Schwarzenegger Tries New Script

California Governor Reaches Out to Democrats, Independents

SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is attempting a political comeback as he faces reelection this year, courting Democrats and independent voters by distancing himself from President Bush and pushing an expensive bond proposal to rebuild California's levees, schools and highways.

Schwarzenegger, one of the nation's most prominent Republicans, has criticized Bush's plan to dispatch the National Guard to the Mexican border. He has appointed Democrats to key state jobs. In recent weeks, he helped engineer a bipartisan compromise to get the $37 billion bond proposal on the November ballot, traveling the state with Democratic legislative leaders to promote it. And he has embraced other causes popular with California's Democratic voters, including an increase in the minimum wage and a cap on greenhouse gases.

"If last November I told you just give it a few months, that he'd be running around the state with Democrat leaders by his side, you wouldn't have believed me and I would have felt like a fool telling you," said Allan Hoffenblum, a Republican strategist who has been a fierce critic of Schwarzenegger. "But he's doing it. All of the sudden, he has a record of accomplishment."

Dropping his combative, conservative style of last year, the governor is hoping to build support in a state where Democrats and independents account for nearly two-thirds of registered voters. His strategy is having some effect: In April, a Los Angeles Times poll showed his approval rating at 44 percent, up from 37 percent in October.

But he still has a way to go. A poll last week by the Public Policy Institute of California said a race now between Schwarzenegger and either of his likely Democratic opponents -- State Treasurer Phil Angelides or State Controller Steve Westly -- would be a tossup.

Last November, Schwarzenegger's fortunes looked grim. California's voters handed him a stunning loss in a special election that would have changed several state laws and given him more political power.

That election night, Schwarzenegger vowed to change and to show voters that "I am not to the right or left, that I just see things best for California."

Since then he has courted the public-service unions that exert enormous influence on California politics and that had spent millions to try to defeat his plans. Schwarzenegger has tried to smooth relations with the California Nurses Association, whose demonstrators dogged him at public appearances last year, by dropping his quest to overturn state nurse-patient ratios.

Buoyed by an additional $5 billion in tax revenue, he has pledged to increase education spending by billions of dollars, hoping to patch strained ties with the California Teachers Association. And he has put off a significant overhaul of California's troubled prison system, leading the California Correctional Peace Officers Association to delay plans to open a $10 million war chest for attack ads against him.

Late last year, Schwarzenegger replaced his chief of staff, Patricia Clarey, a veteran Republican, with Susan Kennedy, a Democrat and abortion-rights advocate who served as chief of staff for former governor Gray Davis (D), the man Schwarzenegger unseated in a recall election in 2003. Kennedy is credited with introducing discipline into a political machine that last year drew criticism for its scripted media appearances with Schwarzenegger as the action hero-turned-governor, dressed in a flight jacket with the state seal on the back and speaking to handpicked audiences.

This month, Schwarzenegger named Linda Adams, a longtime Democratic aide, to head the state's Environmental Protection Agency. Adams's appointment was a coup of sorts; she most recently was Westly's chief of staff.

To run his reelection campaign, Schwarzenegger also recruited a fresh crop of Republicans, including Matthew Dowd, a senior strategist for Bush's campaign in 2004. Dowd himself is a former Democratic strategist who was instrumental in sending two Democrats from California to the Senate in 1992.