Governor Fires Up His Ad Campaign
TV Spots Couldn't Come Soon Enough for Backers Watching His Initiatives and Popularity Plummet.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, after weeks of watching critics trash him with millions of dollars in television ads, finally unveiled some special election spots of his own Wednesday.
With just 48 days before voters are asked to wade through a ballot jammed with initiatives they still don't know much about, TV advertising is crucial to the outcome, and the new spots mark the Republican governor's first advertising counterpunch of the fall campaign.
Coming the same week that Schwarzenegger is doing rare face-to-face interviews with reporters - a few days after announcing he'll run again next year - the ads are part of a media blitz aimed almost as much at supporters and donors as it is at voters.
"There's some angst in his administration and in his campaign that speaks to not having the money they thought they'd have and at the other side spending so much on their ads," said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the nonpartisan Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs.
"There are some people in the GOP who will see the ads and are breathing a little sigh of relief that at long last the battle has begun. He's beginning to fight back."
The two 30-second spots, one featuring Schwarzenegger talking directly into the camera and the other showing actors briefly pitching his four initiatives, were scheduled to start airing in the state's major television markets Wednesday night, Schwarzenegger spokesman Todd Harris said.
Harris would not say how much was being spent, but it costs about $2 million to run ads for a week throughout the state.
Just a day earlier, Schwarzenegger said in an interview that he didn't plan to be on TV until the end of the month. Rob Stutzman, his communications director, said the governor was "just not showing his hand" when he laid out that timetable.
Some Schwarzenegger supporters, including state Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, urged him to start advertising sooner.
Opponents have helped drive his approval rating below 40 percent with frequent ads accusing him of breaking promises on education funding and needlessly picking fights with public employees rather than seeking compromise.
Schwarzenegger conceded in an interview with The Bee a day earlier that he didn't have the campaign funds to respond in kind.
"We have not yet gotten the other side out," Schwarzenegger said. "We've had for the whole year their side. How terrible I am. How I am taking money away every day from education and all those things."
Asked if it was a mistake to not start his ads earlier, he said: "We don't want to spend the money that early. I don't have the hundred million dollars. We have to raise a certain amount of millions of dollars in order to be successful the last six weeks of a campaign, not the entire year."
Schwarzenegger is also expected to put several million dollars of his own money into the campaign so he can be on TV in the closing weeks before Election Day, Nov. 8.
In one of the new ads, Schwarzenegger, in an open-collar blue dress shirt, looks into the camera and says politics in Sacramento is "rigged to benefit big government labor unions who will do anything to preserve the status quo."
"Four measures on the ballot will change the way Sacramento does business, get our budget under control and make the system more accountable to you," he says.
The second ad ends with a woman saying, "Let's face it. Sacramento is screwed up. Anything we can do to change it, I am for."
Schwarzenegger's initiatives would give the governor broad new powers to make spending cuts in times of financial crisis, change the way legislative districts are drawn, make it harder for teachers to get tenure protection. He also backs a ballot measure to require public employee labor unions to get written consent from members before using dues on political campaigns.
Gale Kaufman, chief strategist for the campaign to defeat Schwarzenegger's initiatives, was not impressed with the ads, which are posted on the JoinArnold.com campaign Web site.
"Six months ago, the governor on camera talking to voters might have made some sense," Kaufman said. "Now they see nothing but a politician. He blames other people for a broken system, when Californians are more interested in the governor's broken promises."
Kaufman also said the ads "speak to giving the governor more power," and with Schwarzenegger's declining popularity, that is "probably the last thing they should be asking for at this point."
Kevin Spillane, a Republican political consultant, said the ads are effective because they show Schwarzenegger laying out "a comprehensive, positive vision. He's explaining to voters what he's trying to accomplish and why it's important to them. It's exactly what the pundits, his supporters and his donors have been looking for these past several months."
In a related matter, the campaign removed a form from its Web site that asked Californians to weigh in with stories about teachers who "just might not be cut out for the job." Schwarzenegger has said many times that he admires teachers but there are too many bad ones who are difficult to fire.
The form was connected to Schwarzenegger's campaign for Proposition 74, which would increase from two to five years the time it takes public school teachers to gain tenure protection.
"Most public school teachers are great, but everyone knows there is a small percentage that, frankly, don't belong in the classroom," said Harris.
"We no longer need that part of our Web site and had in fact never even accessed it. Therefore, we took it down."