Arnold Considered Party Switch

by Joe Mathews
The Daily Beast

How bad did things get between Der Governator and his fellow Republicans? Schwarzenegger’s biographer, Joe Mathews, reports that he recently considered dropping out of the party altogether. It’s the latest blast in a long-running war.

A few months ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a few close associates discussed whether he should leave the Republican Party, according to two people familiar with the conversation. His friend Mike Bloomberg, the New York mayor, had become an independent. Maybe Schwarzenegger should, too. But the governor and his people quickly concluded that Californians already saw him as independent of the Republican Party. So what would be the point of a switch? (A spokesman for the governor declined comment.)

To people outside the state, Schwarzenegger’s recent battles with Republican legislators over a budget and his criticism of GOP governors and Congressmen for their opposition to President Obama’s stimulus package might sound jarring. Schwarzenegger once was “Conan the Republican” (the first President Bush’s nickname for him), a politician who declared in his 2004 convention speech, “I'm proud to belong to the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of Teddy Roosevelt, the party of Ronald Reagan and the party of George W. Bush.” Now he is on ABC News saying that “it doesn’t really mater if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

(More here.)