Republicans Blame Schwarzenegger

Republicans Blame Schwarzenegger

LOS ANGELES - The across-the-board collapse of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ballot propositions came down to this: They were ideas with narrow appeal, further damaged by a flat-footed campaign and an unpopular messenger, the governor himself.

And that's just what his fellow Republicans said.

California's celebrity governor was elected in 2003 as a centrist Republican — an essential pedigree in a state that votes reliably Democratic. But by the end of his initiative campaign Tuesday, Schwarzenegger had alienated Democrats and independents and allowed his opponents to paint him as an extremist.

"What was defeated yesterday was a caricature of Arnold Schwarzenegger, not the reality of Arnold Schwarzenegger," Republican consultant Kevin Spillane said Wednesday.

Despite his moderate views on social and environmental issues, "that's not the tone and style and implicit message that came through in this campaign, and it played right into the hands of his opponents who depicted him as an ultraconservative Republican," Spillane said.

In many ways Schwarzenegger's failure at the polls spoke for itself. Voters turned away all four of his ballot initiatives, three of them by double-digit margins, according to unofficial returns.

The propositions sought to give the governor authority to make midyear budget cuts, take away the power of legislators to redraw their own political districts, restrict the money public employee unions could raise for political campaigns, and make it easier to fire teachers and harder for them to obtain tenure.

Several GOP analysts and consultants traced the start of the governor's troubles to his choice of propositions. For a while he talked about pushing pension reform, an issue that outraged labor unions but never made it to the ballot. In the end, the four proposals he did back generated little or no appeal with the political middle and left, limiting his support largely to Republicans who are a minority in California.

"They ran a Republican campaign in a Democratic state, and they saw that yesterday in the results," Republican analyst Allan Hoffenblum said.

Schwarzenegger, who has famously called some political opponents "girlie men" and said he was always kicking the butts of others, saw such remarks come back to haunt him, said John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who once worked as an analyst for House Republicans.

"His rhetoric put off a lot of voters, Pitney said. "'Girlie men' was a very expensive laugh line."

Analysts also said the campaign was too slow to answer criticism from opponents, who framed the governor and his proposals as extreme in a barrage of TV ads.

"Why did they wait several months to respond to attacks from unions?" Hoffenblum asked. "They made bad political decisions all the way through."

The campaign was limited to some extent in its response by the fact Schwarzenegger's opponents raised twice as much money.

"We had to weather the beating that we took," said campaign spokesman Todd Harris, who also complained of second-guessing by people he said weren't directly involved.

"There were people who didn't lift a finger to help in the fight for reform who will now take great joy in pointing out what we should have done differently," Harris said.