The unlikeliest girlie man: Arnold Schwarzenegger gives Californians what they want.

WITH four months left in his campaign for reelection, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger found himself at odds with the state's Democratic legislature over the minimum wage--and who could raise it faster.

Although Schwarzenegger had vetoed minimum-wage hikes twice before, his thinking on the subject had evolved. Following the devastating defeat of his government-reform ballot initiatives in the 2005 special election, Schwarzenegger had adopted a make-no-enemies approach to politics. This time, there was no chance he was going to stand in the way of a popular policy, regardless of his professed free-market principles.

But the legislature was stalling, holding out for the minimum wage to be indexed to inflation, guaranteeing increases for years to come. Schwarzenegger didn't want to go that far, yet hoped to get the hike before November's election. So he turned to a dormant state panel that could boost the minimum wage without legislative approval. And to improve the odds of the panel's giving him the result he wanted, he stacked it with four appointees who supported his agenda--all Democrats.

Behold the new Arnold, a man bearing little resemblance to the revolutionary who toppled Gov. Gray Davis just three years ago. He's politically compliant, eager to please, and anxious to avoid a fight. One might say ... a girlie man.

Schwarzenegger has, in the parlance of the Left, "grown." So has California's government. In June, the governor signed a $131 billion budget, up 8.4 percent from the year before. Schwarzenegger's spending plan is 30 percent larger than the one Davis approved in 2003, just before being ousted as a reckless spender.

"I don't think the governor is a small-government Republican," says Jon Coupal, president of California's largest taxpayer-advocacy group, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation. Or, as GOP pollster Arnold Steinberg puts it, "He's become a chamber-of-commerce Republican." That is, "someone who confuses big business with free enterprise." Adds Steinberg, "He lost his populist roots a long time ago."

Still a Schwarzenegger supporter, Coupal is quick to point out that the governor hasn't raised taxes. But it's unclear how much of the credit belongs to Schwarzenegger and how much belongs to California's constitution, which requires a two-thirds legislative majority for tax hikes. The Republican minority holds just enough seats to block tax increases, as it did throughout the Davis era. Besides, with a thriving economy producing $8 billion in unanticipated revenues over the last fiscal year, there's more than enough cash on hand to sate even the biggest of Sacramento's big spenders.

There are also billions more in planned borrowing. Courtesy of Schwarzenegger, November's ballot will include $37 billion worth of bonds to rebuild crumbling infrastructure that Sacramento ignored for decades while tending to a perpetually growing bureaucracy and welfare state.

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Schwarzenegger, who once spoke loftily about improving California's business climate, has also warmed up to regulation. In July, he proposed legislation that would require drug companies to provide discounts to families earning as much as three times the federal poverty rate--despite having vetoed similar legislation twice in the past.

What prompted Arnold's change of heart is last year's special-election debacle. Emboldened by his ability to intimidate Democrats during his first year in office, Schwarzenegger had launched a "year of reform" campaign to pass several ballot initiatives. But he took on too many vested interests at once--teachers, public-employee unions, every major spending lobby, as well the state legislature and its gerrymandered districting plan. Labor unions spent tens of millions on relentless, highly effective attack ads, and sent protesters to interrupt his every public event.

In short order, Schwarzenegger's once-stratospheric popularity ratings crashed, and his ballot measures failed. Worse, he lost the one trump card he could bring to negotiations with Democratic legislators--his threat to take matters directly to the voters. In the special election, Democrats discovered they no longer needed to fear Arnold's popularity.

But the lesson Schwarzenegger learned from the disaster wasn't "pick your battles"; it was "pick no battles." In true Hollywood fashion, he set out to reinvent himself. He apologized to the state for his over-exuberance, and hired a new chief of staff--Democrat and former Davis aide Susan Kennedy. Since then, he has made his peace with the education establishment, and his new budget includes every penny of funding that the teachers unions requested. Similarly, Schwarzenegger has dropped his onetime effort to break the guards union's vise grip on California's dreadfully managed prisons. Instead, he's cozied up to the union's leadership, earning a stinging rebuke from a court investigator looking into the system.

