chwarzenegger's governorship has been rife with political contradictions from the beginning. The task he set for himself of balancing competing constituencies would mean, practically speaking, giving enough goodies to each one to keep it in his coalition -- or at least to not oppose him. Courting environmentalists may have been a brilliant early way to help neutralize those to the left of him on other questions, such as taxes, pensions, and education. But it couldn't work for long, and environmentalists expect him to continue the good works throughout his tenure, not turn to soothe other anxious factions. The farther into his term he goes, the more precarious the balancing act becomes -- and the farther he has to fall if he slips off the tightrope.
These questions could all become moot in the face of a much larger problem: what appears to be a rapid process of political self-destruction, as dramatic as his ascent, and all the more startling for its seeming utter avoidability.
After his landslide victory, Schwarzenegger's approval rating polled in the high 60s. Democrats and labor unions, still in the majority but gun-shy, realized they had to work with him. The governor, meanwhile, made good on one of his most popular campaign promises -- rescinding Governor Davis's "car tax" on motor vehicle registrations. This added billions of dollars to the budget deficits he inherited. Schwarzenegger stubbornly resisted any new tax increases to raise revenue and instead looked to the big public-employee unions to cover the shortfall with concessions on wages and pensions. Taking an unusually (and, most observers thought, misguidedly) aggressive tack, the governor loudly called nurses, teachers, firefighters, and police officers "special interests" on TV. The unions responded with outrage and a barrage of TV ads of their own.
Sacramento slid backward from the politics of governing to full-time campaign mode. But Arnold's playing his Terminator role after the election didn't thrill the public or cow his opponents the way it had during the heated circus of the recall. The teachers, nurses, and cops -- groups the public finds highly sympathetic -- skillfully turned his rhetoric against him. By January of this year his approval rating had dropped to 59 percent. By April it had sunk to 49 percent, and most voters, even Republicans, agreed with the statement: "He should be putting more effort into working with legislators so he'd get more done."
Instead, Schwarzenegger did the opposite, calling for the November 8 special election and infuriating his opponents. The legislature, stripped by term limits of veterans and controlled by a young, left-wing Democratic caucus led by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, has countered the governor's every move with one of its own -- even when Schwarzenegger's proposals have unquestioned merit, such as a bill to require schools to serve California-grown fruit, which was pettily squashed by the Democratic leadership. Indeed, the day before the San Francisco World Environment Day event, Democratic legislators in Sacramento held a press conference, attacking in advance the Schwarzenegger global warming plan for not spelling out enforceable measures. However, since the legislators essentially agreed with his goals and didn't offer significantly different policies, the stunt got little notice.
This chaos was worrying to those people, in California and elsewhere, who had seen in Schwarzenegger's election the best chance in years to pull the Republican Party back to the center. Just as the Schwarzenegger administration finished out a pretty good first year, it seemed as though the partisan warfare in Sacramento could stop the bipartisan environmental agenda cold.
And it is the relationship between the governor and the legislature -- currently abysmal -- that will ultimately determine whether progress on the environmental front continues, is stymied, or is reversed. Mary Nichols, who was resources secretary under Gray Davis, explained to me just how limited the governor's power is: He can sign executive orders, but, "if it requires spending any money or regulating anything or enforcing anything, you still need the legislature.
"Clearly environmental interest in this state is very high, and any governor can engage the public attention and get good press and overcome other obstacles by focusing on those issues," Nichols continued. "I don't think it was an accident that the global warming policy was unveiled at the same time as he was taking a beating over the special election that he's called. It's a way of getting people talking about something that you want them to talk about."
While the appeal of his environmental platform to moderates and liberals helped Schwarzenegger get elected, it may not be enough to help him escape his current quagmire. A new poll released in July by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California showed that a majority of Californians supported Schwarzenegger's policies: 69 percent favored the greenhouse gas targets he announced in San Francisco; 76 percent favored his solar energy initiative; 83 percent favored requiring carmakers to improve fuel efficiency -- and 73 percent would pay more for such vehicles. But this huge support for his specific environmental policies did not translate into an overall perception that he is proenvironment: Just 32 percent of Californians polled said they liked his environmental record as a whole, while 35 percent disapproved. His overall job approval kept sinking, from a May low of 40 percent, to 34 percent in July -- the same as President Bush's. In other words, not only did the governor's very public proenvironment stands not help him, but they didn't even register as proenvironment. The poll data are perplexing, but they suggest that Governor Schwarzenegger, ironically, has the same problem Governor Davis did: While most Californians liked his policies, they didn't like him.
It is equally hard to fathom the logic behind the governor's recent appointments. It may be that the more conservative members of his strategy team are counseling him, presumably against the advice of Terry Tamminen, that the moderate, proenvironment stands have cost more than they were worth and that he must make up ground with the GOP base. In California, this base isn't religious conservatives, it's big business -- which can deliver money, though it can't deliver votes.
t may also be, sadly, simply bad judgment. Pundits have taken to calling the governor's strategy team "the gang that can't shoot straight" for its ineptitude and uncanny ability to misjudge the public mood. Fresh setbacks have rained on Schwarzenegger nearly weekly since the poll. A scandal erupted when the press questioned the propriety of his multimillion-dollar endorsement contracts with American Media Inc., which owns several bodybuilding magazines -- publications that advertise the kinds of nutritional supplements whose regulation he vetoed. He was forced to cancel the deals. The November 8 special ballot he called hasn't been a hit either. In the latest poll, 54 percent of the public remains opposed to the special election, and 51 percent says that the state is headed in the wrong direction.
It seems clear that Schwarzenegger is unlikely to retreat too much from, much less abandon, his environmental commitments -- they are the last point of common ground he shares with majorities of both voters and legislators in Sacramento. It also seems clear that the Schwarzenegger saga proves again that no politician can be elected governor in California without moderate-to-liberal positions on a set of core issues, the environment foremost among them. Whoever succeeds Arnold Schwarzenegger will carry on the state's tradition of leadership on environmental governance.
But if in the next election Schwarzenegger is thrown out in favor of a traditional, reliably green Democrat, the environmental agenda in California will certainly be less vulnerable to shifting political winds than it has been during his tenure.
On the other hand, progress on the national front might be better served if Arnold the Republican environmentalist managed to succeed: In doing so, he might weaken the core opposition of the national GOP and give environmental issues some purchase in the Red states where they are now effectively suppressed by being identified with the Democratic Party.
Arnold Schwarzenegger's failures, as much as his successes and his progressive environmental visions, can best be explained by his determination to "govern from the center" -- which has meant, in practice, taking politically expedient stands across a spectrum so wide as to be incoherent, even contradictory. In the end, we are left looking at the Hydrogen Hummer: clean and green, we are told, but still a pretty incongruous hunk of machinery.
