http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=4333

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
Arnold Schwarzenegger could face one big obstacle to reelection this November: Conservative Republicans
by Dean Kuipers

It’s a Friday evening in the studios of Los Angeles’ KABC radio, and callers are lighting up the board on The Al Rantel Show. The immigration debate that has dominated state and national news for the past few weeks has been great stuff for the conservative Republican host and his listeners, and it’s an issue on which he’d like to hold Arnold Schwarzenegger’s feet to the fire. The governor, he says during a commercial break, doesn’t want to look anti-immigrant. But Rantel’s show this night is challenging the notion that those who oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants or want tightened borders—like he does—are anti-immigrant or racists.

“I’ve heard a lot of talk from the liberal elite, from erudite folks like John Kerry, about how we should be more like Europe,” Rantel barks, staring over his microphone at a news story he’s taken off the wire. “We’re told that we’re racists over here in America, that we’re xenophobic, that we’re anti-immigrant, and of course we’re not. We’re a nation of immigrants.”

As proof, he reads from the sheet in his hand, a bulletin out of Paris about increasing racism exhibited at soccer matches. In major European cities from London to Paris to Rome, it seems, thousands of fans have recently taken to making what the story calls “monkey chants” at black players. “I think Europe is a hotbed of racism and xenophobia,” Rantel opines. The phones go crazy.

“I’m in Europe all the time,” says a caller named Danny, “and I just wish the [Jesse] Jacksons and the Farrakhans and the Al Sharptons could spend 30 days in any city in Europe. They’d come back and say this is the greatest country in the world.”

“But if we don’t control our borders and pass on the best education system in the world, we really risk losing it all,” Rantel adds, bringing it back on point. “We’re always one generation away from losing the whole thing.”

That kind of urgency, of course, is the typical stuff of talk radio on both the left and the right, but even California conservatives that are far less red-meat Republican than Rantel have felt genuinely frustrated since last October, when Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor they helped elect, failed utterly to pass a slate of conservative ballot initiatives. Even worse, from their perspective, his messages grew more mixed as he hired liberal Democrat Susan Kennedy, the former chief of staff for recalled Gov. Gray Davis, and began pushing a huge, pork-filled infrastructure bond proposal. Plus, he’s been routinely appointing Democrats to judgeships and state commissions.

These are all slaps in the face to conservatives who backed him in the 2003 recall election over their obvious preference: state Sen. Tom McClintock (who still took 13.5 percent of the total vote and between 30 and 40 percent of the Republican vote in that election). Suddenly, they’re thinking their loyalties were misplaced. What happened to the Schwarzenegger who promised to “clean house” in Sacramento and cure the state’s “spending problem,” who seemed to give a conservative speech at the Republican National Convention in 2004 and who wrote in the Sept. 24, 2003, Wall Street Journal that his heroes were free-marketer Adam Smith and small-government economist Milton Friedman?

“I’m less enthusiastic about him than I was when he took office, because I think he’s made a few mistakes,” says Rantel. “He’s caved in on principle on a lot of conservative issues.”

On immigration, for instance. Schwarzenegger has been largely parroting the position of President George W. Bush, calling for tightened borders but also guest-worker programs that conservatives equate with an amnesty.

“He’s giving a lot of generalities and platitudes, but I don’t think he’s very strong on [immigration]. I think he’s worried about alienating Latino voters. He wants to avoid being Pete Wilson,” says Rantel. “He should be a lot stronger against Bush about controlling the border, as a couple of other governors have been—[Janet] Napolitano in Arizona and [Bill] Richardson in New Mexico.” (Ironically, both are Democrats.) “Schwarzenegger could take a higher-profile position as the governor of the biggest problem state.”

Conservatives statewide, like Rantel, simply want Schwarzenegger to come out into the clear and differentiate himself from the Democrats with whom he seems to do most of his strategizing and negotiating. They believe this is the best path to reelection. Yes, that approach got him pounded in the special election last fall, but there’s a bigger prize at stake: To conservatives, if he goes on acting like what they see as a Democrat, appointing loads of Democrats, and hiding his fiscal agenda beneath a flowery bed of feel-good, the Republican Party will cease to mean anything at all in California.

“The Republican Party in California is a wreck,” says Rantel. “They can’t get anybody elected. The only reason they have Schwarzenegger is because of people like me, who helped to get Davis recalled. Imagine, in a state that was the home of Ronald Reagan, Nixon and other successful Republicans, they have not one statewide elected office. Not one. Because they don’t stand for anything. But even in California, most people agree with Republicans on the big issues. He just has to step out and deliver the Republican message.”

