It’s true that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be leaving Sacramento in disgrace in January, and the Washington Post gets it right that the genesis of his failure lies in the fact that he was a political novice and outsider — just like the current Republican candidate to take his place:

After nearly six years in office, Schwarzenegger has few friends left in either party. The state budget deficit hovers around $20 billion; his approval rating has sunk below 25 percent.

“We thought he was going to be a great governor, but he has been a great disappointment,” said Geneviève M. Clavreul, a Republican activist.

As candidates in races across the country try to position themselves as the politician with the least political experience, Schwarzenegger’s troubles in California illustrate some of the possible downsides of outsiderdom. Like Whitman, the GOP’s candidate for governor, and Fiorina, the party’s Senate nominee, Schwarzenegger came to office as a non-politician who would solve problems with unconventional ideas.

He had some successes, but the movie star stumbled as he tried to navigate the state’s political establishment, with its touchy egos and endless compromises. He floundered as he tried to tame the state’s runaway budget and push through ambitious reforms such as universal health care.

“Touchy egos?” — please. This man spent his career in Hollywood, where dealing with egomaniacs is the price of admission. And while Schwarzenegger may not be “touchy,” he is saddled with an over-sized ego himself — where do you think he got the foolish notion that he could govern California?

Los Angeles Times’ political analyst George Skelton published a better account of Schwarzenegger’s swan dive into political infamy last month:

Pretty pathetic, all of it: The bleeding state government, the weakened Legislature, the lame duck governor.

The governor especially. Promise unfulfilled. Opportunity squandered.

It’s the choices one makes in the early years — in life and in a governor’s office — that usually determine one’s fate. Options narrow. The path can become one-way.

For Arnold Schwarzenegger, two very early decisions as governor helped force him into the budget box he found himself in Friday [May 14], where the only moves he dared make were, he said, personally painful. Those two fateful moves were:

First, cutting the vehicle license fee, or “car tax.” Ironically for Schwarzenegger, it counted as a spending increase, costing roughly $5 billion annually. That’s because local governments, not the state, had banked the VLF revenue, and Sacramento graciously reimbursed them for their loss.

Second, the new governor used his star power to persuade the Legislature — it wasn’t hard — and the voters to borrow $15 billion to pay not only for inherited debt, but the initial car tax cut and other daily expenses. The state still is paying off those bonds and the money’s long gone. The annual cost: $1.2 billion.

Republicans shouldn’t have been surprised that Schwarzenegger failed, as GOP activist Geneviève Clavreul said. Few Democrats and hardly anyone else were. As governors, outsider candidates like Schwarzenegger and former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura go into office with structural problems that doom them to all but certain failure. Voters choose them because of their independence, but they have no natural constituencies in their legislatures. They are propelled by the voters’ mandate at the outset, but celebrity only gets them so far in navigating the maze of committee meetings, back rooms and cocktail parties where deals are done. Before long, they find themselves ground under by political reality.

In California where crises are piled on crises, the choice this year between amateurs and seasoned hands could not be starker — with Democratic former Gov. Jerry Brown squared off against Meg Whitman, a billionaire business executive who didn’t even bother to vote for 28 years, and Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, a one-time Marin County supervisor who served in the U.S. House for 10 years before being elected senator in 1992, is being challenged by Carly Fiorina, the disgraced former Hewlett-Packard CEO.

The issues favor the Democrats — both Whitman and Fiorina oppose abortion and immigrants’ rights and both support offshore drilling — Whitman supports the untested new “slant drilling” method and Fiorina has joined Sarah Palin’s “Drill, Baby, Drill,” chorus. All of these positions are non-starters among California voters. It’s been decades since Californians elected either a governor or a senator who was 100 percent anti-choice or who favored drilling off the California coast. On immigration, California Republican Party mortally wounded itself with its hardline stance against immigrant rights during its Prop 187 debacle in the mid-1990s, and the party won’t be recovering from the self-inflicted wound in the foreseeable future.

It’s a paradox, maybe even a tragedy in the making, that at a time when the United States faces crises on just about every front, the right-wing media has somehow convinced the nation as a whole that what we really need to do right now is send a bunch of amateurs in to run the country. Let’s hope that in California, at least, voters will keep seasoned hands on deck.