Posted on 04/01/2006 10:33:24 AM PST by SmithL
SACRAMENTO - Despite his rocky relationship with the White House, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has surrounded himself with a team of former Bush aides to run his re-election campaign.
The latest addition came this week with veteran Republican ad man Alex Castellanos, a master of political attacks who helped Bush's 2004 campaign team transform Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., from a war hero into weakling in the eyes of many voters.
Choosing such a partisan team might seem an odd fit for a candidate like Schwarzenegger, whose re-election hopes rest on winning back the very voters who have turned so sharply away from the president. Bush lost California by more than a million votes in 2004.
But given Schwarzenegger's vulnerability this year, some analysts say he was shrewd to hire consultants who know how to eviscerate the opposition when their own candidate is weak.
"They had a candidate who dodged the draft, dodged the ... National Guard," Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and television personality, said of Bush. "And they made that candidate look strong against a guy who was shot three times and won the Bronze Star and the Silver Star for valor," he said of Kerry.
"That is incredible."
Schwarzenegger's team includes Matthew Dowd, Bush's former pollster and strategist, and Steve Schmidt, who ran Bush's rapid response against Kerry before moving to the White House, where he was an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and helped guide Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination. The campaign's communications director, Katie Levinson, worked in the White House communications office.
Democrats said the links to Bush will remind voters of the boost Schwarzenegger gave the president in 2004, when they campaigned together in Ohio, a swing state, just before the election.
"They do not like Bush here," said Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist who is not working for either of the two Democrats who hope to challenge Schwarzenegger in the general election. "It's another connection. It makes it harder for Arnold to run away from being a Bush Republican."
A statewide poll taken in March showed Bush with an approval rating of 38 percent among likely California voters, while Schwarzenegger was at 47 percent. The popularity of both drops sharply among Democrats and independents, who account for two-thirds of the California electorate.
Dowd said voters don't pay attention to minutiae such as who runs political campaigns. Democrats are wasting their time if they talk about it, he said.
"It just means they won't be talking about the concerns people have in the state," he said.
But the Schwarzenegger campaign was concerned enough about the Bush connection that they only allowed Dowd, a former Democrat, to speak for this story.
In an interview, Dowd, who lives in Austin, Texas, mentioned the role Schwarzenegger's wife, Democrat Maria Shriver, played in hiring him. He also spoke of his earlier work with Susan Kennedy, the Democrat whose appointment as Schwarzenegger's chief of staff caused a furor among his conservative base.
Schwarzenegger appointed her during a house-cleaning after the failure of the four proposals he promoted during the November special election.
Kennedy and Dowd worked together in 1991 and 1992 to turn out the vote for Bill Clinton, helping him win the state, and get Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein elected.
It was his later friendship with George W. Bush that turned him into a Republican. Dowd served as Bush's pollster in 2000 and was his lead strategist in 2004, analyzing polling data, overseeing messaging and a field campaign that succeeded in turning out millions of conservative voters with an army of volunteers who rallied their neighbors.
Dowd said the Schwarzenegger re-election team plans to use the same tactics in California, although the Bush campaign abandoned the state early in 2004 as unwinnable.
With Schwarzenegger's approval rating below 50, analysts expect the campaign to go negative, a specialty of Castellanos.
He made the racially charged "white hands" ad for Jesse Helms' 1990 race against a black candidate. It showed a white job applicant crumpling a rejection notice, while a narrator said, "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."
The governor's team also must overcome another potential disadvantage. Compared to his Democratic rivals, Schwarzenegger is getting a late start.
He spent last year embroiled in a losing special election battle with the state's public employee unions and took several months to shed his old advisers, both those on the state payroll as well as his political operation, before hiring a new campaign team in January.
That means there is less time to organize the kind of intensive field operation the Bush team put together in 2004, although Dowd said it is sufficient.
Dowd, 44, serves as lead strategist. But he works in concert with Kennedy, whose California experience includes serving as executive director of the state Democratic Party and as a top aide to former Gov. Gray Davis, who Schwarzenegger replaced in the 2003 recall election.
Schmidt, 35, is the day-to-day campaign manager, as well as Dowd's best friend.
Insiders say the unlikely triumvirate gets along, despite the stark differences in their political backgrounds.
"Gov. Schwarzenegger does not fit into any single box," said his communications director, Adam Mendelsohn, who also arrived this year from Washington, where he worked for a Republican lobbying and public relations firm.
He said the campaign staff's diversity is a reflection of Schwarzenegger's eclectic ideology and an example of the bipartisanship the governor is seeking to rekindle in California, despite the low marks he is receiving from Democrats and independents.
Indeed, the governor shows no outward signs that by hiring Bush's former staff he has become any closer to the president.
When the governor was asked by Tim Russert recently on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether he would run for re-election as a "Bush Republican," he replied cannily, "I will run as an Arnold Republican, which is that I am there to govern and to serve the people of California, meaning Democrats and Republicans."
Bush came to California several times last year but the two did not meet, blaming schedule conflicts. More recently, Schwarzenegger has asked the Bush administration for federal assistance to repair levees but received no commitments of help.
The balancing act by Schwarzenegger's campaign team will be interesting to watch, said Mark DiCamillo, director of the San Francisco-based Field Poll. He said that whatever voters make of the governor's new campaign team, the specter of Bush will not disappear.
"I do think the linkage between Schwarzenegger and the president is likely to rear its head in the fall campaign," he said. "Certainly Schwarzenegger played a very active role in getting Bush re-elected in Ohio, and that's going to come back."
Is that what Castellanos is claiming? What a joke. The Bush boys were clueless until the SwiftVets ripped the heart right out of Kerry's chest. They defeated Kerry. Not this guy. Not McKinnon. And now the stupid GOP wants to outlaw 527's. Brilliant.
Thank you for not excerpting this article. :)
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