Quotes of the Day

Up close, Arnold Schwarzenegger seems not quite real, an animatronic version of himself. His skin is waxworks smooth, his hair untroubled by gray, his accent so often imitated that the real thing sounds like someone goofing on Ahhnold. He speaks informally—there is no hortatory political baloney to him—but we are not really having a conversation. The Governor of California has his lines, and he recites them, just as he did onscreen, with a knowing, ironic clumsiness. All of which tends to undercut his current message, which is quite radical. After a year of trying to negotiate with his state legislature and succeeding less than he had hoped, Schwarzenegger is going to war against the special interests—especially the public employees' unions—that dominate the Democratic majority in the statehouse. "You see the protesters out there," he said at a press conference in Fresno last week. "They are not just people, teachers and nurses and so forth. They are organized special interests. They follow me everywhere with their protests, and I think that works to our advantage, because the people see what we're fighting against."

The protesters nip after Schwarzenegger because he has proposed four dramatic reforms that may be voted on in a special election next fall if he can't get action in the legislature. The four initiatives would cap spending, make the public employees' pension system less expensive, introduce merit pay for teachers and offer tenure only after 10 years of service, and create an independent panel of judges to draw legislative districts. These are the sort of good-government ideas that political scientists—and wonky columnists—love but that politicians avoid because they arouse fanatic opposition from entrenched interests and inspire massive gusts of apathy from the public. "This stuff is about as sexy as campaign-finance reform," says Dan Schnur, a Republican political consultant. "Voters aren't ready to go to the ramparts over them, but Arnold realized that these were the things standing in his way if he was really going to change the system. Unlike most politicians, he hasn't spent 20 years working his way up the ladder, waiting for the chance to be Governor. If he's not successful in passing some of these, I wouldn't be surprised if he decided to not run for a second term in 2006. He'll just go home."

Schwarzenegger's war has national implications. California's perpetual fiscal crisis is unique—a consequence of the state's artificially low property taxes, cemented in place by the infamous Proposition 13 passed in 1978—but most states are now being squeezed as the Federal Government cuts spending on everything from cops to Medicaid. The public employees have used their political clout to protect unaffordable fringe benefits and antiquated work rules, even as employees in the private sector have been forced to accept reductions in health plans and pensions. "The question is, Is the state being run for the benefit of its citizens or its employees?"

Asked a prominent California Democrat disgusted by the hold the teachers have on his party but unwilling to say so publicly because "I'd be f______ dead. I disagree with Arnold on a lot of things, but you've got to give him credit for this. Everyone dances around the perimeter of these issues because we're so scared of the unions. He isn't."

The teachers' union began running ads against the Governor in January. Schwarzenegger's favorable ratings have dipped from the stratospheric to 55%, more or less. And while the Dems' knee-jerk support for the unions is a perennial portrait in cowardice, Schwarzenegger's proposals do avoid one crucial area of reform. "If he really wanted to lead with moral authority," says California state treasurer Phil Angelides, a Democrat running for Governor in 2006, "He would be asking everyone to make sacrifices. But he has been totally unwilling to ask those with means to give a nickel of their resources. We need a comprehensive package—spending cuts and revenue increases," that is, tax hikes. Angelides adds that G.O.P. Governors Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson proposed both.

I asked Schwarzenegger about the imbalance, especially the property-tax situation—a problem the Governor's informal financial adviser, Warren Buffett, has said was key to solving California's fiscal crisis. "We looked at that," Schwarzenegger told me, "but we decided that California had a spending problem, not a revenue problem." This seemed palpably ridiculous, given that California is 42nd in the nation in per-pupil education spending. But the Governor wasn't budging, and our conversation drifted into his standard riffs, some of them quite entertaining, about the "dinosaurs" in Sacramento who introduce bills about "plastic surgery for dogs and where you can park ice cream trucks and condom distribution in prisons" but who refuse to negotiate on his proposed reforms. Schwarzenegger is right to be scornful, but there is an obvious deal to be made here—real reform in exchange for new revenues—and it will take a politician who is more than an animatronic action figure to make it.

• Joe Klein
• Schwarzenegger is going to war against the special interest groups that dominate the Democratic majority in the statehouse.