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Posted on 10/11/2003 6:07:46 AM PDT by truthandlife
Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in the California gubernatorial recall election was stunning. It was solid. But it was not inevitable.
After getting off to a rocky start with many GOP activists, Schwarzenegger and his advisers retooled the campaign, running fiscally to the right and actively courting conservatives. As a result, observers say, he was able to motivate the party faithful as well as expand the Republican base.
"He went out of his way to unify the party on conservative themes," says California Assemblyman Ray Haynes, R-Riverside, state chairman of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that represents conservative state lawmakers.
Those themes included getting rid of incumbent Gov. Gray Davis' car-tax increase, ending burdensome regulations on business, cutting waste and standing up to public-sector unions and not rewarding illegal aliens with driver's licenses.
The campaign didn't start out with a clear message. In fact, it stumbled badly when billionaire campaign adviser Warren Buffet attacked Proposition 13, a crowning achievement of conservative activists that put the brakes on rising property taxes.
Looking back, Haynes says the campaign was "on the edge, not so much in the last week with the L.A. Times allegations, but in the beginning when there were so many questions [about his positions]."
In mid-September, polls had Schwarzenegger five points behind Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, and Republican rival Tom McClintock had reached around 20 percent, threatening to split the Republican vote. It was around this time that Schwarzenegger began courting and surrounding himself with conservatives, from lawmakers and activists such as Haynes to policy advisers from the right-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Haynes, a close friend of McClintock, was concerned about the Buffet comments but withheld endorsement of anyone.
"I didn't endorse him until I was sure he wouldn't be hostile to conservatives," Haynes said.
After meeting with Schwarzenegger in September, however, he came away confident he could work with him.
"He said, 'You'll always have a seat at the table,'" Haynes recalled. "He said, 'Conservatives will be happy with a Schwarzenegger administration.'"
Haynes said the meeting, scheduled for 15 minutes, went 45. He was impressed, when after noting he often clashed with moderate former Gov. Pete Wilson, one of Schwarzenegger's chief advisers told him Schwarzenegger said, "The Wilson people don't set my agenda; I set my agenda."
Haynes says Schwarzenegger, despite his disagreements with and lack of firm stands on some conservative issues, did not repeat the mistakes of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who lost the 2002 Republican gubernatorial primary because he attacked conservatives.
"Schwarzenegger never challenged conservatives like Riordan did," Haynes said. "Riordan wanted to chase us out of the party."
Bill Whalen, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former speechwriter for Wilson, had advised Schwarzenegger on a future political career in 2001. Whalen, who wrote for Insight in the 1980s, says Schwarzenegger learned from Riordan's mistakes.
"Riordan made a classic mistake: He ended up lecturing conservatives on what he thought was wrong with their position on abortion and immigration," says Whalen, who is himself pro-choice. "Nobody on the right or left likes to be lectured and told that their core beliefs are wrong. ... Schwarzenegger reaches out to conservatives. He never insults conservatives. He's always respectful about differences. He always tries to bring them in, and he never picks a fight with anyone. Smart politician."
Schwarzenegger barely had a critical word to say about conservative rival McClintock. In fact, he praised his good ideas and said he would have a place in the Schwarzenegger administration. Many took these gestures as an olive branch for McClintock to get out of the race, but they served another purpose as well. They let McClintock supporters know that Schwarzenegger had nothing against them and it made Schwarzenegger seem like an alternative with which they could live.
"My advice on McClintock is, do not call on him to get out of the race," said Schwarzenegger informal adviser Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at Hoover, in late September when this reporter visited the California think tank. "He's obviously a principled guy, very clear about his policies. The only way to deal with McClintock is to say, 'Here's McClintock, here's what he's for. Here's Schwarzenegger, here's what he's for.' And the voters will sort that out."
Schwarzenegger soon made it clear he repudiated Buffet's views on Prop 13, promised to repeal Davis' tripling of the car tax and said he would not raise taxes except for a national emergency, although he got heat for not taking the Americans for Tax Reform pledge for no net tax increases.
In the mid-October debate that many say was the turning point, Schwarzenegger staunchly opposed Bustamante's "play-or-pay" plan to force all businesses to fund employee health insurance, saying it would drive business out of the state. He also talked of tort reform to curb frivolous lawsuits that also make businesses flee.
Davis inadvertently gave Schwarzenegger an issue when, in a move that was seen on both sides of the spectrum as pandering to Hispanics, he signed a bill approving driver's licenses for illegal aliens. Schwarzenegger used the issue masterfully, citing security concerns that there were no background checks.
"This horribly backfired on Davis," Whalen says. "It showed [Schwarzenegger's] a pretty commonsense guy and put him in the mainstream."
Exit polls showed 70 percent of voters opposed licenses for illegal aliens. And Schwarzenegger didn't do too badly among Hispanics either, garnering 31 percent of their vote. (With McClintock's Hispanic vote added in, the GOP got 41 percent of the Hispanic vote.)
"Hispanics who can vote are here legally, and the Democrats in Sacramento are not reflective of the values of hardworking Hispanics who play by the rules," Assemblyman Haynes says.
Two other issues largely were invisible to the national media. Unlike all other candidates, Schwarzenegger refuses to take contributions from two powerful special interests: Indian tribes with casinos and public-sector unions.
At a time when California is billions of dollars in the hole, the fact that Indian tribes largely escaped taxation for their gambling proceeds struck many as unfair. This is arguably the one issue where Schwarzenegger ran to the right of McClintock. Like Bustamante, McClintock took contributions from the tribes.
An ad from Schwarzenegger featured slot machines spinning around pictures of Davis, Bustamante and McClintock. Haynes points out that although McClintock long had championed tribal sovereignty, "taking money from the tribes undercut his message of social conservatism." And not taking their money probably will strengthen Schwarzenegger's hand in renegotiating the gambling compact with the tribes to get more money for the state, Whalen says. (McClintock's campaign did not respond to an Insight interview request by press time.)
And similarly, not taking money from public-sector unions will leave Schwarzenegger freer to renegotiate their contracts with the state and eliminate wasteful practices.
In addition to all the disparate groups he added to the GOP base, Schwarzenegger ended up capturing 70 percent of the votes of self-identified conservatives. Haynes was at a fund raiser for a crisis-pregnancy center on election night where he was surrounded by fellow pro-lifers.
"Every person at my table voted for Schwarzenegger," Haynes reported.
The Los Angeles Times allegations came too late to help Democrats, Haynes says, because Schwarzenegger had "solidified" the vote behind him by running on conservative themes and establishing his character as a family man.
So far, Schwarzenegger has indicated he will keep his promise to not raise taxes and appointed conservative Republican Rep. David Dreier to head his transition team.
Insight just learned Schwarzenegger also has appointed to the team Hoover Institution scholar Annelise Anderson, wife of conservative Hoover scholar Martin Anderson. Anderson was an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration.
If so, this means that his election was an even greater victory for conservatives than had been previously supposed.
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