Lights! Camera! Legislative Action!

Soon after Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected, he sent a representative to the Legislature to arrange for a courtesy call on the Assembly speaker.

“Are you the advance man?” the speaker’s aide asked.

“No,” said the governor’s representative. “I’m in production.”

He wasn’t joking. Since Schwarzenegger made his surprise announcement on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” in August that he was running for governor, California politics has resembled a Hollywood mega-production. At Schwarzenegger’s first campaign event in Huntington Beach, recalls Landon Parvin, “People shook Arnold’s hand, then ran ahead in the crowd to shake it again or touch him.” Parvin, a White House speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan who wrote Schwarzenegger’s campaign speeches, had never seen anything like it. Hecklers were drowned out by surfers yelling, “Arnold! Arnold!” It was, said Parvin, “like a scene from a movie.”

Since then, the show has not stopped. The Schwarzenegger campaign was a series of theatrical photo ops and sound bites, interspersed with smooth-edged celebrity interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Larry King. Former Gov. Gray Davis, no showman, didn’t have a chance. Still, the question asked by a Newsweek cover when Schwarzenegger announced -- Is He Really Up to Playing a Governor? -- echoed in Sacramento after Davis was recalled and Schwarzenegger elected in a landslide. In the past five months, that question seems to have been answered in the affirmative by the former bodybuilder and action-movie hero who is still wowing star-struck Californians. “People want heroes who are larger than life,” says George Steffes, a Sacramento lobbyist who was legislative liaison for then-Gov. Reagan. “Arnold fits the bill, and most politicians don’t.”

People also want politicians who get results, and Schwarzenegger is off to a good start in this respect as well. In March, he persuaded voters to pass Proposition 57, a $15-billion bond issue to refinance the state’s debt. They also approved a companion measure, Proposition 58, to place a moderate cap on state spending. To get them on the ballot, the governor accepted a mild Democratic version of a sterner Republican measure.

Public opinion surveys find that Schwarzenegger is California’s most popular politician. In a survey before last month’s primary election by the Public Policy Institute of California, likely voters gave Schwarzenegger a 61% approval rating, with only 22% disapproval. The governor’s ratings could go even higher after the Democratic-controlled Legislature approved a Schwarzenegger compromise to reform the state’s troubled workers’ compensation program.

Not taking anything for granted, Schwarzenegger last week had charged around Costco stores across the state to get signatures on initiative petitions that would have put the issue on the November ballot if the Legislature had failed to act. “Arnold much prefers the carrot, but he is willing to use the stick,” said a member of the governor’s team.

Throngs of autograph-seekers intent on catching a glimpse of their hero have flocked to these stores, a boon for Costco’s business if nothing else. Legislators and a supposedly skeptical press corps in Sacramento seem equally star-struck. “Arnold’s a superstar,” says John Burton, the skilled and combative Democratic Senate leader whose agreement is crucial to Schwarzenegger’s success on this year’s budget, which is projected to be $15 billion in the red.

Schwarzenegger’s stardom goes beyond celebrity, says Burton, a liberal politician from San Francisco with a profane manner and a progressive record. The Senate leader, routinely described as the most powerful legislator in Sacramento, disdained Davis, whom he described -- in one of his more printable comments -- as “bloodless.” But he exchanges gifts and jokes with Schwarzenegger and believes he can negotiate with him on difficult issues, as he did as an assemblyman with Gov. Reagan. “Arnold’s not afraid to get his hands dirty and become engaged,” says Burton. “He’s comfortable in his own skin, and he knows the problems aren’t just going to go away.”

Some of Schwarzenegger’s friends say that his determination to succeed, not his celebrity status, is the key to his accomplishments. “Arnold’s not a success because he’s a celebrity,” contends Sacramento lobbyist Bob White. “He’s a celebrity because he’s a success.” White, chief of staff under Gov. Pete Wilson, says that Schwarzenegger is doing in Sacramento what he has done throughout his life: setting goals, engaging people and competing in an effective way. “He’s got the best gut, political instinct of anyone I know,” White says.

In this respect, as in others, Schwarzenegger inevitably has been compared to Reagan, who served two terms as governor en route to the White House and two terms as president. He has also been compared to Jesse Ventura, the wrestling champion who scorned conventional politicians and became the Reform Party-turned-independent governor of Minnesota. Indeed, Stuart Spencer, who managed several of Reagan’s campaigns and believes the jury is still out on Schwarzenegger, says the key question is whether the governor turns out to be a Reagan or a Ventura.

Both comparisons are instructive. Reagan, after a rough start, became an effective governor. Ventura made little practical use of his celebrity status, quarreled with legislators and just about everyone else, and became so unpopular that he did not seek a second term.

Schwarzenegger is his own man. He is less irascible and more goal-oriented than Ventura, and more gregarious than Reagan, who engaged legislators socially only after aides persuaded him that this was politically necessary. Schwarzenegger enjoys the give-and-take with Burton and other legislators. “He believes in the power of his personality,” says White.

Because Schwarzenegger -- and his wife, Maria Shriver -- are such stars, the governor is able to tap talent that might be unavailable to ordinary politicians, says Mark Baldassare, the research director of the Public Policy Institute of California and an expert on direct democracy. Parvin makes a similar point: “He can get any expert on the telephone any time he wants.”

Still, it is not clear that Schwarzenegger, even if he wanted to do so, could emulate Reagan’s performance in his first year as governor, when he endorsed a billion-dollar tax increase, the equivalent of more than $5 billion today, to erase an inherited budget deficit. Ventura, in contrast, did not agree to a tax increase until his third year in office; by then he was too unpopular to get it.

While proclaiming his opposition to any tax increase, Schwarzenegger has left the door open by refusing to sign a no-tax pledge when he ran for governor. Last month, he told the Los Angeles Times that his opposition to tax increases might be “wishful thinking.” In this respect, says White, the governor finds himself in the position of Reagan and Wilson, who detested new taxes but found the alternative worse. Reagan in 1967 and Wilson in 1991 won bipartisan support with budgets that blended spending slowdowns advocated by Republicans with tax increases that Democrats believed were necessary.

Privately, even some Republicans in Sacramento acknowledge that the state can’t balance the budget, as Schwarzenegger proposed to do in January, with spending cuts and borrowing alone. They also find it inconceivable that Burton or most other Democrats would accept the billions of dollars of reductions in social spending envisioned by the governor’s January budget. But no Republican legislator has stepped forward to support a tax increase, nor is any likely to do so. Republicans are more dug in against taxes than in Reagan’s or even Wilson’s days. “Many of the conservative Republicans of the Reagan era would be considered moderates now,” observes Steffes, the former Reagan liaison.

Schwarzenegger’s ace in the hole, says Republican and Democratic strategists alike, is that GOP legislative candidates need him more than he needs them. And in a budget deal that included a tax increase and had Democratic support, Schwarzenegger would need only six Republican votes in the Assembly and two in the Senate to prevail.

Still, no one thinks that a budget agreement will be easy to get, even for a superstar. In the months ahead, it will take all Schwarzenegger’s charm and determination to write a happy ending to his Sacramento production.