The Good Arnold

It didn't have to be this way. For a brief historical moment, at least, it seemed as though Schwarzenegger was going to scramble the state's partisan lines and reorder Sacramento politics.

Heading into next month's special election, it's clear that that moment has passed. The governor has spent much of 2005 scurrying to shore up the red-meat Republican base. He vetoed a gay marriage bill, a raise in the minimum wage and a measure that would have given driver's licenses to the undocumented. He's also favoring a parental-notification abortion initiative.

But simply writing Schwarzenegger off as "Pete Wilson with a smile" or one more run-of-the-mill "Bush Republican"--as some of his critics have--is as mistaken as suggesting that his dour pay-to-play predecessor, Gray Davis, was somehow a progressive. Little more than a year ago, some of California's most powerful unions sent their members into the state capitol to lobby for Schwarzenegger's renegotiated compacts with Indian tribes, which made union recognition a make-or-break issue. "Arnold walked the walk," an organizer for the hotel workers' union, told me at the time. "Other governors," she said, referring to Gray Davis, "merely talked the talk."

Schwarzenegger has also supported pro-farmworker measures that Davis and his predecessors had left to languish. He has taken a decidedly more liberal position than Davis on criminal sentencing and correctional reform. And even as he vetoed the gay marriage bill a few weeks ago, he signed four other measures that strengthened civil unions.

Forty percent of Schwarzenegger's judicial nominees have been Democrats. Four of his twelve Cabinet secretaries are also Democrats; one is an independent. And while some of his more recent moves have angered the green lobby, the governor named a prominent environmentalist to head the California EPA, fought for expanded solar power and successfully championed a global-warming measure that went far beyond the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol. Schwarzenegger and the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature wound up jointly supporting several budget-balancing measures and workers' compensation reform.

But even while those measures were sailing to passage last year, the governor made it clear that he'd be willing to use his soaring popularity and go directly to the voters in a referendum if the compromises didn't continue.

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