[Mb-civic] Arnold Terminates Himself - Harold Meyerson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Arnold Terminates Himself

By Harold Meyerson
Thursday, November 10, 2005; Page A29

LOS ANGELES -- Arnold Schwarzenegger's nine mad months of governing 
Democratic California as a partisan Republican came to the most 
predictable of unhappy endings here on Tuesday. Each of the four ballot 
measures he inflicted on voters in his special election lost decisively 
-- his spending-limit proposal tanking by 24 percent, and his measure to 
curb the clout of public-sector unions (Proposition 75) by 7 percent. 
The mystery of this election is what on earth Schwarzenegger could have 
been thinking: No comparable elected official in recent memory has 
picked a fight so gratuitously and come out of it so beat up.

Back in January Schwarzenegger's approval rating stood at 62 percent in 
the Public Policy Institute of California's poll. Then, in short order, 
he called for axing the pensions of the state's public employees, which 
would have eliminated the survivor benefits for widows and orphans of 
police officers and firefighters. He tried to stall the implementation 
of a law mandating a nurse-to-patient ratio in hospitals and attacked 
the nurses' union as a special interest. He reneged on a commitment to 
restore funding for the state's schools. He went after the public 
employees unions by backing Proposition 75. And the sky fell on him.

California's unions produced a torrent of advertising that featured 
cops, nurses, teachers and firefighters condemning the governor. They 
revved up the most effective Democratic voter mobilization operation in 
the nation. When they were done, not only did the governor's 
propositions fail but his approval rating in the most recent PPIC poll 
collapsed to a Bushian 35 percent.

"Arnold's mistake was to try to leverage his popularity to advance the 
Republican platform, which doesn't have much support in California," the 
state's Democratic Assembly speaker, Fabian Nez, remarked a few days 
before the vote. "The Republicans see him as a vehicle to move their 
agenda, and he's done that rather than try to enlarge their agenda."

You'd think the Governator would know better. He was elected less as a 
partisan Republican than as an outsider who could forge bi- and 
nonpartisan solutions in a fractious Sacramento. Sometime last winter, 
though, he forgot who he'd been when the voters elected him. He began 
spouting the gospel according to Grover Norquist, the anti-tax, 
anti-union Republican strategist. But Norquist's Proposition 226 -- a 
1998 anti-union California ballot measure that essentially prefigured 
this year's Proposition 75 -- had gone down in a heap. Why did 
Schwarzenegger think he could prevail with a warmed-over version seven 
years later? Particularly since California is just about the only state 
in which union density has actually increased over the past half-decade?

The answer is: the special election. By calling yet another election in 
election-weary California, Schwarzenegger was counting on engendering so 
much voter revulsion at the election itself that only a relative handful 
of disproportionately Republican voters would actually go to the polls. 
After all, the past two special elections to feature only propositions 
and no candidates on the ballot -- one in 1979, the other in 1993 -- 
both had roughly 37 percent turnout. The unions understood that their 
task was to push turnout over 40 percent, and on Tuesday they did just that.

The conventional wisdom out here is that Schwarzenegger, like the 
Terminator, will be back -- that he'll seek reelection next year and 
mount a strong and quite possibly successful candidacy. I don't buy 
that. He'll run, all right, but I think the damage he's inflicted on 
himself precludes much hope of a comeback. His polling among 
independents and moderates is almost as low as it is among Democrats and 
liberals. His approval rating among Latinos has toppled to a ghastly 25 
percent.

More broadly, Schwarzenegger's fierce opposition to raising taxes to pay 
for state services is profoundly at odds with the wishes of state 
voters. Over the past couple of years, while he has raised tuition and 
restricted admissions to the state's universities rather than hike taxes 
on the rich, voters in more than 100 municipalities around the state 
have levied higher property taxes on themselves to pay for new schools.

Indeed, the repudiation of Schwarzenegger's propositions, coupled with 
the defeat in Virginia of the Republicans' taxophobic gubernatorial 
nominee, Jerry Kilgore, and last week's decision by Colorado voters to 
partially overturn a spending limit that was blocking road and school 
construction, strongly suggests that the Republicans' anti-tax revolt is 
running out of steam. All politics may be local, but when you lose in 
dissimilar localities all across the country, in large part because the 
central theme of contemporary conservatism isn't resonating anymore, you 
have yourself a national problem. And that's not even counting the issue 
of George W. Bush.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/09/AR2005110901635.html
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