Trouble at the convention

“My support for his reelection isn’t really an issue,” says Jon Fleischman, former executive director of the California Republican Party and publisher of well-read conservative Internet blog The Flash Report. “I can’t imagine how far to the left Arnold Schwarzenegger would have to move to be worse than [state Controller] Steve Westly or [state Treasurer] Phil Angelides,” the front-running Democratic challengers.

“The problem is going to be motivating what I would call regular conservatives out there, who have options,” he adds.

Since October, say Fleischman and others, the governor simply hasn’t given grassroots Republicans much to cheer for in the way of conservative issues. And, with McClintock playing good soldier and easing off the far-right rhetoric in his run for lieutenant governor, red-staters might just fall asleep and stay home in November. It’s an abrupt shift from the contentious summer of 2005, when they saw The Terminator at war, pushing four ballot initiatives that were pro-life, made it easier to fire teachers, changed school funding formulas, and diminished the political power of unions. That was a far-right rallying cry, put together by party operatives who’d worked with Pete Wilson and designed to bring out the faithful. It was, in fact, a slate so conservative it shocked most of the California electorate, who hadn’t expected teacher- and nurse-bashing from a man elected as a moderate. And it all was resoundingly defeated.

Immediately after this, however, it appeared that Arnold, like a man addicted to sweeping gestures, went big in the opposite direction. Even before hiring Kennedy—which was more of an insult to Republicans than any kind of serious policy gaffe, as Kennedy is liked in Sacramento—he began outlining a proposal for a huge infrastructure bond to launch a statewide makeover. On top of the $15 billion he borrowed in 2004, he was thinking about possibly borrowing as much as $100 billion to fix roads, schools and levees, and to juice up the economy. It quickly became $200 billion. Well, hell, how about $222 billion? And what about another handful of liberal judges?

What some observers see as wild, irreconcilable policy swings, others see as signs of a practical politician attuned to the election calendar

“I think he realizes what you can get away with at different times in your governorship,” says UCSD political science professor Thad Kousser. “He knew early on that he needed to get quick victories, and so he compromised, he worked with politicians of both parties and he worked with Sacramento’s major interest groups in 2004. In 2005, he knew he had some time before he had to run for another reelection, and so he took a shot at some policy reaches. And he missed; he lost badly. But he knew he’d have time to recover, and I think this year’s all about recovery. He’s running in a state that’s majority Democrat, so he has to show that side of himself.”

Whatever the case, by February, 2006, Republican activists across the state had had enough.

Going into that month’s California Republican Party convention, conservatives such as the California Republican Assembly (CRA), a statewide activist group whose members include many state legislators, came armed with motions to censure Schwarzenegger on four different points, including one to rescind his endorsement from the party. That motion was easily defeated, and censure was also abandoned, but the matters were taken up in committee, and some of them survived. For one, the party agreed by unanimous vote that the governor has been wrong in appointing so many non-Republicans to the bench—by March, he’d appointed 68 Republicans, 46 Democrats and 16 Independents. (Most governors, say activists, appoint about 90 percent from their own party. And even worse, they say, he’s appointing judges from both parties who don’t believe in the death penalty, but that wasn’t part of the resolution.) The party also came out in opposition to deficit spending and unbalanced budgets—supporting McClintock positions, not Schwarzenegger positions. A motion to oppose the increase in the minimum wage—which Schwarzenegger favors—was also popular with delegates but was defeated in committee.

Disagreement over platforms is hardly new to any political party, but Schwarzenegger seemed to brush it off like so much lint. As described by Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton, the governor addressed the convention’s big Friday-night banquet but didn’t eat with his fellow Republicans, didn’t shake hands, didn’t work the tables. Just talked and left. Skelton’s column noting this concludes: “Schwarzenegger must tend to the care and feeding of his own party. Otherwise, agitated activists could take a bite out of him in November.”

“The governor has been endorsed by the party, and he looks forward to their continued support throughout this campaign,” says his campaign press secretary, Julie Soderlund.

“We want the governor to return to the themes with which he was successful in the 2003 recall,” says Mike Spence, president of the CRA, which did not support Schwarzenegger in the recall election and has not endorsed him in this one. “And after the special-election losses, he abandoned several of those themes: Reforming Sacramento. Reforming the budget process. He decided to go a different route, in supporting more debt, more spending.”

“His theory is that he can gain Democrat and decline-to-state votes in November and lose a certain percentage of Republican votes and still win,” says Steve Frank, publisher of another popular conservative blog, California Political News and Views. “The problem with that is, he doesn’t just lose Republican votes; he loses turnout. So not only does he lose Republican votes, but everyone on the under-ticket loses. People running for legislative seats lose.”

