Who Is the Real Arnold?

During a tour of communities devastated by the rainstorms that hit California last week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood atop a battered levee reinforced by stacks of sandbags and previewed his next crusade. He was preparing to ask the legislature to support a 10-year, $222 billion proposal to fortify eroding flood banks and other decrepit infrastructure. Surveying the swollen canal nearby, Schwarzenegger closed by saying, "I hope we can move forward with [the plan]. It's just the sandbags protecting us from a disaster here."

Schwarzenegger is crossing his fingers that the massive public-works plan will help rescue him from political disaster. His approval ratings are well below 40%, his re-election day is just 10 months away, and he's still recovering from the defeat of his pet ballot initiatives by voters who thought he had become too conservative and combative during the special election last November. The Republican Governor is trying to rally by championing levee restoration and a host of other largely nonpartisan programs in a concerted attempt to recast himself as the consensus-building centrist he promised to be when he was elected two years ago. To that end he has added more moderates to his inner circle—most notably staff chief Susan Kennedy, an iconoclastic Democrat who supports abortion rights but shares the Governor's hostility to government regulation. And he has demoted partisans like liberal environmental activist Terry Tamminen and Kennedy's predecessor, conservative Republican Patricia Clarey. He is courting—or, some suggest, co-opting— Democrats on pet issues like raising the minimum wage and freezing tuition at state colleges. But at the same time, he followed the politically safe precedent—no California Governor had commuted a death sentence in 38 years—and denied clemency to death-row inmate Stanley (Tookie) Williams.

Schwarzenegger 3.0 was on full display during his State of the State address last week. Gone was the man who in last year's speech talked of fighting special interests, deplored the "broken" budget process, called the education system a "disaster" and declared that the state-employees pension system was "out of control." In his place, legislators heard a chastened Governor offering a plan to please any populist—or teacher, bond salesman, union member, hourly worker, college student or construction-company owner. "The people, who always have the last word, sent a clear message—cut the warfare, cool the rhetoric, find common ground and fix the problems together," Schwarzenegger said. "So to my fellow Californians, I say—message received." Among other things, he proposes to repay elementary and secondary schools the $1.67 billion the state previously borrowed to close the budget gap. He would finance his public-works projects not with higher taxes but with a combination of bond sales and freeway tolls. Most startling, Schwarzenegger conferred so frequently on those ideas with Democratic legislative leaders that "Democrats all but wrote the speech," says Fabian Núñez, the Democratic assembly speaker who has shared cigars, wine and espresso with the Governor during their confabs.