Arnold Looks to Recover From Dip in Poll

Arnold Schwarzenegger struggled to put sexual harassment allegations behind him Monday as a new poll indicated some voters were having second thoughts about recalling Gov. Gray Davis (news - web sites).

"The campaign is not losing momentum," Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Karen Hanretty told CBS' "The Early Show." A four-day bus tour of the state that Schwarzenegger concluded in Sacramento on Sunday had drawn thousands of enthusiastic supporters.

A poll of 1,000 registered voters, conducted by Elway-McGuire Research for Knight Ridder from Wednesday through Saturday, found the percentage of people saying they would definitely vote to oust Davis dropped from 52 percent Wednesday to 44 percent Saturday. The poll had an overall margin of error of 3 percentage points, but the margin of error for individual days was not given.

The poll also showed Schwarzenegger's lead over Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to replace Davis narrowing slightly from an earlier survey.

On Monday, the last full day of campaigning, Schwarzenegger planned campaign stops in San Jose, Huntington Beach and San Bernardino. Davis was to appear in Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles, while Bustamante planned appearances in Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco.

The shift in support for the recall followed allegations from 15 women that Schwarzenegger had groped and verbally harassed them during encounters dating to the early 1970s and as recently as 2000.

Schwarzenegger, who has acknowledged and apologized for having "behaved badly" toward women in the past, blamed the allegations on last-minute dirty campaign tricks and said some of them are flatly untrue. He has not discussed most of the allegations specifically and said he won't until after the campaign.

"I can get into all of the specifics and find out what is really going on. But right now, I'm just really occupied with the campaign," he told "Dateline NBC" on Sunday.

He told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that he couldn't remember many details connected to allegations going back more than 15 years but said they could have been true.

"It doesn't make any sense to go through details here with you. What is important is that I cannot remember what was happening 20 years ago, 15 years ago. But some of the things sound like me, which I was the first one to come out and say, you know, some of the things could have happened, I want to apologize to the people if I have offended anyone because that was not my intention," he said.

"No one ever came to me in my life and said to me that I did anything, that said 'I don't want you to do that. You went over the line, Arnold.'"

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who began Monday at a rally in East Los Angeles, said he believed the sexual harassment allegations were hurting Schwarzenegger's campaign.

"I think this is a very serious situation that we have right now and, you know, one surprise after another with this guy. I think we've probably had one too many surprises," he said after addressing a rally of about 100 supporters, including Christine Chavez, the granddaughter of the late United Farmworkers union co-founder Cesar Chavez.

State Sen. Tom McClintock told MSNBC on Monday that he remained skeptical of the allegations because they came so close to the election.

"The conduct that is alleged is reprehensible, and I'm afraid the voters are just going to have to sort through the facts as best they can in the days remaining," he said.

Hanretty didn't answer directly when asked if any of the women had lied. Instead, she accused the Los Angeles Times, which first broke the story of the allegations, of not investigating their claims thoroughly.

"Excuse me, but the L.A. Times failed to investigate a lot of these women," she said, adding that at least one of the women had contributed to independent candidate Arianna Huffington's campaign.

On Sunday, Davis demanded that Schwarzenegger give a full explanation of the allegations before Tuesday's vote, and Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a Democrat, said the Republican actor should volunteer for a state investigation whether or not he is elected governor.

Lockyer also noted the one-year statute of limitations for sexual battery has expired on all the complaints.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Rob Stutzman accused Lockyer of engaging in the sort of "puke politics" the attorney general had earlier warned Davis to avoid.

Davis used the power of incumbency to create news Sunday, signing a law making California the largest state to require employer-paid health care for an estimated nearly 1.1 million working Californians currently without job-based coverage.

After the "Dateline" segment aired, two of the women who claim Schwarzenegger harassed them said they were upset the actor said some of the accounts were fictional.

"That incensed me," said Colette Brooks, who claims Schwarzenegger grabbed her buttocks when she was a 23-year-old intern at CNN in the early 1980s. "He's dodging any sort of culpability. He's dodging these allegations."

The Knight Ridder poll that was completed Saturday showed Schwarzenegger leading Bustamante in the race to replace Davis by 36 percent to 29 percent. An earlier poll by the Field Research Corp. put his lead at 36 percent to 26 percent.

Although those definitely planning to vote to oust Davis had slipped to 44 percent, among overall voters surveyed the margin supporting the recall was still 54 percent.

Pollsters surveyed 1,000 registered voters, including 284 people on Wednesday and 200 on Saturday. The margin of error for individual days was not given.

Associated Press writers Erica Werner, Beth Fouhy, Paul Chavez and Seth Hettena contributed to this

The plain and simple fact is most thinking people can figure this one out for themselves. Some ugly politician gropes someone and chances are it was an unwanted advance. No matter what the woman looked like, you tended to believe it. But here we have a whole new ballgame. Arnold is a handsome, well built movie star and had probably the best looking women in the world throwing themselves at him. Why on earth would he bother making unwanted advances at a bunch of homely looking women? Have you seen some of these women who are making the accusations?

Come on, if Arnold wanted action all he had to do was open his trailer door and whistle and there would have been a stampede of perfectly willing, physically spectacular women rushing for the door.

That's why I don't believe this nonesense.

if he is a personally immoral man, with low character,

Huh? How is he "immoral"? Just because he grabbed a few asses 20 years ago? Give me a break. We had a President who RAPED A WOMAN WHILE HE WAS ATTORNEY GENERAL. We have a President now who had a DWI arrest 25 years ago. Arnold has no such record on either account.

"May he who is without sin cast the first stone"

The most recent incidents were not twenty years ago. Bush was quite a goofball but I am 100% convinced he had a pivotal moment and changed everything in his personal moral life about that, from top to bottom. Not so Arnold.

The similarities is that in the political camps of the Democrats and the GOP, both sides look the other way when their is dirt and shoddy ethics/morality on the part of their candidates, and they are only too happy to blast full force into their opponent when they see smoke on the other side of the river bank.

I am just being a consistent conservative who cannot go back on the standards that drew me to FR in the first place (read 'em, they are on my profile page), and to do so makes me a HYPOCRITE and no better than the liberal Democrats covering for Clinton's follies and immoralities. There are a few of us around here left, you know.

You know, I do hope you will go back and look at the tone of your posts after things have calmed down, and understand why so many who have taken your position have alienated those on the other side.

You are willing to take the word of a democrat paper and anonymous women, some of whose stories have already been discredited, and some of whom are democrat operatives, all to justify your position that Schwarzenegger is without character.

Meanwhile, you care nothing about McClintock taking the money from the Indian gaming casinos, his attempts to piggyback on this democrat-manufactured scandal, nor his going back on his word to Darrell Issa.

All of us are sinners and it seems to me that Arnold's sins are no better or worse than Tom's.

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