Abstract

The Terminator Stumbles

The article focuses on political conditions in California under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger announced he was giving up on his proposal to shift public employee pensions into private accounts. Demonstrations and falling poll numbers have underlined the governor's political decline and his now uncertain future in office. Apart from the pension privatization scheme, Schwarzenegger was also proposing a merit pay plan for teachers and an erosion of their tenure, as well as diverting $2 billion away from public school funding. Schwarzenegger was saying he would go directly to the voters and ask them to approve his teacher merit-pay plan, the private pension proposal, a political redistricting measure and a budget spending cap. So his pullback of the private pension plan is an implicit recognition by him that he was losing the initiative.