politics@roanoke.com / Preston Bryant

Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

Did Arnold Schwarzenegger and his campaign staff have notes on Virginia? Or are some issues simply the same the world over and too irresistible for candidates to pass up?

In either case, any Virginia politico who even remotely followed Arnold’s convincing victory last week in California certainly noticed a couple campaign issues with familiar rings to them. Arnold barnstormed across the Golden State running against the recent hike in his state’s car tax and he railed against a just-enacted California law allowing illegal aliens to be granted driver’s licenses.

We all know that Virginia’s dreaded car tax has been an issue since then-Gov. Jim Gilmore moved in 1998 to cut it for most Virginians. He’d made much of the unpopular local levy during his campaign for governor, and Virginians rallied behind him, carrying the Republican into office largely on his promise to cut it. Once victorious, Gilmore took his “no car tax” gig on the road, showing Republicans running for statewide office in other states how it could work for them, too.

And more recently, current Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, also a Republican, quite smartly pushed legislation to shut down the possibility of undocumented immigrants in Virginia being given a driver’s license. He did so after it was discovered that a number of al Qaeda members involved in the 9/11 attacks had Virginia-issued permits. Kilgore enlisted the help of Del. Dave Albo and Sen. Jay O’Brien, both Fairfax Republicans, in ushering the legislation through the General Assembly. Now, any Virginia resident wanting a state driver’s license must show proof of U.S. citizenship or legal residency when applying.

In California, both issues were handed to Arnold on a silver platter by Gov. Gray Davis, the incredibly unpopular Democrat whom Californians were in the process of throwing out of office. Davis had recently groped Californians by tripling – that’s right, tripling – his state’s car tax in an effort to bring in an additional $4 billion to help offset California’s budget deficit, and he’d also signed legislation just a month ago allowing illegal aliens, who make up most of California’s farm labor force, to be given official state driver’s licenses.

The former was cause for natural rebellion. The latter was simply seen as a bonehead thing to do.

Arnold capitalized on Davis’ flubs. He told Californians at every turn that he’d repeal the car-tax hike. (He promised it as though he could do so single-handedly, which isn’t the case, but that’s beside the point.) And at every turn, and at every rally, voters cheered wildly. Arnold has no choice now but to follow through on his promise – and doing so is likely to swell California’s current $8 billion budget shortfall to $12 billion, which could create lots of other problems for the new governor.

But it was Davis’ signing into law the bill that would grant driver’s licenses to undocumented aliens that proved to be the politically stupid play of the day. While the new law could apply to as many as 2 million illegal aliens, it drew the ire of many millions more – among them, nearly 20 Republican members of California’s congressional delegation.

The group sent a letter from Washington to Davis in Sacramento, criticizing his signing the bill. And in their letter, they noted that the new law set in place a process not unlike Virginia’s old one (before Kilgore pushed for its change), whereby driver’s licenses seemingly were handed out willy-nilly. The congressmen even noted the infamous seven al Qaeda members who had Virginia licenses.

While these weren’t the only two issues in Arnold’s campaign platform (well, what little he had of one), they certainly resonated with GOP voters. They went over big in such Republican strongholds as California’s Central Valley and Orange, San Diego, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties.

As flattering as it might be to think that Arnold had a “Virginia strategy,” and that the car tax and driver’s license issues traveled westward like yesteryear’s Virginia settlers, there’s no evidence of it. No, it’s more likely that these issues were simply propelled onto California’s political landscape by Davis’ tin-ear ineptitude. And they were too good for Arnold to pass up.

Conventional wisdom is that Kilgore will be settling into Virginia’s governor’s office in 2006, the same year that Arnold will be up for re-election. The two governors will certainly meet up somewhere along the way, and they can have a brief chat – Arnold with his accent, Kilgore with drawl – about perhaps the only two things their states will ever have in common.

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