I am not a resident of California, but, if I were, I would have voted for Arnold. Wait a minute, what am I on about? You don’t need to be a resident to vote. If you’re a British tourist on holiday in Mexico, all you have to do is make it across the border and, under one of Gray Davis’s desperate last-minute pre-election ethnic panders, he’ll give you one of his free driver’s licences for illegal immigrants, no questions asked, with which piece of identification you’ll be able to bluff your way into the voting booth.

But, if I had bluffed my way in, I would, as I said, have voted for Arnold. For one reason - to wind up the Europeans. And sure enough this week the Continentals could hardly wait for the polls to close to throw up their hands and shriek "Quelle horreur!" Der Spiegel put Arnold on the cover over the headline "Das verkommene Paradies" - the rotten paradise. Le Monde warned of "le danger Californien". In L’Humanité, Claude Cabanes turned in a column headlined "The American Bad Dream" and declared that the election of a "cardboard Hercules" was merely the latest stage in the "decomposition of a completely worm-eaten political system". Ah, yes. What a shame the Californian political system is so worm-eaten it’s unable to offer voters the civilised choice M Cabanes had in his last presidential election.

The Europeanised end of Fleet Street was also in full Gallic hauteur mode. The Independent called Arnold’s election a "profoundly depressing day for those who believe in democratic ideals". Cheer up, lads. Voter turnout was up; the electorate quickly winnowed 135 candidates down into three credible contenders, Arnold piled up more votes than Davis got last November: why’s that incompatible with "democratic ideals"?

Well, the Independent frets that, in jurisdictions like California, fear of a Davis-style recall "militates against the strong but unpopular action that governments have to take from time to time". Really? Isn’t the more common problem that, in California as in Europe, an entrenched top-down political culture finds it far too easy to take "strong but unpopular action"? It’s strong but popular action that governments seem to find hard to take - cutting taxes, enforcing immigration law, reining in inefficient bureaucratic spending, standing up to entrenched special interests, whether it’s Indian tax-free gambling in California or French farmers.

In the EU, that "strong but unpopular action that governments have to take" apparently extends to deciding on your behalf what constitutional entity you’ll belong to. If you want the very opposite of the raw responsiveness of Californian democracy, it’s the debate on the European Constitution. As noted over the page this week, the Brussels correspondent of the BBC worries that letting the voters express a view on their constitution risks undoing "two years of painstaking work by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing". Can’t have that, can we?

Meanwhile, my old friend from the glory days of the Independent, Mark Lawson, turned in a thumbsucker for the Guardian on "the biggest joke in politics since Hartlepool elected a man in a monkey-suit". Arnold, he said, "has no experience of politics and no discernible policies". It was, of course, people with nothing but "experience of politics" who reduced California to its present state. As for "no discernible policies", here’s three: unlike the Democratic incumbent, he wants to tax Indian gambling, reverse the recently tripled car tax, and deny driver’s licences to illegal immigrants. For "no discernible policies" read "policies we sophisticated Guardian columnists think are hopelessly infra dig".

The Lawson thesis is that Arnold’s victory inaugurates "the age of narrative politics" - candidates who have nothing to offer but their life stories. He’s got it precisely backwards. The age of narrative politics ended last November, when candidates who ran on biography lost: in Missouri, Senator Jean Carnahan was the brave widow who’d picked up her husband’s political torch when he died in a plane crash. She flopped. In Georgia, Senator Max Cleland was the triple-amputee from Vietnam who’d paid a terrible price for doing his duty. It wasn’t enough. In Minnesota, Walter Mondale was the old lion and political legend pressed into service one more time. Who cares? Running on biography doesn’t work if you’ve got the wrong policies. On Tuesday, Terminator 3 counted for less than Auto Tax x 3 : the electorate loathed Davis’s policies and voted for someone who opposed them. They were very sober and clear-headed. It’s the media — even unto the high-minded Guardian types — who go all goo-goo over "narrative politics".

California’s problem was that it was beginning to take on the characteristics of an EU state, not just in its fiscal incoherence but in its assumption that politics was a private dialogue between a lifelong political class and a like-minded media. It would be too much to expect Le Monde and the BBC to stop being condescending about American electorates. But they might draw a lesson and cease being such snots about their own.