The Eraser

So why is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger coasting to reelection in a year when Republicans are likely to lose their advantage in governorships?

Much of the credit goes to the Governator and his ability to seize both headlines and the political high-ground. Want to criticize Arnold as eco-unfriendly? Good luck getting a word in edgewise while Arnold is doing photo-ops with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Care to call Arnold a partisan hack? By this time next week, the most furious campaigning in California will be Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers stumping for infrastructure bonds.

Schwarzenegger is skillful; but he’s also lucky. And in California, luck came in the form of the Democratic nominee, State Treasurer Phil Angelides, a perfectly awful candidate who also happens to be Arnold’s perfect foil.

Not since Paul Giammati went vineyard-hopping in Sideways has the Golden State been the backdrop to such prolonged and pronounced angst. Only Angelides can’t blame his problems on a failed marriage or merlot. As with the movie, his troubles center around a story he keeps rewriting.

Angelides began his run for governor vowing to spend more on public schools by raising taxes on the wealthy. That helped him survive a bitter primary fight; it also provided Team Arnold with its first attack ad. For much of the summer, the two campaigns disputed the legitimacy of Schwarzenegger’s claim of $18 billion in new taxes. While Arnold’s math is fuzzy, the impression it left with voters wasn’t. By Labor Day, Schwarzenegger had surged to a double-digit lead.

Angelides’s next move still has political insiders scratching their heads. California gubernatorial races are notoriously domestic affairs. Angelides decided to try to turn the campaign into a referendum on Iraq and the Bush presidency, appearing with the likes of Rep. Barbara Lee, who is distinguished as the only member of Congress to vote against going to war with the Taliban. Never mind that Schwarzenegger had spent most of this year staging mini-spats with the White House: over stem-cell research, levee funding, and deploying National Guard troops at the Mexican border. Or that Arnold had a snappy comeback when lobbed a softball by Jay Leno: “To link me to George Bush is like linking me to an Oscar.”

As it turns out, Schwarzenegger’s Tonight Show appearance marked a tipping point in the governor’s race–it was where the Angelides campaign went from ill-fated to ill-tempered. Rather than do something clever–say, cut a quick ad and run it during Arnold’s late-night appearance–Angelides sore-headedly demanded equal time on NBC. He took his protest to beautiful downtown Burbank, failing to get noticed by NBC but succeeding in getting plenty of free exposure for Mary Carey. As a write-in candidate for governor, the actress/adult entertainer (Bosom Buddies 6 and Can You Be a Pornstar? 7 & 8) also requested equal time, telling reporters: “More people know that I am running for governor than (know of) Arnold’s Democratic challenger.” (This just in: Carey has dropped out of the governor’s race to be with her injured mother, reportedly a schizophrenic who jumped off a four-story building.)

Angelides’s tantrum did have one effect: It inspired a change in his campaign’s strategy. After dismissing Leno and other gabfests as low-brow fare for non-serious candidates, Team Angelides booked their man on Adam Corolla’s Los Angeles-based radio show, a safe haven for the listeners who didn’t follow Howard Stern to Sirius. The candidate and his eldest daughter arrived at the studio just in time to hear a 400-pound, 20-year-old man kiss a 72-year-old woman in hopes of wrangling an invitation to the Playboy Mansion’s Halloween party. Not that Angelides was interested in restoring decorum to the show. During his interview he called Schwarzenegger a “robot,” “the Santa Ana winds of blowhards,” “a guy whose hair looked like it was dipped in Tang,” and “a bit of a sociopath when I heard him on Monday Night Football talking about how great the Raiders were.”

For reporters covering the race, such outbursts are the gifts that keep on giving: A poll released this week by the Public Policy Institute of California has Angelides trailing, 48 percent to 30 percent. Angelides has spent the past two months looking for a topic that will breathe life into his campaign. Only, he keeps coming up with character issues. And as Election Day nears, that search has taken on an air of desperation:

* At an appearance before an African-American audience, Angelides implied that Schwarzenegger was a racist, claiming that “there have been news reports that have indicated the governor might have made comments defending apartheid.” Never mind that, three years ago, Nelson Mandela called Arnold to congratulate him on his recall victory.

* Angelides twice has tried to summon the ghost of Richard Nixon. First, he challenged Schwarzenegger to release taped conservations between the governor and his staffers (Angelides’s campaign already has a copy of the tapes, which it swiped from the governor’s website; this may be California’s “October Surprise”). The other Nixon reference: the beginning of Angelides’s TV bio ad, where a vintage-1972 “Dump Nixon” poster explains how young Phil was first drawn to politics.

* Angelides may be the only major candidate in America this year to personally reach out to reporters and pitch hit pieces on his opponent. Last week, he called the Los Angeles Times‘s Sacramento bureau, once again bringing up the apartheid allegations and–even more amazingly–accusing Schwarzenegger of being to slow to act on the genocide in Darfur.

ASSUMING HE LOSES big to Schwarzenegger, there are two ways to assess Angelides’s defeat:

One line of thought is the treasurer wasn’t terribly popular within his party to begin with, and his loss enables a more a glamorous Democrat to succeed Schwarzenegger, who can’t run for a third term four years from now. Some California Democrats still hold a grudge from the 1994 primary when Angelides, running for state treasurer, ran one of the sleazier ads in state history, linking his opponent to the murder of a doctor at an abortion clinic. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, presumably a gubernatorial candidate for 2010. Fabian Nunez, the state Assembly speaker, wants to replace his good friend, the mayor. Nunez also is co-chairman of Angelides’s campaign, but like Villaraigosa, he’s rarely seen stumping for his party’s standard-bearer.

Or it could be that Angelides never stood a chance in the showdown at stature gap. Take, for example, his recent visit to the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle. On the same day that Angelides was whining about being on the receiving end of too many negative ads, Schwarzenegger was back East, his smiling face broadcast from high above Times Square while he opened that day’s NASDAQ session. This summer, Schwarzenegger appeared before adoring NASCAR crowds; his opponent’s anti-war rallies never drew more than 200 Bush-haters. Angelides may claim that Schwarzenegger was slow to act on Darfur, but it was during a press conference with George Clooney and Don Cheadle that the Governator signed a bill to divest state pension money from Sudan. Angelides will get a break today when Illinois Sen. Barack Obama comes to California. Then again, it was Arnold who hung out with the Dalai Lama at Maria Shriver’s women’s conference in Long Beach.

All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that California voters are naive or star-struck. But it does suggest that some things don’t change, even amidst a tsunami. In elections, optimists usually prevail and pessimists are punished. And that may be why Phil Angelides, though denied equal time on NBC, may be the Democrats’ biggest loser on Election Day.

Bill Whalen is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he follows California and national politics.