With just five days left to sway voters before the special election, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faced a skeptical audience Thursday night that turned a televised question-and-answer session into an extended advertisement against his ballot initiatives.
Appearing live on a KNBC-TV Channel 4 forum at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the Republican governor was peppered with hostile questions from a crowd of about 75 voters screened by the station.
One told Schwarzenegger that his proposal to change the law on union campaign donations was fraudulent. Another got into a shouting match with the governor over his proposal to scale back teacher tenure. Still another suggested, in a question directed to one of Schwarzenegger's rivals, that the governor hoped to establish dictatorial power over the state budget.
Schwarzenegger, unruffled throughout, politely dismissed the arguments against his four ballot measures as scare tactics by unions and their Democratic allies. He said he was not mounting an assault on labor or pursuing a witch hunt against teachers.
"We want to add teachers," he said. "I love teachers."
One voter, whose wife and son are teachers, said he was "absolutely appalled" by Proposition 74, the governor's proposal to extend the probationary period for public school instructors from two years to five.
"It's almost impossible, almost impossible to fire a teacher," Schwarzenegger said.
"No, you're wrong," the man interrupted.
Schwarzenegger asked for a chance to finish.
"No, I'm not going to let you finish, because you're wrong," the man argued.
The governor, who rocked gently back and forth on his heels during the exchange, made light of the confrontation, saying: "I like when you're passionate."
The event was Schwarzenegger's first unscripted event of the campaign in California's largest media market. He has rejected all invitations to debate, but has agreed to take questions from voters at forums around the state, provided that his opponents appear separately. Although the station hired an outside consultant to provide a demographically and politically balanced audience, most of the questioners seemed to lean against the governor. While the names of some questioners were mentioned during the forum, a station spokeswoman said that she did not have immediate access to their correct spellings Thursday night.
