Wednesday, January 25, 2006, Sacramento Bee

Schwarzenegger's newest approach - channeling Gray Davis?

By Dan Walters

Gray Davis was the most risk-averse governor in recorded California history, carefully avoiding any position or topic that he thought might generate significant controversy - but learned that practicing finger-in-the-wind politics was the riskiest strategy when voters recalled him from office in 2003 for allowing energy and budget crises to fester.

The irony of Davis' political undoing is being compounded three years later by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bodybuilder-turned-actor to whom California voters turned on his promise of "action, action, action, action." As he begins his third year in the governorship, Schwarzenegger is retreating from confronting the Capitol's dysfunctional status quo and is, in a sense, channeling Davis.

Schwarzenegger's annual appearance Tuesday before the Sacramento Press Club was vintage Davis - advocating only policies that he knows will find favor with the voters (infrastructure investment), sidestepping questions on controversial issues (the Iraq war, assisted suicide) and paying homage to the legislative leaders he was trying to kneecap last year.

Schwarzenegger, it would appear, has convinced himself that avoiding risk and telling voters about the highways and other goodies he wants to deliver to them will overcome his less-than-stellar popularity and gain him another stint in the Capitol this year. "It is all about the quality of life," he told the Press Club as he pitched his plan to spend $222 billion on transportation, waterworks, schools and other public facilities over the next decade without raising taxes - while insisting, with a straight face, that "we won't win votes with this proposal."

Of course he hopes it will win him votes, just as Davis (with similar popularity, about 40 percent) campaigned in 2002 while touting all the money he had handed out to schools, health care and other popular programs from a windfall of income taxes - a cornucopia, one should note, that led directly to the massive budget deficits that later fueled his recall. Schwarzenegger hopes that as he crisscrosses the state, telling voters about projects in their regions that he wants to build, his popularity will continue to edge upward while his two would-be Democratic opponents, Treasurer Phil Angelides and Controller Steve Westly, beat each other's brains out in a multimillion-dollar media slugfest.

The new Schwarzenegger model implies that he's learning, contrary to his original expectations, that trying to govern California from the middle of the political road is tricky, even if it's where most voters would want him to be. "In a way, this is on-the-job training," Schwarzenegger said Tuesday about his plunge in popularity last year as he pursued his spectacularly unsuccessful "year of reform" ballot measures.

As Davis also learned, trying to pursue compromise-oriented political centrism makes one a target for those on the right and left who dominate the Capitol and the two major political parties. Despite their public expressions of cooperation, it's not at all certain that the Legislature's liberal Democratic leadership will actually produce an infrastructure program on which Schwarzenegger could seek re-election. They're already talking about the near-impossibility of writing a bond package for the June ballot and suggesting that they want housing, hospitals, parks and other public works categories included.

The governor clearly will bend almost any direction to please Democrats, but the more he caters to them, the more he alienates himself from Republicans, especially conservative Republicans, who are leery about massive spending of any kind and who are insisting that there should be reforms to streamline projects, the kinds of reforms that environmentalists and unions intensely oppose.

Conservatives are already complaining that Schwarzenegger is leaning too far to the left on spending. Some want to strip him of the Republican Party's re-election endorsement at next month's state convention, citing his appointment of longtime Democratic Party activist Susan Kennedy as his chief of staff.

Kennedy was a top official in the Davis administration as well - one of the architects, it could be said, of his risk-averse governance. Channeling indeed.