One example of what moving back to the center actually entails - Arnie doesn't think that Bush or his style is going to work in building a majority.
Schwarzenegger Tries New Script
California Governor Reaches Out to Democrats, Independents
By John Pomfret and Sonya Geis
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 29, 2006; A03
SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is attempting a political comeback as he faces reelection this year, courting Democrats and independent voters by distancing himself from President Bush and pushing an expensive bond proposal to rebuild California's levees, schools and highways.
Schwarzenegger, one of the nation's most prominent Republicans, has criticized Bush's plan to dispatch the National Guard to the Mexican border. He has appointed Democrats to key state jobs. In recent weeks, he helped engineer a bipartisan compromise to get the $37 billion bond proposal on the November ballot, traveling the state with Democratic legislative leaders to promote it. And he has embraced other causes popular with California's Democratic voters, including an increase in the minimum wage and a cap on greenhouse gases.
"If last November I told you just give it a few months, that he'd be running around the state with Democrat leaders by his side, you wouldn't have believed me and I would have felt like a fool telling you," said Allan Hoffenblum, a Republican strategist who has been a fierce critic of Schwarzenegger. "But he's doing it. All of the sudden, he has a record of accomplishment."
Dropping his combative, conservative style of last year, the governor is hoping to build support in a state where Democrats and independents account for nearly two-thirds of registered voters. His strategy is having some effect: In April, a Los Angeles Times poll showed his approval rating at 44 percent, up from 37 percent in October.
But he still has a way to go. A poll last week by the Public Policy Institute of California said a race now between Schwarzenegger and either of his likely Democratic opponents -- State Treasurer Phil Angelides or State Controller Steve Westly -- would be a tossup.
Last November, Schwarzenegger's fortunes looked grim. California's voters handed him a stunning loss in a special election that would have changed several state laws and given him more political power.
That election night, Schwarzenegger vowed to change and to show voters that "I am not to the right or left, that I just see things best for California."
Since then he has courted the public-service unions that exert enormous influence on California politics and that had spent millions to try to defeat his plans. Schwarzenegger has tried to smooth relations with the California Nurses Association, whose demonstrators dogged him at public appearances last year, by dropping his quest to overturn state nurse-patient ratios.
Buoyed by an additional $5 billion in tax revenue, he has pledged to increase education spending by billions of dollars, hoping to patch strained ties with the California Teachers Association. And he has put off a significant overhaul of California's troubled prison system, leading the California Correctional Peace Officers Association to delay plans to open a $10 million war chest for attack ads against him.
Late last year, Schwarzenegger replaced his chief of staff, Patricia Clarey, a veteran Republican, with Susan Kennedy, a Democrat and abortion-rights advocate who served as chief of staff for former governor Gray Davis (D), the man Schwarzenegger unseated in a recall election in 2003. Kennedy is credited with introducing discipline into a political machine that last year drew criticism for its scripted media appearances with Schwarzenegger as the action hero-turned-governor, dressed in a flight jacket with the state seal on the back and speaking to handpicked audiences.
This month, Schwarzenegger named Linda Adams, a longtime Democratic aide, to head the state's Environmental Protection Agency. Adams's appointment was a coup of sorts; she most recently was Westly's chief of staff.
To run his reelection campaign, Schwarzenegger also recruited a fresh crop of Republicans, including Matthew Dowd, a senior strategist for Bush's campaign in 2004. Dowd himself is a former Democratic strategist who was instrumental in sending two Democrats from California to the Senate in 1992.
Dowd and other Republican advisers have focused on toning down Schwarzenegger's partisan rhetoric and widening his appeal, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior scholar at the University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning, and Development.
"He is very gubernatorial now," Jeffe said. "You almost never see him out without a shirt and tie. And he's surrounded by a lot of Democrats, as much as or even more than Republicans."
Barely more than half of Schwarzenegger's appointments to jobs, commissions and boards have been Republicans. The majority of his appointees to the state's Air Resources Board, one of the most powerful anti-pollution bodies in the country, are Democrats. Almost half of his judicial appointees are Democrats or independents.
One Democrat appointed by Schwarzenegger is Joe Nuñez, on the state Board of Education. Nuñez, a vocal supporter of Angelides, jokingly refers to himself as "the enemy within."
"I think it's really important to recognize that the staff that he surrounded himself with [before the special election] is completely gone," Nuñez said. "I think that his new staff and his new advisers are looking down the road at the next election and how they can position themselves to win this horse race."
Schwarzenegger's new persona has ruffled feathers among the Republican faithful. In February at the party's state convention, some sought to pass a resolution condemning him for abandoning Republican principles. Karen Hanretty, a former state GOP spokeswoman, said Schwarzenegger can no longer count on Republicans to support him at the polls. She contended that he had become overly influenced by his wife, Maria Shriver, a lifelong Democrat and a member of the Kennedy clan -- a claim the Schwarzenegger administration denies.
Schwarzenegger's recent change of heart on immigration is a case in point, Hanretty said. Last year, the governor, himself an immigrant, spoke in favor of the Minutemen and other vigilante groups patrolling the Mexican border. This year he has distanced himself from the Minutemen and recently criticized a Senate plan to build more walls along the border, telling ABC News's "This Week" that such a plan would be "going back to the Stone Ages."
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on May 16, Schwarzenegger questioned Bush's plan to dispatch the National Guard to help the Border Patrol. He wrote that Bush's idea to send Guardsmen to the border for two-week deployments "presents a logistical nightmare and would be a poor use of forces trained for combat."
"There have been three stages of Arnold," said Bruce Cain, political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. There was "the initial cooperative stage when he first came to office." Then came a stage in 2005, when Schwarzenegger challenged the state's influential Democratic interests.
"And now we have the Pat Brown incarnation, which is the more cooperative incarnation," Cain said, referring to the state's popular Democratic governor in the 1960s who last proposed large infrastructure projects.
"That one plays pretty well in California." |
