Columnist Daniel Weintraub writes in The saga of the special election Sacramento Bee 11/13/05:
In the end, it was an election that a majority of voters did not want on issues about which the governor could not get them to care. Now many of them are angry with him for putting them through the ordeal. A year from now, the same voters will decide whether to grant him another term. Winning back their affection - and trust - will be the biggest challenge of Schwarzenegger's short political career.
Tuesday of last week (Nov. 8) there was a special statewide election in California over several propositions. It was seen near-universally as a major blow for Schwarzenegger and his popularity. I notice that hasn't stopped the press in the days since from gushing out the governor's spin over his trip to China to promote trade. (See Trip coverage could help court Asian Americans in 2006 campaign San Francisco Chronicle 11/14/05 and Excited Crowds Greet Governor in Beijing Los Angeles Times 11/14/05, the latter article headline on the LA Times home page as "Governor's Star Power Still Shining Brightly in Beijing".) But Schwarzengger's days as the novelty movie-star governor are over. Voters are now evaluating him as a politician and political leader.
Weintraub is a fan of Schwarzenegger's. But, unlike the David Brookes of the world, he still seems to have enough journalistic professionalism to still tell a story without wrapping it in the Republican Party line of the day. He uses few Republican-partisan phrases in this column. But his analysis of the recent election is very good, especially given that he normally tends to lean favorably toward Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger made the all-too-understandable mistake of taking his own press too seriously. He was under the impression that he was such a tribune of the people that he could bully the Democrats in the legislature into going along with his anti-union and anti-education and quirky redestricting proposals by threatening to take matters to the voters in initiatives.
But there was something critical that made the difference: unions. Teachers unions, nurses' union, public employees' unions. Schwarzenegger went after them. And they responded. This is a lesson that Democrats should remember next time they take control of Congress. Legislation to promote unionization should be a top priority. Even with a relatively small portion of the working population unionized, labor unions are still the backbone of many Democratic campaigns, and especially so in presidential campaigns. And last week's election showed it. And THEY cared about the issues at stake.
Weintraub writes that Schwarzenegger made a big mistake by allowing an initiative promoted by "anti-tax activist Lewis Uhler" to get on the ballot. Uhler's proposition was an underhanded scheme to try to block union members from contributing to their unions' political funds. Do I need to say that "anti-tax activists" never sponsor parallel schemes to restrict corporate and wealthy individual donors? I didn't think so.
That meant that Schwarzenegger was thrown into an all-or-nothing confrontation with the unions and the Democrats. Once that initiative qualified for the ballot, it became a win-or-lose fight for labor, meaning negotiating compromise measures instead was off the table, as Weintraub explains:
Any chance for a settlement ended. For many months, Schwarzenegger held off endorsing the initiative, which would become Proposition 75, thinking that as part of a grand deal with lawmakers he might oppose it. But that didn't matter.
Kaufman, the unions' consultant, said Schwarzenegger adviser Michael Murphy seemed to believe that the union dues measure could be used as leverage to force the unions and the Democrats to the table. But once the signatures for the measure were submitted, election law required that it appear on the ballot, either in a special election called by the governor or at the next regularly scheduled vote. And the unionists knew that once it was on the ballot, they were going to have to spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat it - whatever the governor did. ...
Allowing Proposition 75 to get into the mix might have been, in retrospect, the governor's fatal error. It killed any chance he had for a deal, even a face-saving one. And it prompted Kaufman and the unions' advertising team to turn to a strategy thatultimately did the governor in: real people.
Schwarzenegger was trying to run against institutions - the Legislature, the unions, what he liked to call "special interests." But his opponents shrewdly made working nurses, firefighters and teachers the faces and voices of their campaign, bringing them to rallies and putting them front and center in their television advertising. They completely reversed the dynamic of the debate. Now he was the bad guy - the power-hungry politician - and they were his victims, seeking protection from a sympathetic public. ...
The move threw Schwarzenegger off balance, and he never recovered. He tried putting "real people" in ads of his own, but they weren't credible. He tried putting the focus on the union money used against him. Nobody cared. He even tried admitting that he was flawed, saying he had made mistakes and would do better if voters gave him the tools he needed to do his job. They refused. (my emphasis)
Sometimes, the "good guys" really do win!
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