Arnold is not your Republican father's "moderate." Those traditional Republican moderates have long been accepted into polite political circles only if they understand that their proper place in Sacramento, Albany or Washington is to serve as pliant small-town lending officers to the dominant Democratic leadership. Say a Democrat wants to spend $4 billion; the GOP "moderate" will counter with $3.5 billion--and then they'll compromise at $3.95 billion. Arnold Schwarzenegger ran against this theory of a moderate Republicanism that is complicit in a long liberal legacy of tax, spend and tax again. Put it this way: Anyone who thinks George Shultz, who was at the Schwarzenegger victory party, would put himself behind an old-school Republican moderate has been overdosing on medical marijuana.

If after this week the definition of a GOP moderate now sits halfway between the center and what the avowedly conservative Tom McClintock represents, then the "center" in American politics is migrating steadily to the right in a measurable and significant way. And of course by definition this would move the Democratic base even further leftward from the mainstream. It's too early to know how permanent California's shifts are, but I suspect that a lot of voters who participated in or watched this election for the first time feel comfortable in this new political place--where Arnold is.

For the purposes of making sense of exit-poll analysis, Mr. McClintock's decision to stay in helpfully allows us to look at voting patterns for both Arnold and a clear conservative. The McClintock numbers are worth looking at. Mr. McClintock, a genuine Reagan conservative, incredibly got 6% of the black vote and 9% of Hispanic votes. Anger alone at Gray Davis couldn't have done that. Aggregating these numbers, 23% of blacks voted Republican, as did 41% of Hispanics. That this should happen once under any circumstances is extraordinary.

Some 14% of all women voted for Mr. McClintock (7% of "female Democrats" voted for him); add in the women's vote for Mr. Schwarzenegger, and the GOP total sums to 57%. Among "somewhat liberal" voters, 7% chose Mr. McClintock, and the GOP aggregate among these presumably moderate liberal voters was 31%--pretty high.

Caveats abound. Yes, the hapless Gray Davis in some sense defaulted Arnold into the governorship. Some of his new support will revert to past loyalties. He may fail. But no matter the special circumstances in California, these rightward shifts in the political landscape are remarkable because they are so difficult and rare. Moreover, what if the new governor succeeds, or at least fights in public with integrity for his goals? Some of these new, rightward-shifted California "moderates" are going to decide they're perfectly happy where they are.

In truth, I think the rightward definitional shift away from the old center began with Rudolph Giuliani's 1993 mayoral victory in, of all places, New York City. For most of his first term this presumed GOP "moderate" was described by Manhattan's liberal writers as "Mussolini." But obviously many left-of-center New York voters were content to live with a Giuliani political set that is well to the right of such famous New York Republicans as John Lindsay and Gov. Rockefeller. Again, no matter what his views on abortion, gays and the like, anyone who has spent time with Rudy Giuliani knows that culturally and politically he is quite to the right of the old-line Republican moderates.

Conventional punditry has been saying for years that the dilemma posed by "centrists" like Messrs. Schwarzenegger and Giuliani is that they would "alienate" the "right-wing" GOP base. To the extent this well-thumbed rule was ever true, the California result suggests it is also dying, as nothing like this happened in Tuesday's vote. GOP voters weren't in the least ideological; they were perfect pragmatists.

Some 65% of self-described "very conservative" voters picked Arnold. More to the point, what about the "religious right" and the womanizing? I talked about this with Rev. Rob Zinn, first vice president of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church near San Bernardino in Southern California. He says the turnout among evangelical Christians for Mr. Schwarzenegger was "huge" and wholly pragmatic: "A lot of evangelical Christians thought if they didn't vote for Schwarzenegger, Bustamante would win. Arnie was not the best, but they voted for him."

The Rev. Zinn says the womanizing stories backfired among Christian voters, who felt it was an over-the-top smear. "The Los Angeles Times did more to get Schwarzenegger elected than any single group," says Rev. Zinn. "The Times cut its own throat with that story. Our people said, 'Enough is enough.'"

If this is true, Arnold Schwarzenegger upended two other longstanding shibboleths--media bias and the "litmus test."

Media bias, long thought to be a cyborg that hunts down and destroys GOP candidates, may be morphing into a new engine of GOP voter turnout. And the single-issue litmus test (abortion, gun control, et al.), assumed to be a constant obstacle to GOP success, may also be finished. The overturned dumpster of moldy womanizing stories did not faze either evangelicals or women, the primary target. Among women, 43% voted for Mr. Schwarzenegger (and in this soccer-mom Disneyland, an additional 14% voted for the not-too-cuddly Mr. McClintock).

Some measure of this support for Arnold and Mr. McClintock surely reflects unique anger over the fiscal mess, but that alone stands as a massive repudiation of a state political establishment that proved during the 1990s influx of tax revenue that it simply has no governor on its own gross appetites--politics as little more than the "Wheel of Fortune." If indeed the "center" has moved rightward on spending, how will Democrats regain the trust of these deeply burned voters absent any proven record of self-control?

Like it or not, the force field of celebrity is part of the cultural physics of our era, and it looks as if the first party to get totally wired-in to a mega-celebrity is, incredibly, the GOP. Something weirdly attractive was coming off the Schwarzenegger camp's victory stage on TV round about midnight Tuesday--Arnold, Maria Shriver (a get-out-of-jail-free card for many centrist Democrats feeling trapped in an inhospitable party), Jay Leno's funny introduction, Rob Lowe nearby, Eunice and Sargent Shriver, the extended Shriver clan, and a sea of young, attractive faces. Liberal pundits will mock this scene unmercifully, but in terms of mass-market politics it was as hip as any politician could ever hope for. Arnold, with all that media reach and the aura of living wholly inside the country's popular culture, may be changing ideas of who can live comfortably on election day among the Republicans.

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