So, Gov. Schwarzenegger, what do you do now?

Arnold Schwarzenegger won the California governership, racking up impressive numbers at the end of a short campaign during which he never defined how he would pull the state out of its financial morass.
But celebrity goes only so far -- as former wrestler Jesse Ventura learned as governor of Minnesota -- and Schwarzenegger will have to come up with a plan to give the voters what he promised. And, in effect, he promised them everything.
He said he would repeal a tripling of the state's automobile license fees, a measure Gov. Gray Davis pushed through in an attempt to balance the budget (and which almost certainly contributed to his defeat).
He said he would not raise taxes (and early in his campaign he rebuked his own economic adviser, billionaire investor Warren Buffet, after Buffet said one of California's problems was that its real estate tax rates were too low).
And he said he would balance the state's budget, overcoming a projected $8 billion shortfall, without cutting spending on education (which consumes up to 70 percent of the state's budget).
What he didn't say before the election was how he was going to do all that. And California voters didn't seem to care. One exit poll showed that two out of three voters recognized that Schwarzenegger didn't provide specifics during the campaign.
The political class
The election in California makes it clear that millions of voters simply no longer trust people they think of as politicians, but will buy into the idea that a celebrity spending millions of dollars of his own money running a slick campaign designed to get their votes and put him in power is something other than -- or better than -- a politician. Likewise, they seem to think that someone who has no in-depth knowledge of public finance and absolutely no experience in balancing a state's budget is in a better position to do so than people who have devoted their lives to government.
Go figure.
And figure is exactly what Schwarzenegger is going to have to do. He must figure out a way to keep all those campaign promises. This moderate Republican must figure out a way to work with a legislature that is divided between a liberal Democratic majority and a conservative Republican minority with very few members standing in the middle.
And he must figure out a way of doing it before a fickle California electorate starts thinking of him as just another politician, because politicians -- unlike bigger-than-life characters of the silver screen -- are subject to recall.