Schwarzenegger rebuffed: voters soundly defeated the California governor's ballot measures, and the Legislature may be stronger as a result.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's yearlong battle to wrest control of the state budget from the Legislature, move redistricting to an independent commission, and hem in California's powerful public employee unions fell flat on Election Day when four ballot measures he was backing were defeated, most by very wide margins.

Although many observers--including the governor himself--said the results were a message to legislators and the governor to solve the state's problems in the Capitol, not at the ballot box, the unambiguous vote seems more likely to empower the Legislature's Democratic majority to rebuff even more of Schwarzenegger's policy proposals. Unless the governor relents, the result would be a statehouse more gridlocked than the one Schwarzenegger was trying to blast past by going directly to the voters.

Still, with the former action movie star facing what looks to be a tough re-election fight in 2006, Schwarzenegger can be expected to be less confrontational this year than he was in 2005. He could hardly be more so.

A chastened but unapologetic Schwarzenegger said after the vote that he should have listened to his wife, Maria Shriver, who, he said, advised him not to press for the special election. But the governor said that even though he lost, the big gamble was in keeping with his style.

"I think that I operate with a different mentality than most people do, which is that I am very forceful and impatient," he said. "And I always have mapped out, my entire life, a program and a work schedule, and also a schedule of when I want to accomplish things. I always was successful with that, and with tremendous determination and with a tremendous amount of will."

A year ago, he said, he figured he could enact his concept of reform by proposing an agenda, inviting lawmakers to meet him halfway, and taking it to the voters if they refused. But now he sees that in politics, it doesn't always pay to move quickly.

"Here in this Capitol, and on the job as governor--or I think any politician--I think you have to be more patient."

LESSONS LEARNED

Reaction among the governor's opponents was mixed.

"We won, they lost," said Gale Kaufman, a key strategist for the California Teachers Association, which spent more than $50 million on the campaign--even mortgaging its headquarters building--to defeat Schwarzenegger's agenda. The CTA and its labor partners in the newly formed Alliance for a Better California are expected to seek to defeat Schwarzenegger when he runs for reelection next year.

In the Legislature, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a former Los Angeles labor organizer who has feuded almost non-stop with the governor, was in no mood to make nice after the election.

"You can't just move on," Nunez said. "It just can't be one of those things where you sing 'Kumbaya' and you move on. Lessons have to be learned."

But on the other side of the Capitol, Senate Leader Don Perata was more magnanimous, saying he was urging his allies to "please forgive, and let's move on."

Perata said he felt as though 2005 was a wasted year because of the special election, and he said he wants no part of a strategy that would seek to stymie the governor for another year in hopes of hurting his reelection prospects.

Perata said he would seek agreement with the governor on a major bond measure to rebuild the state's aging highways, ports and levees, a plan to reduce the cost of housing by reducing regulation, a goal of hiring 100,000 new teachers, and a major education reform that would relieve the schools of what he sees as micromanagement from Sacramento.

"I don't want to spend next year doing what we did this year," Perata told reporters. "I'm getting too old to waste a year of my life."

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

It was a strange year indeed. Twelve months ago, Schwarzenegger was riding high, with his public approval rating at about 65 percent, a near record for California governors. He had been on the winning side of nearly every ballot measure he supported or opposed in the 2004 elections, and had helped re-elect George W. Bush as president with a last-minute appearance in Ohio.

But all of that began to unravel when Schwarzenegger broke a promise on future education funding he had made to the state's teachers union and education lobby, infuriating a powerful interest group that immediately launched television and radio attacks bringing his credibility into question. Although the governor eventually gave the schools $3 billion in new funding, that was still far short of what they said they were due, and their advertising campaign seemed to convince the voters that he had actually cut school spending rather than increase it.

Yet even as his approval rating was in a free-fall, eventually bottoming out at 36 percent in September, Schwarzenegger launched his assault on teacher tenure, public pensions and other sacred cows of the state's dominant Democrats.

Many of the proposals he put forward actually had significant early support among voters, who said they liked the idea of rolling back public employee pensions, limiting state spending, making it easier to fire teachers and giving judges the power to draw district lines.

But several of the measures Schwarzenegger was backing had drafting problems, forcing him to juggle his agenda even as he was gathering signatures to qualify the initiatives for the ballot. By the time he called a special election, which polls repeatedly showed the voters did not want, the governor had settled on three measures.

One would have extended teachers' probationary period from the current two years to five and made it easier for districts to fire incompetent instructors. It failed, 55 percent to 45 percent.

Another would have created a new state spending limit, tweaked the state's constitutional mandate for minimum education funding and given the governor the power to cut spending when a deficit was looming. Voters rejected it 62 percent to 38 percent.

A third initiative would have taken the job of drawing new district lines from the Legislature and given it to a panel of three retired judges, with a mandate to redistrict the state as soon as the 2006 elections. It lost, 60 percent to 40 percent.

Schwarzenegger also endorsed a fourth measure that would have required public employee unions to obtain the written permission of their members annually before deducting money from their paychecks for political purposes. The so-called "paycheck protection" initiative galvanized the public employee unions and became the focus of an effective advertising campaign featuring firefighters, teachers and nurses complaining that the governor was attacking them for problems he should have been solving in Sacramento. Although it led by a wide margin in early polls, it eventually failed by vote of 53 percent to 47 percent.

The only idea that seems likely to be revisited this year in the Legislature is redistricting. Both Nunez and Perata committed themselves during the campaign and shortly after to the idea of creating an independent commission to draw new district lines after the next census.

Daniel Weintraub is the public affairs columnist for the editorial pages of the Sacramento Bee. He has covered the California Capitol since 1987.