GOP: Poor campaign, one-sided message, doomed Schwarzenegger

LOS ANGELES (AP) - 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.

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.

Schwarzengger, 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 for the campaign.

"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 in the effort.

"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.

Inevitably, some of the blame for the disastrous showing will fall on Schwarzenegger's advisers, including Mike Murphy and Rob Stutzman, who were at the governor's side throughout the campaign.

Stutzman discounted the notion that Schwarzenegger was a victim of bad advice from his numerous political consultants, who collectively earned millions of dollars in fees.

"The governor was determined for there to be this election and for these reforms to be on the ballot," Stutzman told reporters in Sacramento. "Obviously he sought counsel and advice from political advisers as well as government advisers. ... But ultimately the rightness of the reforms that he was seeking, the urgency to do so ... compelled him to move forward with the election."

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=10104

Devious Democrats Attack Arnold’s Initiatives

by Larry Kelley
Posted Nov 7, 2005

Come tomorrow night, Arnold Schwarzenegger might be wishing he stuck to movie stardom and real estate barony rather than trying to save California from itself—wishing instead that he were perhaps lounging on the French Riviera with fellow Europhiles such as Johnny Depp and Gweneth Paltrow in salons where the conversations inevitably come around to trashing President Bush and those American boorish boobs that voted for him.

But instead he’s spending his days being trashed by California’s myriad special interests: fireman, teachers, nurses, cops, public employee unions, city, county and statewide elected officials, trial lawyers, illegal alien activists and the vast legions of the state’s rental mobs, anarchists, and duped do- gooders.

This is a large list of trashers that he has attracted to himself. But after last week, when the Field Poll showed that his four key reform initiatives are all in danger of defeat in California’s special election tomorrow, the list of Arnold-bashers was expanded to include national players like the Democratic National Committee, Moveon.org and sadly, even some Republicans in Congress.

His key initiatives, which are aimed at totally retooling a corrupt California government, are:

Prop 74, which pushes teacher tenure out to five years

Prop 75, which requires union members’ consent before money can be taken from them for political purposes

Prop 76, which gives the governor the power to cut spending if there is revenue shortfall

Prop 77, which calls for redrawing not only state senate and assembly lines but all of California’s congressional districts as well

Last week I spoke to Kevin McCarthy, who is the Republican minority leader in the California Assembly and who has introduced a very similar version of Arnold’s redistricting initiative as an assembly bill, each year for the past three years. Our interview follows.

Given that the polls were mostly wrong about the recall election and predicted that Gray Davis would hold on to the governorship, how are you feeling about the chances for the Governor’s initiatives?

Assembly Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy: I think it all comes down to what turn out is. This is a special election. How do you call the percentage of the turnout? And which base is most motivated to turnout?

You sound guardedly optimistic.

McCarthy: Every single newspaper that has taken a position on redistricting has come out and supported it. And that was unbelievable. When the Field Poll people read just the ballot statements without endorsements the [positive] numbers go up.

Do you see that the lynchpin for reform of the state is redistricting?

McCarthy: These guys paid for their seats. The Communist Party [in the former Soviet Union] had more turnover than we have here.

I have a flier here that arrived in my mailbox from Citizens for Good Government telling me that we Republicans should vote no on Prop 77 (redistricting) and it quotes Congressman John Doolittle, Secretary of the House Republican Leadership as saying that the redistricting is bad for the Republican Party. Who are these people?

McCarthy: This shows how far they’ll go. This is [the product of] Democrat money raised by [U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi and others in her party. All they [the Democrats] really care about is 77 [redistricting] being defeated. They paid their money. They want their return on investment and expect to be in power for at least 10 years. This is a false mailer sent by Democrats to Republican voters. This is how worried they are and how devious they’ve become.

So what about Doolittle and the Congressional Republicans being against your redistricting plan?

McCarthy: Government should not be owned by a few people in the back room. Why have so many Democrats raised money to oppose 77 if somehow Republicans were going to lose? I would think they would be funding it.

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What chance was there, when even some 'FreeRepublic' members couldn't be bothered to get of their a$$'s and go and vote?

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