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By BILL DURYEA, Times Staff WriterCalifornia's new governor has succeeded, in part, by confounding his friends and befriending his enemies.
Before he was elected mayor of Fresno, Alan Autry spent some time acting in Hollywood. You might remember him as Capt. Bubba Skinner on the TV show In the Heat of the Night.
"I got paid very well for saying, "I'll get right on it, chief,"' Autry, 51, said.
So when Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the fray of last year's gubernatorial recall, Autry saw a kindred spirit: actor and fiscal conservative.
"(Schwarzenegger) supported a full audit and performance reviews and a thorough review of the welfare system," Autry recalled, "a commitment to root out (health care) fraud, a commitment to workers' comp reform. He was going to get into waste in K-14 funding, which is $58-billion of a $98-billion state budget. And I was saying, yes, yes, yes, yes."
But four months into his administration, the candidate Autry backed has yet to emerge. Instead voters from both ends of the political spectrum have grown to appreciate (or at least grudgingly admire) a man who has tamed the rampant animus of Sacramento's partisan politics and replenished the state's nearly empty reservoir of optimism.
He has done it by making allies of his bitterest Democratic critics and ignoring some of the most conservative Republicans who drove the recall effort that put him in office.
Two weeks ago, voters approved Schwarzenegger's "California Recovery Plan," a package of two initiatives, one that would issue $15-billion in bonds to cover the current debt and a second that would prevent deficit borrowing in the future. Known as propositions 57 and 58, they passed by 61 and 71 percent, respectively.
The results gave Schwarzenegger a huge boost in the first significant test of his young administration. But Autry felt betrayed.
"You tell me how this is what the governor ran on," he said. "Where is the conservative nature of this?"
There isn't any really. In fact, the propositions passed only because Schwarzenegger persuaded prominent Democrats to stump for them. Earlier this year, the measures were 20 points behind in the polls and headed for apparent defeat.
But Schwarzenegger prevailed upon U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had been a leading opponent of the recall, to do a television commercial endorsing the bond proposal. When Schwarzenegger gassed up for a last-minute bus tour, he brought state Controller Steve Westly, a Democrat, along to ride shotgun.
Smart move.
Fifty-two percent of the voters on March 2 were Democrats and more than half of them supported the measures, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll.
"I didn't see a way out of it," said Robert F. Oaks, a 62-year-old retired history professor and author. A Democrat, he had opposed the recall, but he set aside any thoughts of retribution for the "good of the state."
What scant vocal opposition there was came primarily from Republicans, one of many ironies surrounding Schwarzenegger's economic prescription. Autry wrote an op-ed piece that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle. State Sen. Tom McClintock, who lost to Schwarzenegger in the recall, wrote the rebuttal that appeared on the ballot.
Even Ted Costa, the scrappy taxpayer advocate who circulated the first petition to recall Gov. Davis, distrusts the bond proposal, the largest in U.S. history.
"Arnold has not torn up one credit card yet," he said. "Prop 57 and 58 aren't tearing up credit cards like he says. It gives him a great big credit card."
But Costa didn't say so out loud. Why? "It's almost like you're a bad citizen if you oppose it," he said.
Costa was far from alone in being unimpressed with Schwarzenegger's solution, which made it easy for Republicans to avoid tax increases and Democrats to avoid spending cuts.
"This isn't that great a stroke of leadership," said David Binder, a veteran San Francisco pollster. "It's nothing that another governor wouldn't have done."
In fact, another governor did do it - Gray Davis. Davis approved a $10-billion bond, but it was assailed because he hadn't put it before the voters, an insult above all others in Propositionland. (Schwarzenegger's bond proposal was $15-billion because it included another $4-billion in debt he incurred by repealing the widely hated vehicle tax increase, a pledge he had made during the recall.)
His quick action on the vehicle tax, though it deepened the state's budget problems, satisfied voters that the new governor was not like the old governor. Schwarzenegger reinforced that impression by calling a special legislative session to repeal a bill Davis had signed that gave drivers' licenses to undocumented workers.
His approval rating is hovering around 60 percent. Tellingly, a poll taken just before the March 2 election showed voters' overall pessimism about the state had dropped markedly from last August, even though nothing significant had changed about the state economy.
For now, the rancor of last fall's recall campaign has disappeared like a Mini Cooper in the shadow of a Hummer.
Hardly anyone calls him the The Gropinator anymore. During the last week of the recall campaign, all anyone could talk about were allegations that Schwarzenegger groped and verbally harassed 15 women in gyms and on movie sets over a 25-year period. Schwarzenegger admitted then that "where there is smoke there is fire." He even promised to hire an investigator to look into the charges, but abandoned the effort once he took office. No one blinked.
Few people expect the fuzzy feelings between Schwarzenegger and the Legislature to last.
State Sen. John Burton of San Francisco, considered one of the most powerful Democrats in Sacramento, supported the recovery bond. But he said the governor will have a fight on his hands over his proposed budget.
"It screws poor people. It screws the middle class," he said. "The chances of it passing are slim and none. And slim just left town."
The bipartisanship he engendered may turn on Schwarzenegger if he pushes forward on two measures that would change the way the Legislature does business. He wants to abolish the self-serving way legislators carve out safe districts for themselves. Also, he has proposed a law that would prohibit fundraising during the budget process.
Then there's the coming battle over workers' compensation, a problem state businesses blame for an exodus of jobs. Schwarzenegger demanded a solution from legislators by March 1 or else he vowed to take it to the voters in November. They missed the deadline.
"He has been governing by threat of initiative," said Elizabeth Garrett, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Politics, a program run jointly by the University of Southern California and Cal Tech. "If you don't play ball with me, I'll go over your heads and take it to the people."
His success on March 2 makes that threat more credible.
Binder, the pollster, said Democrats may be more willing to negotiate with the governor because "they'd rather not have this on the ballot in November. They don't want this to distract from their races. There's concern the governor may pound them on this issue."
If money drives voter initiatives, and the evidence is clear that it does, the Democrats ought to be brushing up their negotiating skills.
Shortly before the election Schwarzenegger traveled to New York City to raise money for what has become a year-round initiative machine. He asked for donations of $500,000. That's not a typo. He came back with $1.4-million, which brought to nearly $8-million the amount he had raised since Jan. 1.
And people said Gray Davis was a fool for fundraising.