It may end up that Schwarzenegger will need every available vote. An April 14 Field Poll shows him in a dead heat with Democratic challenger Westly, with each preferred by 43 percent of voters in a head-to-head contest. The governor still maintains a four-point margin over Angelides. As a result of heavy campaigning, Westly also now enjoys an 11-point lead on Angelides for the June 6 Democratic primary.

“Schwarzenegger and his team are probably counting on the idea that they can paint the Democratic opposition in November as so horrible that they can motivate conservatives to come back to him based just on that contrast,” says Dan Schnur, a political consultant who has worked for both Pete Wilson and U.S. Sen. John McCain. “The prospect of a Governor Angelides can frighten a lot of conservatives and a lot of prospective donors.”

Bond breakdown

Schwarzenegger’s behavior at the state convention aside, many analysts and activists look at the mid-March collapse of the $222 billion infrastructure bond as proof that the governor is out of touch with his own party. Despite harried, last-minute work by Schwarzenegger and some top Republican donors to line up support, the deal was largely scuttled by Republicans themselves, robbing the “Governator” of a high-profile achievement to show voters.

“It’s pretty clear that Mr. Schwarzenegger is dramatically out of touch with his Republican constituency and with the Republican legislators,” says Michael Schroeder, a Corona del Mar attorney and former head of the California Republican Party and the CRA. “He made the mistake of trying to negotiate with the Democrats first and assuming that the Republican caucus would support this massive $222 billion bond proposal. And he was wrong.”

According to Schroeder and others, Schwarzenegger had plenty of warning. The Republican caucus in the state assembly had voted against the bond measure a month before the looming March ballot deadline, and chair Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) announced they weren’t going to be supporting the governor’s plan. Instead, they wanted pay-as-you-go bonds.

“He assumed that things were like right after he was elected, where, based on his star power, they would come around,” adds Schroeder. “Instead, we ended up with the fiasco that we have now.”

Behind the scenes, such conservative activists as the CRA campaigned hard against the bond measure. “We opposed the bonds,” says CRA’s Spence. “We oppose bonds for soccer fields. We oppose bonds for bike paths and pedestrian walkways, when what we need is more roads. We’re opposed to any of the pork-filled bonds that were being proposed there. So we’re fine with them being defeated.”

It seems that, in many ways, conservative thinking won the day; the Legislature took action on its own to carve out a few bond issues it desperately needed to fund schools and levee repairs and put together bills on them independently, proposing to fund them year by year, or pay-as-you-go, rather than borrowing a lot up front.

“He probably underestimated their level of discomfort with that amount of spending,” says Schnur. “The breakdown of the bond negotiations, unlike a lot of debate in the capitol, probably didn’t have to happen. If anything, he ran out of time.”

As evidence, Schnur points to the fact that those school and levee packages came together independently in the assembly and the senate on the last night.

“There was common ground to be found,” he says. “There just wasn’t enough time to find it. Now, there are legitimate questions to be asked why that happened.”

Rocky Reelection Road

Phil Angelides’s admission last week that balancing California’s budget will probably mean tax hikes—a rare burst of honesty in an election season already marked by a lot of feel-good talk and doublespeak—was enough to send Republicans scrambling to Schwarzenegger’s side. Moderate or not, he is at least the Republican candidate, and one part of his strategy seems solid: GOP activists are going to vote for him no matter what.

But those are the activists. Lukewarm Republicans, fence-sitters, independents, crossover Democrats who voted for Schwarzenegger the first time, and politics-haters might sit this one out if there are no hot-button issues to vote on. Plus, President Bush and the Republican Party in general are taking a drubbing over corruption scandals and the manipulation of evidence to support the Iraq war, and pundits are predicting this will depress party turnout.

UCSD’s Kousser quarrels with the notion that Schwarzenegger’s shift toward Pat Brown-style big government might compel Republicans to sit the next one out.

“Are Republicans thrilled with Arnold Schwarzenegger? The answer’s obviously no—but it doesn’t matter,” Kousser says. “Republican turnout doesn’t fluctuate that much. Republicans don’t tend to be marginal voters; they tend to be the type of folks who do vote fairly regularly.

“Republicans,” he says, “generally don’t take a walk on their candidates.”

To make sure they don’t, conservatives are begging Schwarzenegger to come out strong, and to do it quick.

“I’ll draw the parallel to Wilson and Davis,” says Schnur. “Invariably, a centrist governor is never going to be completely acceptable to the ideological base of his own party. There were Democrats who were furious with Davis throughout his term in office, and many conservative Republicans whose anger with Wilson back in the 1990s was much greater than anything being expressed toward Schwarzenegger now. And the answer is to find a series of issues on which there’s some common agreement with the party’s base.”

