At Last, Somebody Listens to David Frum

RINO and soon to be ex-Gubernator Arnold Schwarzenegger:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger created shock and awe in the Republican Party when he warned years ago that the GOP was in danger of "dying at the box office" by failing to make the sale to a wide swath of voters.

And with the presidential election looming, the Republican governor of the nation's most populous state - a decidedly blue state - has now found a chorus of agreement. The Republican "brand" - thanks to an unpopular president, a war, gas prices, foreclosures and deficit - has become such damaged goods that GOP Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia groused last week that "if we were dog food, they would take us off the shelf."

The answer for GOP presidential candidate John McCain: take a page out of the Schwarzenegger playbook and sell a product that is "counter" to the current GOP brand on issues like global warming, spending and even immigration reform.

Of course, liberal Democrats have already cornered the market on simply taking whatever the Republican base believes and doing the opposite, but so long as it makes the missus happy and keeps her looking the other way, it's all good for Ahnuld.

And you can't mess with success---Schwarzenegger's "counter-branding" strategy has driven California $15 B deep into a budget hole, well on his way to the fiscal mismanagement that got his predecessor recalled.

The perils of listening to people like David Frum ought to be obvious.