Arnold's Wild State: For California and for conservatives, populism has its ups and downs.

Eastern elites thought California had gone around the bend when it sent ex- actor Ronald Reagan to the governor's mansion in 1966. The New York Times, in a rare editorial endorsement for a California election, attacked Reagan and implored voters to "understand where reality ends and fantasy begins."

Imagine what the Times will think if the Terminator is elected.

Keepers of the conventional wisdom need to get over the notion that the California recall and Arnold Schwarzenegger's prospective governorship are just another expression of Californian flakiness. Just as Reagan's 1966 election marked a major turning point in American politics, the California recall may be the herald of a new turn in politics across the country. The pundits who have suggested in recent years that California is no longer a political trendsetter-as The Weekly Standard did in "California Doesn't Matter," a 2000 cover story-are wrong.

The Gray Davis recall represents a new chapter in the politics of populism, which began on the left but has become a phenomenon of the right ever since Reagan's promise to "ignite a prairie fire that sweeps the land." Both recalls and California's legendary initiative process were originally products of Progressivism, and were meant to serve liberal ends. Indeed, both procedures-for recalls and initiatives-were designed specifically to enable the people to break the grip of special interests on government. The modern initiative process is so costly, however, that in practice, only moneyed interests can successfully sponsor initiatives.

The most successful state initiatives have been launched from the right, starting with Proposition 13, in 1978, and continuing on through term limits, three-strikes criminal sentencing, immigration reform, bans on racial quotas, the Defense of Marriage Act, and tax-limitation measures. Meanwhile, liberal initiatives on the environment, gun control, health care, taxation, and so on-with a few notable exceptions, such as California's Prop. 65 toxic-labeling law-have gone down in flames. This is one reason liberal interest groups prefer to go to the courts rather than to the people to achieve their policy objectives. Even conservatives who harbor principled misgivings about the initiative process can't help but feel: "Thank God for the initiative!"

Yet one of the paradoxes of the last decade is that conservative ballot initiatives continued to flourish even as California went through a long, slow slide to the left. As recently as 1996, Republicans had a narrow majority in the state assembly. (This was after recalling two Republican legislators who had defected to support Speaker Willie Brown; the present recall is not entirely without precedent.) Republicans were running close in the state senate, and held the governorship and about half the statewide offices. Today they are badly outnumbered in both houses of the legislature, and do not hold a single statewide office.

The initiative process itself may partly account for the GOP's slide. With most of the big issues coming directly to voters, the initiative process has effectively become a political safety valve, diluting partisan political accountability. Accordingly, Democrats have been able to dodge voter sentiment on a wide range of issues. And money and energy that might have gone into winning offices were channeled into sponsoring initiatives instead.