers work longer to achieve tenure, and Proposition 73, which would have restricted political spending by public employee unions.

It seems that the voters have made a big decision to keep things the way they were in California, even though most of them don’t really like the way they are. Voting down re-districting? That ensures that they’ll get career Congressmen, which neither Republicans nor Democrats should approve of. Voting down a measure that would keep labor workers from having to give money to the Democrats whether they want to or not? I’m sorry, but if I were a Democrat, that’s not how I would want to get funds.

So why the heck did people go for this stuff? Well, I’ll check into some commentary and see brighter bulbs make of this. It may be less of a big litmus test than just a matter of voters being tired of political tub-thumping no matter what they’re talking about:

Poll after poll showed it was an election that Californians didn’t want, with a total lineup of eight initiatives that didn’t connect with every day issues such as gas prices, housing costs and the war in Iraq.

So Arnold might have just been going for a gamble to remind everyone why they voted for him. But if it just wore everyone out, it probably ended up working against him in the long run, as long-odds gambles usually do.

Not that I’m solidly behind Arnold. I have the same problems with his social liberalism that other Christians do. I think I just feel sorry any time Californians miss a chance to say that they’re tired of going to Gehenna in a handbag. This state thinks it’s a good thing for a 13-year-old to be able to have an abortion without even telling her parents. Lord have mercy.

Other commentary:

• Hugh Hewitt has an open letter to da Gov:
  

  As Nixon often remarked: You can’t win with just the conservatives, but you cannot win without them. … And they aren’t even that upset this morning. They didn’t lose a thing — you lost. Perhaps you will spend the next couple of weeks figuring out that you have exactly zero high profile GOP conservatives close to you, and that there are a whole bunch of lefties running around your offices busy advancing agendas with which the right cannot agree.

• Rush Limbaugh is upbeat, as he tends to be. His points: this election isn’t the big deal that the media will make it out to be. The Republican losses in Virginia and New Jersey just represent the Democrats holding onto territory, not gaining anything new. Overall, the GOP should figure out not to try to move centrist, because when they do that, they lose the conservative vote.
• Wall St. Journal’s OpinionJournal thinks that the re-districting loss is actually a good thing overall:
  

  Voters in both states (California and Ohio) rejected ballot measures that would have taken redistricting out of the hands of legislators and reassigned it to nonpartisan commissions with a mandate to draw competitive districts. This would have been to the Republicans’ advantage in California and the Democrats’ in Ohio, so if both had passed they might have canceled each other out. In the event, voters in both the Golden and Buckeye states delivered their incumbents a victory, a year early.

  They predict that this points to maintaining the status quo in next year’s elections as well, which would mean that Republicans hold onto the ground they gained.

• Instapundit thinks that the GOP lost because those who wanted to keep Terry Schiavo alive were too mean. Say what?

  I also think that I may have been right in suggesting that the GOP had lost its mojo with the Terri Schiavo affair. Things seem to have started to go south then, not only because of the issue itself, but because of the divisive venom that so many Schiavo partisans aimed at people who disagreed with them. I think it was very damaging to the GOP coalition, and they’ve continued to pay a price.

  Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion. And it’s possible that in this case, fighting the cultural war wasn’t politically expedient for pro-lifers and Christians. But if so, then the heck with politics.

• National Review Online is less upbeat:
  

  Last night’s election results were a stinging blow to the Republican party. Undoubtedly Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Rahm Emmanuel are in very good moods today. This off-year election raises the question about a Democratic sweep in next year’s mid-term elections.

  While the GOP is attacking oil companies and perhaps reneging on tax-cut extenders, without offering any strong budget-cutting plan, the Dems are thinking about putting together their own Contract with America. While Democrats still have to craft a coherent message, and while their glee may yet be premature, the 2005 election message is clear: It’s time to get serious. This is a Republican problem. GOP pundits who try to downplay these election results are just plain wrong.