But it's not just unions that have the supposed tough guy cowering.

When legislative Republicans and Democrats were divided over a $300 million program to provide health insurance to the children of illegal immigrants, Schwarzenegger sided with the Democrats. Better to offend his fellow Republicans than to risk the ire of Latino activist groups. Schwarzenegger has also given various excuses for not allowing the state's National Guard units to participate fully in President Bush's plans for patrolling the border. And in a July interview with a Spanish-language newspaper, he said that, "looking back," he had made "the wrong decision" when he supported Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative to deny various public services to illegal immigrants.

In many respects, this is a familiar story: The "moderate" governor who promises social liberalism and economic conservatism ends up delivering only the former. Think George Pataki or Christine Todd Whitman, or California's last Republican Governor--and Schwarzenegger's mentor--Pete Wilson, who signed the biggest tax increase in state history.

But at times, Schwarzenegger's pick-no-fights philosophy can work in social conservatives' favor. Although Schwarzenegger supports legal abortion, gay rights, and much else of the cultural-Left agenda, he has--at least since the special election--opposed any legislative attempt to further enshrine that agenda as law. Here, too, Schwarzenegger takes refuge in technicalities. He opposes legislation to recognize same-sex marriage, but only because he thinks that voters in a statewide referendum--or, shudder, the courts--should make the decision. He threatened to veto a bill that would have legalized assisted suicide, but only because he said the matter should be decided at the ballot box. And he vowed to block legislation that would mandate "gay positive" textbooks in public schools (not that there's anything wrong with that, he says--he just doesn't want to interfere with local school boards).

No one should confuse these equivocations with deference toward voters or a commitment to devolution, however. When it suits him, Schwarzenegger jettisons those principles as quickly as any others. California cities, for example, can already raise the minimum wage on their own, but that's not stopping Schwarzenegger from seeking a statewide hike. His respect for local governments and voters is directly proportional to the level of controversy involved.

Nor should social conservatives think that Schwarzenegger has become sympathetic to their concerns. In 2004, California voters approved a $3 billion bond to fund embryonic-stem-cell research, and the measure has been tied up in court ever since. But after President Bush vetoed legislation to fund such research at the federal level, Schwarzenegger announced that he would float the state's stem-cell-research program a high-risk, $150 million loan so that it could begin work while sorting out its legal problems. So much for economic or social conservatism.

For Schwarzenegger, it was an easy call. For all the noise conservatives can make over gay marriage, their own divisions render them impotent on stem-cell research. And as long as the Left can inflict greater political damage on this issue than can the Right, Arnold will continue to trend left. When the new Arnold approaches a political fight, he sizes up both sides--then joins the one he thinks will win. The old Arnold thought himself big enough to take on the playground bully. The new Arnold wants to be the bully's best friend.

This hardly makes for inspired leadership, but as a reelection strategy it seems to be working. As pollster Steinberg observes, given the realities of running as a Republican in a bright blue state, "risk-aversion might be the most auspicious" tactic Schwarzenegger can employ. By appeasing the unions, he's kept them from spending heavily in behalf of his opponent, state treasurer Phil Angelides. Likewise, by not antagonizing social conservatives on the issues they hold dearest, he avoided any meaningful primary challenge.

Still, it's questionable whether the Republican faithful will turn out for Schwarzenegger in November. Democrats, however, have given him a hand in this area by choosing as their candidate the hard-Left Angelides, who promises to raise taxes and sign gay-marriage legislation. Confident that fear of Angelides will secure his base, Schwarzenegger has been able to tailor his campaign to moderates and independents. The polls give him a healthy eight-point lead.

Not bad for a Republican governor who, a year ago, was about as popular as the avian flu, in a state where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by 1.3 million. Sadly, Schwarzenegger's capitulations might just be what it takes for a Republican to win in California. Voters here have made it clear they don't like tough guys who bruise feelings or step on toes. What they want in a governor is a girlie man. And that is exactly what they're getting.

Mr. Weinkopf is the editorial-page editor of the Los Angeles Daily News.