“Believe me, I expected it to go faster. In a way this is an on-the-job training. I mean I did not go to school to become a governor.”

– Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, addressing California Republican state convention

In Washington, a “gaffe” is when someone accidentally speaks the truth. Gov. Schwarzenegger uttered this gaffe in front of a crowd of key constituents: the California Republican Party, at the statewide annual convention earlier this month.

Tim Russert replayed it when Schwarzenegger appeared on Meet the Press yesterday. When asked about the quote, Schwarzenegger appeared to dig his hole a bit deeper:

“[No one] can prepare for the job of being a governor until you’re there. And that’s when you all of a sudden see the kind of complexities.”

No one? Schwarzenegger’s principal advisor (and probably the source of volumes of bad advice) during the Recall campaign and his first year in office was former California governor Pete Wilson, a Republican who had spent a lifetime in public service, starting in the state Assembly, then as mayor of San Diego and as a U.S. Senator, before becoming governor.

As governor, Wilson led his party over a cliff by successfully using immigration as a wedge issue. He put the infamous Proposition 187 on the ballot to drive up rightwing votes in order to win reelection in 1994. It worked for Wilson, giving him another term in office but it moved millions of Latino voters into the Democratic Party, giving the Dems a decisive majority in the state and sending the California GOP into the wilderness.

As bad as Wilson was, his time in office now looks almost successful compared by the utter failure of his protege.

Or take the resume of Schwarzenegger’s immediate predecessor, Democrat Gray Davis: He served in the state Assembly, as chief of staff to Gov. Jerry Brown, as lieutenant governor under Wilson and then as governor.

Davis, who was also a Marine, proved to have wooden political instincts when it mattered — when he was under fire — and he was easily outgunned by Schwarzenegger’s end run around the state’s political system during the Recall campaign by limiting his interviews to national outlets like Entertainment Tonight and Oprah, where he was only asked softball questions.

After criticizing every action taken or proposed by Davis, once in office, Schwarzenegger’s approach to solving the state’s problems was fundamentally the same course Davis had charted.

Even with all their accumulated wisdom, California’s previous two governors were both left office with their reputations in tatters. Leave it to a movie star to think that he could do better than they did just by pretending to know what he’s doing.