Sacramento -- It was just two years ago that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, angered by his inability to get right-wing bills through his state's Democratic-controlled legislature, termed that body's leaders -- Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Senator Don Perata -- "girlie men." This political neologism went over particularly big with a subgroup with which Arnold claimed a special rapport: Dumb Young White Guys.
Sacramento -- It was just two years ago that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, angered by his inability to get right-wing bills through his state's Democratic-controlled legislature, termed that body's leaders -- Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Senator Don Perata -- "girlie men." This political neologism went over particularly big with a subgroup with which Arnold claimed a special rapport: Dumb Young White Guys.
Deluded, perhaps, by the belief that the Census Bureau systematically undercounted the DYWGs, the Governator then spent all of last year campaigning against the Democrats and their institutional allies. Attempting an end run around the legislature, he called a special election so that voters could approve four partisan Republican initiatives he supported, including a draconian spending limit and a measure that would have curtailed unions' political involvement. Somehow he overlooked that California is a heavily blue state, and a place where independents are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. More bewildering still, he forgot that he had campaigned for governor in the 2003 recall election as the guy who would end the partisan bickering in Sacramento, a Republican who would forge common-sense solutions with the Democrats.
The result was a flat-out disaster. All four of Schwarzenegger's initiatives went down in a heap. His approval rating, which stood at 62 percent as 2005 began, plummeted to 35 percent as 2005 ended. There weren't, it seemed, as many DYWGs as he had suspected.
Whereupon Schwarzenegger figured, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. He sacked his chief of staff and hired in her stead a centrist Democrat, Susan Kennedy, who had been the star staffer in the administration of the Democratic governor Schwarzenegger had replaced, Gray Davis. Predictably, many of his fellow Republicans went ballistic, but with Schwarzenegger at least nominally bearing their standard in the upcoming gubernatorial election against state Treasurer Phil Angelides, a liberal Democrat, they had no alternative to Arnold.
And all that was just the beginning. As Sacramento barreled toward the third straight unproductive legislative session of Schwarzenegger's tenure in office, the governor suddenly began striking deals with the girlie men he had campaigned against for the past couple of years. He reached an accord with them on a series of bond issues to build new roads and rail lines, schools, and affordable housing. He agreed to landmark legislation that set strict new standards for greenhouse gases, over the opposition of oil companies that had funded his campaigns and whose interests he had championed. He supported a bill he had previously opposed that would compel drug companies to reduce their costs to millions of Californians or lose their access to the state's massive Medicaid market. And he reversed his opposition to raising the state's hourly minimum wage, which will now increase from $6.75 to $8 over the next two years. The Democrats gave away a little to get these deals -- they had proposed indexing the minimum wage to the cost of living, for instance -- but not a lot.
"I've been saying all along the governor's adopting a Democratic agenda," Nunez told reporters last week. The Republicans in the legislature thought so, too: Most of these bills were sent to the governor's desk without a single Republican vote for them in either house. During the recent state Republican convention, Schwarzenegger didn't even appear together with the six other Republicans running for statewide office -- all of whom, in the latest poll, are trailing. Schwarzenegger, by contrast, has opened a 13-point lead over Angelides in the most recent poll from the Public Policy Institute of California, and his deals with the Democrats have greatly undercut Angelides's ability to make up that ground. With the governor already tagging the treasurer as a dangerous tax-raiser (Angelides supports restoring a higher tax rate on the state's wealthiest 1 percent and cutting taxes on middle-class Californians, but Schwarzenegger has succeeded in blatantly misrepresenting Angelides's position), Nunez and Company figured that their best shot at enacting their priorities was to deal with Arnold while he was in a Democratic mood.
But the real story is Schwarzenegger's astonishing malleability of identity: He's a right-wing Republican; he's a mainstream Democrat; what's the difference? Partly, this is because he's the only major figure in American politics who didn't get nominated in a party primary or convention, because of the nonpartisan nature of California recall elections. More fundamentally, unlike Ronald Reagan, this is one actor who will take on almost any role if the political exigencies -- that is, winning over independent and some Democratic voters in a heavily Democratic state -- demand it.
Call it a triumph of will over identity: Arnold is now a girlie man, too. And should the race tighten between now and November, and the polls suggest he needs to, Schwarzenegger will gird his loins and become a manly girl.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.
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