Last week, Hugh Hewitt asked, what, if anything, will Arnold Schwarzenegger legacy as governor of California be remembered for?

Wally Cox isn't going to get the girl, Barney Fife isn't going to get to load his bullet, and Phil Angelides isn't going to get close to Arnold.

Arnold thus has the opportunity to get a mandate for something.

The Governator has been campaigning on infrastructure needs, which means the right to spend a lot on planning because given California's environmental laws, litigation-happy activists and the executive branch bureaucracies that Arnold has left unreformed, no major new project will actually happen. There won't be a new campus, a new connector tunnel, a new high speed train. There won't even be the conclusion of previously approved toll road in south Orange County.

Bridges will get repairs and a few widening projects will proceed. "Arnold, repairer of bridges" --this is how he wants to be remembered?

Because California is such a large map on which to work, its governor's do get remembered, for better or worse. Gray Davis was defined by the power crisis, Pete Wilson by his competent handling of major disaster after major disaster and for his embrace of Prop 187. Pat Brown was a builder, Jerry Brown a pop icon and the anti-builder, and George Deukmejian the law and order governor. Reagan, of course, was Reagan.

While California blogger Steve Frank praises his appointments of Republican judges, Chris Weinkopf writes that Arnold's legacy could be in serious danger of ending up as, ironically, the ultimate "girlie man":

Behold the new Arnold, a man bearing little resemblance to the revolutionary who toppled Gov. Gray Davis just three years ago. He’s politically compliant, eager to please, and anxious to avoid a fight. One might say . . . a girlie man.

Schwarzenegger has, in the parlance of the Left, “grown.” So has California’s government. In June, the governor signed a $131 billion budget, up 8.4 percent from the year before. Schwarzenegger’s spending plan is 30 percent larger than the one Davis approved in 2003, just before being ousted as a reckless spender.

“I don’t think the governor is a small-government Republican,” says Jon Coupal, president of California’s largest taxpayer-advocacy group, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation. Or, as GOP pollster Arnold Steinberg puts it, “He’s become a chamber-of-commerce Republican.” That is, “someone who confuses big business with free enterprise.” Adds Steinberg, “He lost his populist roots a long time ago.”

Still a Schwarzenegger supporter, Coupal is quick to point out that the governor hasn’t raised taxes. But it’s unclear how much of the credit belongs to Schwarzenegger and how much belongs to California’s constitution, which requires a two-thirds legislative majority for tax hikes. The Republican minority holds just enough seats to block tax increases, as it did throughout the Davis era. Besides, with a thriving economy producing $8 billion in unanticipated revenues over the last fiscal year, there’s more than enough cash on hand to sate even the biggest of Sacramento’s big spenders.

There are also billions more in planned borrowing. Courtesy of Schwarzenegger, November’s ballot will include $37 billion worth of bonds to rebuild crumbling infrastructure that Sacramento ignored for decades while tending to a perpetually growing bureaucracy and welfare state.

Schwarzenegger, who once spoke loftily about improving California’s business climate, has also warmed up to regulation. In July, he proposed legislation that would require drug companies to provide discounts to families earning as much as three times the federal poverty rate — despite having vetoed similar legislation twice in the past.

What prompted Arnold’s change of heart is last year’s special-election debacle. Emboldened by his ability to intimidate Democrats during his first year in office, Schwarzenegger had launched a “year of reform” campaign to pass several ballot initiatives. But he took on too many vested interests at once — teachers, public-employee unions, every major spending lobby, as well the state legislature and its gerrymandered districting plan. Labor unions spent tens of millions on relentless, highly effective attack ads, and sent protesters to interrupt his every public event.

In short order, Schwarzenegger’s once-stratospheric popularity ratings crashed, and his ballot measures failed. Worse, he lost the one trump card he could bring to negotiations with Democratic legislators — his threat to take matters directly to the voters. In the special election, Democrats discovered they no longer needed to fear Arnold’s popularity.

On the other hand, as of right now, it seems pretty unlikely that Arnold will be resuming his movie career in November.