It's all just shades of Gray

Dan Walters asks if anyone else notices that Arnold is looking an awful lot like the man he replaced lately?

Just a bit:

A few days after winning re-election to the governorship in 2002, Gray Davis declared that the state faced a $35 billion budget deficit and proposed spending cuts and new taxes to close the gap.

Although Davis insisted that his plan contained "no gimmicks, no tricks, no evasions," it soon became apparent that it was one gigantic gimmick, that he had hyped the supposed deficit by many billions of dollars to make his supposed spending cuts look larger and his supposed $8.3 billion in new taxes look smaller. . . .

Five years later, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who succeeded Davis on a promise to end "crazy deficit spending," is dramatically increasing the budget deficit number again, jumping some $8 billion over the figure that the administration had been citing.

And wasn't there something quietly done to raise VLF fees again?

Any time you need your spokesman to insist your budget figure is "not hyperbole" - isn't it time to reevaluate your talking points?

Everything old is new again, it just the publicity that changes.