The Terminator Stumbles

Los Angeles

It was a real Hollywood moment on April 7, when California's hard-charging, seemingly invincible Governator stood before the news cameras and rather meekly announced he was giving up, for the time being, on his proposal to shift public employee pensions into private accounts. No accident that his dramatic backdown came the same day a major poll showed his job-approval rating slipping below 50 percent for the first time since he took office. That was only the topping on a mounting heap of bad news for the governor. For the past several weeks, Schwarzenegger's public appearances have brought out crowds--sometimes in the thousands--of rowdy demonstrators, mostly from the ranks of organized labor. Even some of his onetime allies in police and public-safety unions joined the protests. The noisy demonstrations and falling poll numbers have boldly underlined the governor's precipitous political decline and his now uncertain future in office.

After Schwarzenegger replaced his highly unpopular predecessor, Gray Davis, in late 2003, he was buoyed by significant bipartisan support and stratospheric popularity ratings. The Democrat-controlled California legislature, which had been irked by the departing Davis, worked closely with Schwarzenegger to fashion measures on the budget and on reform of workers' compensation. This past summer, Schwarzenegger was even able to enlist powerful liberal unions in his successful renegotiation of state compacts with wealthy Indian gambling tribes.

Things started heading in a more problematic and confrontational direction a few months ago when the governor seemed to start obsessing about nurses, teachers and other public employees. 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. The celebrity hero who came to power promising to sweep Sacramento of special interests was now not only raising more millions from industry than any previous governor but also seemed to be picking only on organized labor.

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