Wilson, of course, riled up the party faithful with strong stands on crime and welfare reform, and, perhaps most infamously, with a push to combat illegal immigration in the form of 1994’s Proposition 187, the “Save Our State” initiative, which passed in a landslide and would have withheld state services from illegal immigrants but was later overturned in court.

So far, say Schnur and others, Schwarzenegger has two decent issues: one, he’s kept his vow not to raise taxes. Two, he’s supported Jessica’s Law, the “Sexual Predator Punishment and Control Act of 2006.” But, they say, he needs something more to reach the masses.

“The first thing he needs to do is to re-engage the debate about the impact public employee unions are having in California,” says Fleischman. “He needs to look at the fact that we have a pension crisis looming, and have some real discussions about what we’re going to do about that. How do you have a conversation about moving from a defined benefit program to a defined contribution program, if you’re not willing to take on the unions?”

This is a sore point for many conservatives, especially in light of the governor’s recent re-appointment of Joe Nuñez to the state Board of Education. Nuñez, a Democratic operative and an assistant executive director for the California Teachers Association, was instrumental in helping defeat Schwarzenegger’s ballot initiatives last year. His union has endorsed Angelides for governor. Fleischman says that empowering the Republicans’ union enemies is insanity, adding that he’d rather have his old kindergarten teacher appointed to that school board, “and I don’t even know her party registration.”

But there are other issues that seem natural. Eminent domain reform. Preventing illegal immigrants from getting driver’s licenses. Taxes are still too high. Drawing a tough line on state spending.

“He’s got to revamp the budget,” says Fleischman. “The budget that’s been introduced right now, it’s almost like he’s downing the ball on his own 30-yard line, when he’s got an opportunity to really move the ball a lot further down the field.”

“The most important one he should go after, and I think he has come out against it, is Proposition 82, what I call the ‘Son of Meathead Initiative,’” says KABC’s Rantel. The “Preschool for All Initiative,” until recently headed up by actor-director Rob Reiner, has been a target of particular ire for small-government types, who feel it’s another wasteful program that would tax the rich, or “wealth-producers,” as Rantel calls them, with no proven benefit.

Blogger Steve Frank agrees: “[Schwarzenegger] allowed Reiner to resign; he should have fired him. But he replaced him with a guy who is one of Rob Reiner’s best friends, a guy who is very active with the National Council of La Raza, a guy named Hector Ramirez, who also serves on the First 5 Committee for L.A. County.”

Frank’s reference to the National Council of La Raza, of course, is to indicate that Ramirez would also be a guy who’d support immigration reform. Which is precisely where many conservatives feel Schwarzenegger should draw his line in the sand. Schwarzenegger has said in speeches and in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that this is a federal problem, and that he wants comprehensive legislation based on “control of the border and compassion for the immigrant.” And, yes, confirms press secretary Soderlund, “compassion” includes support for a guest-worker program. In fact, the governor’s position on immigration is very similar to that of President Bush—which conservatives feel is weak.

“The issue has nothing to do with immigrants,” huffs Frank. “Nothing to do with immigration. It has to do with people who are illegally coming into our country. That’s not immigration, that’s criminal action. What he’s trying to do, like he’s doing with global warming, is he’s trying to smooth over the differences by changing the language. He’s just trying to fudge the issue in the hopes that no one will notice.”

Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters suggested in a March 19 piece that immigration might work for Schwarzenegger just like it did for Wilson: “A new Field Poll on that issue indicates that if it comes down to the wire, illegal immigration still is a hot button with the capacity to move voters, especially all-important independents. In a heated reelection campaign, that could be as decisive for Schwarzenegger as it was for Wilson 12 years ago.”

But whatever it is, it will have to be real. Party activists say that the base might not be swayed by TV ads this time around. They’ve had very little action since 2004, and they’re looking for red meat.

“I don’t want him to take a stand on any issue,” says Frank. “None. Because words are meaningless in politics. I want to see him provide a budget—action—that will balance the budget. I don’t want to hear him talk about compassion toward immigrants, who are here legally and by the rules of the federal government. I want to hear what he’s going to do to un-crowd our schools. What is he going to do to fix our roads? What is he going to do to provide health care for seniors when they’re crowded out of trauma centers by illegal aliens?

“The governor could,” he adds, “issue an executive order that every government agency in the state that comes into contact with any illegal aliens, create a list and turn it over to the federal government. That’s action. He can do it. He’s the governor.”

David Rolland contributed to this story.

5/3/06