This Time, Schwarzenegger May Not Get a Hollywood Ending

NY Times
Nov. 07, 2005

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 6 - A startling change has come over California's larger-than-life governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as voters prepare to head to the polls on Tuesday for an unpopular statewide election. His television advertisements have taken on an uncharacteristic tone of humility. And ordinary people, no longer awed by his Olympian persona, are openly challenging him in public.

The four ballot measures Mr. Schwarzenegger supports are trailing in the polls, and his re-election prospects next year appear, for now, to be dimming. His approval ratings are in a tailspin, and his stage presence has been drained of much of its bombast and bluster.

At a televised forum here last week, with audience members picked to represent a cross-section of voters, several questioners interrupted Mr. Schwarzenegger and accused him of distorting facts to sell the four ballot measures, which are among eight up for a vote in an election ordered specially by the governor.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was explaining Proposition 75, a measure he favors that would require public-employee unions to receive the written permission of members before their dues could be used for political campaigns.

Democrats and union leaders who oppose the proposition have called it a naked attempt to silence the unions' political voice. The governor says the proposition is about protecting workers' paychecks.

An audience member who gave his name as Chris Robeson and said he was a health care worker from Camarillo angrily cut the governor off. "That's just Rovian spin," Mr. Robeson said, referring to Karl Rove, the White House political guru. "That's fraudulent."

Such bald impertinence would have been unthinkable a year ago, when Mr. Schwarzenegger was riding high in the polls and rolling over the opposition. But political missteps and unending battles with Democrats in the California Legislature and the public-employee unions have taken their toll. The governor seems chastened for the first time in his public life.

He no longer refers to members of the Legislature as "girlie men" and does not talk about "kicking their butts" anymore. He does not even appear in many of the advertisements for his initiatives, letting others speak for him.

This weekend, as Mr. Schwarzenegger toured Southern California on a bus in a final pitch, he was hounded by opponents, including the actors Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, in a bus dubbed the Truth Squad.

One television advertisement in which Mr. Schwarzenegger does appear is particularly startling to those who have followed the arc of his career from champion bodybuilder to action movie star to Governator. He looks straight into the camera and reminds voters that they elected him to clean up state government and put California back on track.

Then he says: "I've had a lot to learn, and sometimes I learned the hard way. But my heart is in this, and I want to do right by you."

His humble approach appears intended to assuage election-weary voters who will go to the polls on Tuesday for the third time in 20 months to vote on proposed laws and constitutional amendments, doing for themselves what in most democracies is done by elected representatives.

In addition to deciding on the union dues measure, voters will determine who will draw legislative district boundaries, how much budget power to give the governor and whether to enact new rules governing the probationary period for new teachers.

Also on the ballot are measures on parental notification for teenagers seeking abortions and the regulation of electric utilities, and competing measures for discounts on prescription drugs.

The special election is a symptom of the partisan gridlock in Sacramento, where the Republican governor and the Democrat-dominated Legislature and its union backers agree on almost nothing.

The campaign has generated more than $225 million in campaign donations, most of them from unions and drug companies seeking to kill measures they disapprove of. The governor's campaign is financed chiefly by business interests, including real estate developers, technology executives, auto dealers, agribusinesses, insurance companies and Wal-Mart heirs.

The airwaves have been saturated with advertising for weeks. Mr. Schwarzenegger has been stumping the state nonstop for the past month, playing largely to small partisan crowds.

National political figures, including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, have visited the state to urge voters to support or oppose the ballot measures. Mr. McCain accompanied Mr. Schwarzenegger on part of his bus tour on Saturday, speaking out in favor of Proposition 77, a plan to transfer redistricting power from the Legislature to a panel of retired judges.

The total price of the election, including the roughly $50 million cost of conducting the vote itself, is likely to top $300 million, an amount that 13 years ago could have financed an entire national presidential campaign.

Despite - or perhaps because of - the ceaseless advertising, voters appear only mildly interested in the election and inclined to defeat most if not all of the measures, according to polls released last week. Officials estimate that about 40 percent of eligible voters will show up.

"Have we got ballot fatigue?" asked Leon E. Panetta, the former Democratic California congressman and White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. "No kidding."

This campaign is Mr. Schwarzenegger's third statewide election since he won office in a wild recall election two years ago. He is following much the same script as in previous campaigns, a Hollywood-style melodrama pitting the self-styled people's governor against what he calls the union bosses and special interests.

He was successful the first time out, in March 2004, winning voter approval of two measures to address the state's budget deficit. A year ago, with the help of tens of millions of dollars from high-technology entrepreneurs, Hollywood personalities and medical research groups, Mr. Schwarzenegger was able to win approval for a $3 billion stem cell research institute.

In fall 2004 he also helped persuade voters to reject two initiatives that would have expanded Indian gambling in California and one to soften the state's tough three-strikes sentencing law.

But this time the governor's pitch does not appear to be working. All four initiatives Mr. Schwarzenegger has endorsed are trailing in public polls, although one is fairly close: a measure to increase to five years from two the probationary period before public school teachers can win union-protected tenure.

A poll by the independent Field Research Corporation of San Francisco found that the governor's call for a special election made voters less inclined to vote for his re-election next year. As of late October, only 36 percent of registered voters said they would support his re-election, the Field poll found. Fifty-five percent said they would not vote for him.

The governor's aides acknowledge that his popularity has plummeted in the past year, but they attribute it to a relentless drumbeat of negative advertising financed by his union foes.

"A $120 million smear campaign is going to have an impact against anybody," said Todd Harris, a senior Schwarzenegger adviser. He said the attacks would not deter Mr. Schwarzenegger from seeking re-election, nor would the governor be swayed if his initiatives were defeated on Tuesday.

"The worse we do, the more he'll want to run again," Mr. Harris said. "This is not a guy who goes out when he's down."