The rise and fall of the California governor: Schwarzenegger's approval ratings, along with the Legislature's, have taken a nose-dive after a divisive and unproductive year.

• Author: Weintraub, Daniel
• Position: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Riding high in the polls and brimming with confidence, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger greeted Republicans at a party convention in February with a call to action for what he vowed would be an historic year of reform. The Democrats who control the state Legislature, he told his audience, were on "sleeping pills" if they thought they could continue to ignore his proposals to reshape state government.

"They can go ahead and do whatever they want," the governor said. "The train has left the station.

"The train has left the station and there are three things they can do. One is they can join and then jump on the train. Number two, they can go and stand behind and just wave and be left behind. Or number three, they get in front of the train--and you know what happens then."

Schwarzenegger's fellow partisans devoured his red-meat rhetoric, sharing his vision for using California's famous penchant for direct democracy to circumvent an unpopular Legislature that, the governor contended, was hopelessly wedded to the status quo.

TIMES CHANGE

But since that winter evening, the Schwarzenegger locomotive has jumped the tracks, and now it is his political career that threatens to become a train wreck. The governor's public approval ratings have plummeted, sliced almost in half, and the ballot measures he championed have either been abandoned or were foundering in the polls in mid-September. More than 60 percent of voters say they think he never should have called a special election for Nov. 8.

"He's got his work cut out for him," says Mark Baldassare, who directs a statewide poll for the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Baldassare's latest survey of more than 2,000 Californians showed that just 34 percent of adults approve of Schwarzenegger's performance as governor, while 54 percent disapprove. Many Californians have come to view the former action movie star as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, the pollster said.

"It's very hard for him to be running an initiative campaign from inside the governor's office," Baldassare said. "It's hard for people at this stage, in his second year in office, for them to ... feel he is not part of [the] political process in Sacramento. He has become part of that process."

That's a far cry from Schwarzenegger's first year in office, when he swept into town wearing the reformer's mantle and got rave reviews for stabilizing the state's rocky finances. The novice politician won voter approval in March 2004 for the first pieces of his economic recovery plan, crafted a compromise budget and then picked the winning side on most of the ballot measures on which he took positions in the fall elections. But even as the governor was crowing over his ballot box successes and planning to go back to the voters with a more sweeping agenda...