Governor’s Race Hits the Road

From Eureka to San Diego, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his newly minted Democratic challenger Phil Angelides churned across California and clashed over tax increases Wednesday as they opened their five-month battle over the state’s top office.

A day after defeating rival Steve Westly in a ferocious Democratic primary, Angelides turned his focus to the Republican governor, portraying him as an untrustworthy champion of President Bush’s conservative agenda.

“This is a governor who said he’d protect education, and then he slashed money to the classroom,” Angelides, the state treasurer, told supporters at a Universal City celebration with other Democratic winners in Tuesday’s primary.

“This is a governor who said he’d balance the budget, and then he borrowed billions. This is a governor who said he would be the people’s governor, then at each and every turn, he has sided with the most powerful interests against the interests of hard-working Californians.”

Schwarzenegger, in turn, called his rival “out of touch.” On a campaign bus trip across a rural northern stretch of the Central Valley, the governor faulted Angelides -- although not by name -- for supporting a failed ballot measure, Proposition 82, that would have raised taxes on high-income Californians to establish universal preschool.

“I don’t think we should raise taxes,” Schwarzenegger said. “We don’t need to punish people for the shortcomings of Sacramento.”

The election results Tuesday reasserted the potency of two staples in California politics: organized labor and incumbency. Unions strongly favored Angelides over Westly, and his victory follows labor’s success in defeating Schwarzenegger’s ballot measures in the November special election.

Incumbents, too, fared well, even at a time of voter unhappiness with the direction of the state and nation. No one seeking reelection to Congress or the Legislature lost a party nomination race.

In the general-election contest for governor, Schwarzenegger starts in far better political shape than many would have imagined just a few months ago, when he was reeling over his special-election debacle. But since then, his approval ratings have risen steadily as he has distanced himself from his conservative base and tried to widen his appeal in the Democratic-leaning state.

By contrast, Angelides must recover from the damage wrought by a scathing primary campaign waged against him by Westly, the state controller.

Schwarzenegger’s reelection campaign lost no time exploiting Westly’s attacks, distributing a greatest-hits list to remind reporters that his Democratic rival had branded Angelides a sleazy developer, “champion smear artist” and Sacramento insider who had “never seen a tax he doesn’t like.”

After conceding defeat earlier Wednesday in a telephone call to Angelides, Westly backpedaled furiously at the Democratic victory event in Universal City.

“The treasurer is a brilliant man,” Westly said as he stood alongside Angelides to endorse him. “He’s been an accomplished treasurer. He’s committed to environmental values.”

Days earlier Westly was still running TV commercials accusing Angelides of paving over wetlands to build houses and dumping illegal sludge into Lake Tahoe for a condominium project. Judging by the results Tuesday, Westly campaign manager Jude Barry said, Schwarzenegger had little to gain by echoing such attacks.

“If it didn’t work for us, it’s not going to work for Arnold,” he said.

On his bus trip, Schwarzenegger said he wanted to keep his reelection campaign positive. He said a major reason for the low turnout in Tuesday’s election -- less than a third of registered voters, according to preliminary figures -- was the antagonism between Angelides and Westly.

Still, the governor stopped short of forswearing negative ads.

“If you only hear about how he has built land and destroyed the environment, and this guy has taken money -- if you only hear about things like that, you turn people off eventually,” he said. “It maybe works, insofar as you can win this way or not win. But in the end there was really no winner. The people became the losers because of it.”

Schwarzenegger said he congratulated Angelides in a morning phone call, and both candidates said they looked forward to a series of debates.

The governor campaigned Wednesday in Eureka, Redding, Chico and Auburn, far removed from the big cities that dominate campaigns. “We wanted to send a signal that we’re going to contest every inch of the state,” said Steve Schmidt, his campaign manager.

In Redding, Schwarzenegger took questions from a friendly crowd in a park on the Sacramento River. Looking relaxed in khaki pants and a white short-sleeve shirt, he stood in front of his oversized green campaign bus, decorated with a picture of Yosemite, to signal support for environmental protection. Working the crowd like a TV talk-show host, he wore a wireless microphone as he touted the billions of dollars in public works projects that he is asking voters to approve on the November ballot.

