Election Results Offer Some Old Lessons for Gov. Schwarzenegger

Many lessons flow from Tuesday’s special flogging of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, most of them very old. But they’re lessons that apparently must be relearned every generation or two.

* Lesson No. 1: If you’re going to proclaim yourself to be “the people’s governor” and embark on a crusade, you’d better be sure that the people are following you as support troops or you’ll march right off a cliff.

Schwarzenegger tumbled over the edge with his “reform” agenda in flames. He can change directions and crawl back up. But it’s not likely much of his package will survive, except for political redistricting, which Democratic legislative leaders have promised -- and did so again Wednesday -- to cede to independent citizens.

Let’s reflect on some of these lessons based on the chronology of events starting from when he took office two years ago:

* Lesson No. 2: The time to make big changes is right after you’re first elected, when you’ve got a public mandate and trust. Schwarzenegger, with bipartisan support, sold voters on a $15-billion deficit reduction bond and a minor balanced-budget requirement. Big borrowing, little spending control. That was the moment to have negotiated a real spending cap -- a moderate version of the rejected Proposition 76 -- and sell it to voters.

* Lesson No. 3: Don’t make deals you can’t keep. The new governor promised schools money that he couldn’t deliver a year later, turning former allies into dangerous enemies.

* Lesson No. 4: Don’t mess with schools -- whether it’s breaking your word or trying to cut back on funding guarantees. Of Schwarzenegger’s four measures Tuesday, Prop. 76 suffered the worst drubbing. Education has become a third rail of California politics, like Proposition 13’s property tax cuts.

* Lesson No. 5: Every politician is human, vulnerable to the natural laws of political gravity. Policy usually outpoints personality. A good salesman can be ruined -- a popular politician sent into a free-fall -- by a bad product. The governor’s policy products were boring to most voters, and incendiary for a crucial number. Schwarzenegger and his strategists mistakenly believed he could sell anything.

“It was a lethal combo: his arrogance and inexperience,” says Ray McNally, a Republican strategist and consultant for the prison guards union, who with his partner Richard Temple created some of the most devastating anti-Schwarzenegger TV ads. “He didn’t know a good idea from a bad idea....

“He’s going to be the new Jesse Ventura for the blab set.”

* Lesson No. 6: Don’t put a product on the market until it’s tested. First, the governor pushed initiatives to ban traditional pensions for new public employees and to require merit pay for teachers that were so flawed he had to junk them. Then his two remaining major proposals -- the spending cap and political redistricting -- were not written by his own shop, but by outsiders, and were defective.

“When you put your brand name on a product, you’d better be darn sure it has quality control,” says Democratic consultant Garry South, who was Gov. Gray Davis’ chief strategist. “If you try to force-feed half-baked, unappetizing measures down people’s throats, they’re just likely to upchuck all over you. That’s what voters did Tuesday.”

* Lesson No. 7: Don’t daydream about being leader of the free world. Several California governors have learned that lesson when their dreams turned into nightmares. One insider remembers “the presidential chatter” of mid-2004 when strategists made Schwarzenegger more partisan in anticipation of the Constitution being amended to allow immigrants to run for president.

“Lunacy,” says the insider. “Someone was blowing smoke at him.”

* Lesson No. 8: When politicking statewide in California, run in the middle. Particularly avoid the right. Schwarzenegger’s agenda tilted right and that’s where he mostly stumped for votes, although the GOP represents only 35% of the electorate.

“The governor’s reform package emphasized only half of his political persona,” says GOP consultant Dan Schnur. “He got elected as a centrist. He governed as a centrist. But his initiative package emphasized only the more conservative aspects of his agenda.”

* Lesson No. 9: You cannot pass complex, eye-glazing government process propositions without strong bipartisan support, especially if it’s the minority party advocating them. Schwarzenegger tried to negotiate bipartisan proposals with Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), and almost succeeded, but each man was pulled to the right and left respectively by his political constituencies.

* Lesson No. 10: The main reason Schwarzenegger lost big in the election was that he called the election. The public didn’t want to spend the $54 million in tax money. Voters had OD’d on six statewide elections in four years. They didn’t believe there was a special reason for the election.

Voters want the governor and the Legislature to do their job in Sacramento, Schwarzenegger acknowledged Wednesday through his spokesman, Rob Stutzman. The governor had been “impatient” for reform, Stutzman said. Now he’ll move more slowly, more conventionally.

And presumably more cooperatively. “The governor wants to make Sacramento work. It’s going to take some cajoling.”

That, at least, is one lesson learned -- a very elementary and necessary one if Schwarzenegger is to crawl back up the cliff.

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George Skelton writes Monday and Thursday. Reach him at george.skelton @latimes.com.