ShareThisBy DANIEL WEINTRAUB
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
The transformation of Arnold Schwarzenegger from an object of widespread derision to a landslide winner in 12 short months was remarkably simple. All he had to do was stop playing the role of governor _ and become one.
But it was also a devilishly complex task. Having gambled everything on a slate of reforms that the public rejected in a special election in November 2005, Schwarzenegger was behind in the polls, out of campaign money and facing a national political climate in his re-election year that was almost certain to favor the opposition. He had to win back the admiration of Democrats and independents while keeping his hold on the base of Republican voters, without whom he would never gain a second term.
The answer came in three parts.
The first was humility. Even as the devastating special election results were still flowing in on Nov. 8, 2005, Schwarzenegger made it clear that he got the voters' message: "Californians," he said, "are sick and tired of all the fighting."
Later, he conceded he was wrong to push for a special election without exhausting every opportunity to work with the Legislature. And it was not a one-time admission. Like a man in therapy, the governor seemed to draw strength from repeating time and again that he had made a mistake, seen the error of his ways, and changed.
"He did say he was sorry, which is something not every politician on earth is willing to do," said Gale Kaufman, the Democratic consultant who guided the labor union coalition that sank Schwarzenegger's plans at the polls last year.
But saying he was sorry was only the beginning. Schwarzenegger still had to prove to voters he was up to the job they elected him to do in the historic 2003 recall election. That was step two: He needed to govern.
Schwarzenegger had demonstrated some of that skill in his first year as the state's chief executive. But his biggest accomplishment, an overhaul of the troubled system for compensating workers injured on the job, came only after he threatened to take the issue to the voters via a ballot measure. Now that option was gone. He was going to have to be smarter, more collaborative. Less brawn, more brain.
Enter Susan Kennedy. Republican activists nearly revolted when Schwarzenegger asked Kennedy, a lifelong Democratic activist, to be his chief of staff. There was talk of withdrawing the party's endorsement for his re-election, even finding someone to run against him in the primary. But in the end, Kennedy, a former aide to Schwarzenegger's ousted predecessor, Gray Davis, helped save the job of one of the few prominent Republicans unscathed by the Democratic wave that would sweep the nation.
She did it by helping Schwarzenegger return to his roots as a man almost uniquely positioned to cross partisan boundaries in an era of intense partisanship. Socially moderate, progressive on the environment, but rabidly opposed to raising taxes, Schwarzenegger is a radical centrist, a near-perfect fit for the California electorate.
Kennedy and others around the governor sensed that as long as Schwarzenegger held firm on taxes, Republican voters would grant him leeway to wheel and deal on other things. And besides, unlike the activists who made so much noise in the press, rank-and-file Republican voters actually supported many of the policy ideas Schwarzenegger would use to bridge the gap with the Democrats who controlled the Legislature.
"He came into office promising to blow up the boxes, but the boxes blew up in his face, because he didn't blow up the biggest thing of all: how you get things done," Kennedy said. "That's what he did this year."
The issue that would come to symbolize that new bipartisan model was, of all things, infrastructure. It was a subject that in other hands might have made the voters' eyes glaze over. But it reflected Schwarzenegger's optimistic, future-oriented outlook. His exuberance was contagious, and, on this issue, almost devoid of partisan coloration. He wanted to "build, build, build" to prepare California to deal with the 21st century. And he proposed a package of $68 billion in public works bonds to make it happen.
"It gave him something to talk about that was so organically his that it lit him on fire," Kennedy said. "The timing was right, we knew it was the right thing to do, and it put him at the center of an issue that drew everyone to the same table."
It didn't come easy. Democrats complained that his first proposal was too big and ill-designed. After an initial stalemate, a new, slimmer package emerged: $37 billion in bonds to pay for transportation, housing, schools and flood control. The two-thirds vote to put the package on the ballot was a huge signal to voters that Schwarzenegger had found a way to build consensus in a contentious world.
While the Republican governor was making policy gains with his new Democratic chief of staff, his Democratic wife, Maria Shriver, was searching for a new political team to run his re-election campaign. That quest led her to a strange place: the Republican White House. Shriver suggested that Schwarzenegger hire two veterans of President George W. Bush's campaign team, Matthew Dowd and Steve Schmidt, to design and manage his bid for a second term. He agreed, and the fusion of left and right, liberal and conservative, was complete.
