Schwarzenegger in the house (with update!)
Conan is in town as we speak, and I'm getting ready to march up J Street to the Eureka Women's Club to take part in a Q and A session. It will be Schwarzenegger, the Times-Standard editorial board and the, ahem, Eureka Reporter editorial board.
We hope it won't turn into a full-on cage match showdown between us and the Reporter staff with the governor playing referee. I'm sure it won't ... I think.
I'll write an update on what happened when I get back, sometime around 1 p.m. Unfortunately, the best question has already been asked. When the governor came up to kick off his re-election campaign at the Samoa Cookhouse, Andrea Arnot piped up with a humdinger: Will there be a Terminator 4?
It gave all the journalists on the North Coast a reason to be proud.
***** UPDATE ******
The ER and TS managed to avoid any scraps this time around, even exchanging a handshake and pleasantry or two. Both sides were obviously thrilled to have the big-wig in town, although in journalism it's totally not cool to show that you're impressed.
In the who-had-the-best-questions competition, as always I thought our staff walked away the easy victor. And online, the T-S creamed the competition: a video, a multimedia slideshow and a Web update up as of 4 p.m.
I love competition.
As for Schwarzzy, it's easy to see why he was elected. He has the charisma of a movie star, and he's not afraid to use it for his political advantage. At times today, when a tough question was asked, he evade the issue and try to charm his way out of it.
Case in point. He was asked about the skyrocketing cost of higher education, and he said he has worked to minimize the rate of increase but that in the end students just need to get a job and pay their own way through school. That's what I did, he said.
Let's analyze this: if UC Davis has a tuition of more than $20,000 a year, and a student works as a dishwasher or fry cook to raise the money, then he or she might just make enough working full-time to pay that tuition.
But living expenses — rent, food, gas, bus pass — you can forget about. And books? That's absolutely out of the question. This answer pointed out that on some things, this governor seems absolutely out of touch.
He mentioned that his daughter was in the midst of applying for various colleges, and was lucky enough to get accepted. Hmmm. Will she be paying her own way through college, Mr. Schwarzenegger, by working an hourly job? Somehow I doubt it.
Comments
Can you please tell me, on a scale of 1 to 10, just how obsessed are you with the ER?
Posted by: anonymous | April 10, 2008 08:07 AM
Jim,
Have you ever seen how much university administrators make? Have you heard about the recent hiring of a new UC president, and why? Suspect it had anything to do with corruption and the absence of any accountability among university officials? Do you know just how little of their bloated endowments most universities actually use to keep tuition costs down?
Just a thought: maybe throwing money at the problem won't actually solve anything if these universities (which are by an large run by academics and former academics) are already completely corrupt.
Posted by: donald | April 10, 2008 10:40 AM
I'm surprised Arnold didn't instantly propose a multi-billion dollar bond for higher education on hearing the question. The least he could of done was appoint some cronies to a blue-ribbon commission to look into the issue.
I think he's losing his touch...
Posted by: Robb Willis | April 11, 2008 09:47 AM