SACRAMENTO -- Abandoning their facade of cooperation, a coalition of California labor unions and consumer groups says it is gearing up a campaign to discredit Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's healthcare proposal as too expensive for many workers.
Organizers say they will trail Schwarzenegger throughout California to challenge and rebut him, hold prayer vigils and news conferences, press elected officials to oppose his proposal and run critical ads on television. They plan to deride the governor's program as the "Arnold Middle-Class Gouge."
The coalition, which includes most major unions and two prominent consumer groups -- Health Access California and Consumers Union -- has hired one of the nation's most aggressive Democratic strategists to run the campaign.
The campaign represents a break from labor leaders' strategy, which had been to encourage Schwarzenegger's efforts while gently prodding him in their direction. Leaders say they no longer believe that the governor will ever agree to their priorities without pressure.
"The year for healthcare reform has been a failure, and it has largely been a failure because of the governor," said Art Pulaski, head of the California Labor Federation.
Unions have successfully employed a strategy to drive down the governor's popularity with the public in the past -- in 2005, for example, when they defeated his special-election agenda.
But the campaign could backfire by turning voters against big changes to the state's healthcare system, including methods favored by unions. That might benefit Republican lawmakers, Blue Cross of California and business groups that have opposed a wholesale overhaul along the lines envisioned by Schwarzenegger and Democratic leaders.
"There is a chance the voters might say, 'This is all too complicated and let's wait,' " said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group.
The planned campaign also could undermine whatever goodwill there might be in healthcare negotiations between Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers long aligned with unions.
"People need to take a step back and ask how to pass healthcare reform, not how to poison it," said Schwarzenegger spokesman Adam Mendelsohn. "I don't think anyone would have guessed that healthcare would be threatened at the end of the day more by unions than by insurers and other special interests."