“This is what the next four years are all about -- to build and build and build,” he said. “I want to see cranes everywhere. I want to pour concrete. Lay steel. Let us build.”

At a coffeehouse in Chico, where Schwarzenegger signed copies of “Terminator” DVDs, the governor signaled that health coverage -- a traditional Democratic issue and long a priority of Angelides -- would be a staple of his campaign. “Let’s all say we need healthcare for everyone,” he said.

Schwarzenegger campaign strategist Matthew Dowd, who was traveling on the bus, said he welcomed efforts by Angelides and his aides to link Schwarzenegger to Bush, who is highly unpopular in California.

“Go for it,” he said. “We’ll be talking about building roads. We’ll talk about improving levees. And we’ll talk about balancing the budget. And they can talk about why Bush matters in this election.”

Angelides, who traveled Wednesday from Sacramento, his hometown, to Los Angeles, San Diego and Oakland, did exactly that. In Universal City, he denounced “the agenda of George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, where you help those at the top and hope some crumbs fall down to the rest.”

But Democrats, he said, would “work for the common good,” balance the state budget and “ask the corporations and the multimillionaires to pay their fair share again so we can have the best schools, more young people going to college, the brightest future for our state.”

“This will be a clear-choice election,” he said.

With his accusations that Schwarzenegger broke promises to make schools a top priority and to curb the influence of special-interest money, Angelides also echoed the character attacks that organized labor used to kill the governor’s ballot measures last year. Emphasizing his close ties to labor were his travel companions, including Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Assn., and Art Pulaski, leader of the California Labor Federation.

“Our people are still angry, and we are going to remind voters who the real Arnold is,” Pulaski said.

The Angelides victory was the most notable of Tuesday’s results, but the vote also set the broader parameters of the November election in California. Among the most striking aspects was the nomination of eight white men for the Republican statewide ticket, a setback for GOP leaders who have struggled for years to expand the party’s appeal, mainly to the rapidly growing number of Latino voters.

“It is the Achilles’ heel of the Republican Party,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a veteran GOP strategist and publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book election guide. “It has not proven its ability to have wide appeal beyond white voters.”

Several of the GOP nominees, he noted, hold conservative social views that could prove an especially difficult sell to the full spectrum of California voters.

They include former state Sen. Richard Mountjoy of Monrovia for U.S. Senate, state Sen. Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks for lieutenant governor, former state Assemblyman Tony Strickland of Thousand Oaks for controller, state Board of Equalization member Claude Parrish for treasurer, and state Sen. Chuck Poochigian of Fresno for attorney general.

Still, an advantage for McClintock, whose Democratic rival in the lieutenant governor’s race is state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, is the relatively favorable public image that he built during his run for governor in the 2003 recall campaign.

Poochigian also holds an important asset in his race against Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, the Democratic nominee for attorney general: voters often tilt toward Republicans for law-and-order jobs.

In the race for insurance commissioner, Republican Steve Poizner, a social moderate, has personal wealth at his disposal for the race against Democratic nominee Cruz Bustamante, the lieutenant governor. A sign of potential difficulty for Bustamante, whose candidacy in the recall election was marred by fundraising controversies, was the strength of his primary rival, John Kraft, who won roughly 30% of the vote after running a barely visible campaign.

Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, another social moderate, holds the advantage of incumbency -- he was appointed by Schwarzenegger after a Democrat resigned -- in his run for reelection against Democratic nominee Debra Bowen, a Marina del Rey state senator.

Democrats went out of their way Wednesday to flaunt their diversity.

“This is California,” state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) told a crowd of Democrats in introducing five candidates on the party ticket Wednesday at the Universal City event.

Leading the ticket with Angelides is U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is seeking reelection and was in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. The Democrats’ other statewide nominees are Atty Gen. Bill Lockyer for state treasurer, who made no campaign appearances on Wednesday, and state Board of Equalization member John Chiang for controller.

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Times staff writer Robert Salladay contributed to this report.