The last action hero: after seven years that felt like a thousand, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger bequeaths a slightly larger government to a sickly state.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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ARNOLD Schwarzenegger has embodied nearly every archetype known to California: immigrant, athlete, movie star, raconteur, real estate developer, humorist, pundit, politician, cyborg. Yet there's one fantastical role for which he has never been credited: exile. By virtue of his national roots--and his tall tales of facing down commissars and Red Army soldiers in a postwar Austria of the mind--Schwarzenegger may belong to a tradition of Mitteleuropean Los Angeles: German-speaking exiles of the 1930s and '40s who settled in Southern California and remade the nation's cultural life with such all-American innovations as film noir, political street theater, and even the distillation of surf culture globalized by Frederick Kohner's Gidget.

Schwarzenegger will leave Sacramento two days after the new year begins. Barring a future run for Senate--or a surprise revival of his 2004 campaign "Amend for Arnold & Jen" (Granholm that is, the Canadian-born governor of Michigan) calling for a constitutional change that would allow nonnative Americans to become president--he probably will never hold elected public office again.

Most commentators, including editors of this magazine on multiple occasions, say the Schwarzenegger administration has been a failure. After riding into office on the deficit-driven recall of stone-cold Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger led the state into deficits as large or larger. His repeated high-profile struggles with public-sector employee unions ended in humiliating defeats, including the failure of several gubernator-backed ballot initiatives. Ambitious long-term goals, such as a serious multi-decade plan to solve the state's complex water supply challenge, came to nothing. Smaller achievements, such as Schwarzenegger's 2008 redistricting reform, do not seem to have had much impact on the state's political stagnation (or its moribund Republican Party).

In policy terms, the Schwarzenegger administration was a protean monster, lurching from limited-government quests (such as the "California Performance Review" plan to reorganize and streamline government, drawn up with assistance from the Reason Foundation and almost immediately shelved) to epic socialist debacles (such as his failed effort to provide statewide universal health coverage). The governor spent enormous political capital on the state global warming law A.B. 32, which is expected to cost California nearly $100 billion over 10 years while reducing...