Gov.’s GOP Credentials Spur Debate

Given his knack for picture-perfect campaign settings, it was hard to miss what was absent from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s otherwise impeccably staged event overlooking a Sherman Oaks traffic jam Tuesday: the Democrats who lead the Legislature.

Undaunted by their abandonment of what Schwarzenegger aides had long billed as a joint campaign swing for $37 billion in public works bonds, the Republican governor praised the missing Democrats for working with him to put the proposals on the Nov. 7 ballot.

“We will be the model for the rest of the country -- and definitely for Washington,” he said of the year’s bipartisan agreements in Sacramento.

As Schwarzenegger pressed ahead with his nearly yearlong effort to keep a measured distance from his own party, his Democratic rival, state Treasurer Phil Angelides, was portraying him as the very embodiment of the Republican Party’s worst qualities.

From the Iraq war to a GOP “jihad” to privatize pensions, Angelides said at a Sacramento news conference, “the Bush-Schwarzenegger agenda is shredding the fabric of our country and our state.”

The candidates’ remarks Tuesday captured one of the main dynamics driving the gubernatorial race as Saturday night’s debate, the only one of the campaign, approaches: a squabble over how much of a Republican Schwarzenegger really is -- and whether voters should care.

By Angelides’ account, the governor is trying to hide his allegiance to President Bush and the national Republican Party’s agenda in order to get reelected in a Democratic-leaning state. He said Schwarzenegger was “scurrying to get away, out of the camera shot” as Bush visited California on Tuesday to raise money for Republicans in Los Angeles and the Central Valley.

Schwarzenegger, however, said it was more important to campaign for the bipartisan ballot measures than to meet with Bush.

“President Bush is coming out here not to help California, but to do fundraising in California, so there’s no reason for me to meet with him,” Schwarzenegger told reporters in Beverly Hills after a breakfast fundraiser for the bond campaign.

If Schwarzenegger’s decision not to appear with the president served to remind Californians of the contrasts between him and the Republicans who run the nation, Democrats hoped their own absence from the governor’s event would do the opposite.

“I’ve got a pretty busy schedule,” Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) said of his last-minute decision to skip public campaign stops with Schwarzenegger.

For months, legislative deals cut with Schwarzenegger by Nunez and state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland) have buttressed the governor’s reelection campaign, enabling him to cast himself, among other things, as a champion in the fight against global warming.

But the two legislators ditched the plan to campaign publicly with the governor for the bonds, opting to raise money with him in private, as they did Tuesday in Beverly Hills.

Nunez said that raising money for TV ads was more worthwhile than “running around the state patting each other on the back.”

So on the roof of the Sherman Oaks Galleria parking deck -- where Schwarzenegger aides positioned cameras Tuesday to capture bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic behind him -- the governor made do with one local Democrat, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, and Danny Curtin, director of the California Conference of Carpenters, the only union supporting Schwarzenegger’s reelection.

Sounding much like a Democrat himself, Schwarzenegger extolled the billions in proposed spending on the ballot for “more highways, more freeways, more tunnels and bridges, more onramps and offramps,” along with school construction, new housing and levee repairs. The levees “need to be fixed right away so we don’t have another disaster like New Orleans,” he said.

But Angelides, who also supports the bond package -- Propositions 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D and 1E -- has argued with increasingly harsh rhetoric this week that Californians should not be fooled by Schwarzenegger’s election year shift from a combative GOP agenda last year to a flurry of bipartisan lawmaking this year.

“What matters is not what lines you read from a script in the last 30 days before the election, but where you’ve been in the fight for civil rights and social justice and equal opportunity. And the fact is that this governor’s been absent,” Angelides said Sunday on a string of visits to black churches in Oakland.

Angelides latest efforts to cast Schwarzenegger as a partisan Republican are part of a push to prop up the challenger’s tepid support among Democrats with a new emphasis on African Americans.

At the Oakland churches, he reminded congregants of his push for state pension investments in urban renewal projects -- and of Schwarzenegger’s cuts to programs that put impoverished high school students on a path to college.

Angelides, who has proposed higher taxes for corporations and Californians who earn more than $250,000 a year, promised tax cuts for those “living paycheck to paycheck.”

In Bush’s Washington and Schwarzenegger’s Sacramento, he said at church after church, Republicans lavish “more on those who have the most,” protecting oil companies, pharmaceutical firms and other “big corporate interests.”

On Monday, Angelides echoed that message in remarks to several hundred African Americans in Watts, where he pounded Schwarzenegger for cuts to state healthcare programs at a community meeting on the threatened shutdown of Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

Angelides pledged state aid to avert closure of the hospital. “We can’t allow the clock to be turned back, and it won’t happen on my watch,” he said.

He also renewed efforts to link Schwarzenegger to Iraq, saying that if voters think the war is wrong, they should “reject the Bush-Cheney-Schwarzenegger agenda.”

Earlier, at the Presidio in San Francisco, Angelides joined two of the most liberal members of Congress, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) and Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), in denouncing Schwarzenegger for supporting the Iraq war.

“Sadly,” Angelides said, “during the Vietnam War, too many leaders in this country stayed silent ... as tens of thousands of young men and women died. We can’t repeat that mistake.”

*

michael.finnegan@latimes.com