This led to the third key step in Schwarzenegger's rehabilitation: a distinct change in his look and style. Schwarzenegger started talking and acting like a governor who happened to be a celebrity, not a celebrity who was pretending to be governor.
Out went "Cartaxula," the Count Dracula figure Schwarzenegger once used as a foil to demonstrate his opposition to raising the car tax. Gone were the oversized spigots flowing with fake red ink to illustrate the Democrats' insistence on deficit spending.
"No more driving around in a Hummer, no more ... running around and explosions and fireworks," Schmidt said Thursday. "People like their governors to wear suits and do gubernatorial things. There was a very conscious effort and focus on that. A lot of the events were gone. He went to settings where he was serious and he was substantive."
All of these changes positioned Schwarzenegger for a comeback. Then he got lucky. The Democrats, after an expensive and bitter primary, nominated Treasurer Phil Angelides, a partisan slasher who identified himself as the "anti-Arnold" and pushed a tax increase that appealed to his party's left wing but almost no one else. Republican voters despised him, and independents were only lukewarm. Even Democrats never completely embraced him.
As soon as the primary result was in, the Schwarzenegger campaign pounced with an ad showing Angelides in reverse-motion, black-and-white footage that made him appear to be walking backward. That became the theme for the entire campaign: Schwarzenegger was moving us forward, and Angelides would take us backward. The Democrat's tax proposals, often in exaggerated form, would also play a key role in the governor's advertising.
Bill Carrick, a senior adviser to Angelides, said the forward-backward theme was simple _ and effective.
"It sort of tapped into the ghost of Gray Davis," he said.
Angelides got no help from his Democratic friends in the Capitol.
Although they could have stymied Schwarzenegger and made him look ineffective, Senate Leader Don Perata and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nzqez did the opposite, working eagerly with the governor on a bipartisan agenda for change.
Buoyed by an unexpected surge in tax revenues, they passed a budget on time that showered money on the schools while paying down some of the state's accumulated debt. They met Schwarzenegger half-way on a key labor issue, passing a bill to increase the minimum wage while acceding to the governor's demand that the legislation not include an automatic annual cost-of-living increase. They sent him a prescription drug discount bill that he had agreed to sign. And in the most dramatic move of all, the governor and the Democrats agreed on a landmark global warming bill that set California on the path to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.
That bill embodied the new Schwarzenegger way. Although he got almost no support from Republican legislators, he did have significant backing from the business community, and he brought opponents of the legislation to the table with an admonition to make the new law workable since its passage was inevitable. In the end, he settled on a hybrid that would rely in part on old-fashioned, top-down regulation and in part on market forces to give polluters more flexibility to meet the new requirements.
Schwarzenegger signed the bill in an elaborate, bipartisan ceremony on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, an event paid for in part by contributions from the very industries that would be regulated by the new law. A huge video screen beamed in British Prime Minister Tony Blair to address the crowd about the historic legislation. And with that, Schwarzenegger's makeover was a success.
Even his one-time antagonists in the labor movement went relatively easy on him. Having spent $80 million to defeat his ballot measures in 2005, labor seemed poised to drive him from office. But in 2006, the main union coalition spent only a fraction of that amount and didn't have nearly the same level of energy behind its campaign. Kaufman, the unions' consultant, said that was in part because Schwarzenegger and so effectively moved beyond the issues that mobilized the unions _ and the voters _ the year before.
"A lot of people said to us, 'Where did all the protestors go? Why aren't you dogging the governor?' " Kaufman said. "You could go out with protest signs, but they have to say something. You have to have something meaningful to say on those signs."
With the governor playing traditionally Democratic issues on a national and international stage, and with Democratic politicians and interest groups unwilling to do his dirty work, Angelides was reduced to a bothersome pest, an afterthought, that obscure guy who was running against "Arnold." He never stood a chance, losing in a 17-percentage point landslide with less than 40 percent of the vote.
Now the question is what comes next. Hard-core Democrats say the transformation was just one more acting role for Schwarzenegger, who will now be free to return to partisan ways. But Kennedy says last year's version of the governor was the contrived one, and that his commitment to finding bipartisan middle ground, even changing the way politics and policymaking work in California, is sincere. Expect more of the same.
"If we can solidify that into some new model that succeeds us, that would be a great accomplishment," she said.
