SACRAMENTO — For years, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has treated fellow Republicans with a combination of indifference and thinly veiled contempt.
Now, as they vie to succeed him in 2010, the party's two leading candidates for governor are responding in similar fashion.
By criticizing his painstakingly crafted budget, actively opposing several of his ballot measures and, more subtly, jabbing at his work habits and ego, Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner are striving to distance themselves from the unpopular Schwarzenegger and tap widespread GOP anger over the incumbent's broken pledge not to raise taxes. It is, in the words of a strategist involved in the race, a competition to become "the anti-Arnold."
It is also an effort to persuade voters -- starting with Republicans -- to trust a pair of candidates with backgrounds similar to Schwarzenegger, who are making some of the same promises he did when he first ran for governor 5 1/2 years ago.
"There's going to be a lot of skepticism, especially among the broad electorate, about what kind of experience is the prerequisite for being a successful governor of California," said Don Sipple, a media strategist who helped elect the neophyte Schwarzenegger in the 2003 recall election. "People think the Schwarzenegger experience didn't work out so well, and they're going to be looking for something very different."
The race for governor is still in its early stages, a time when mainly activists and political insiders are paying attention. That helps explain why Whitman and Poizner are positioning themselves against the governor and taking some of their contrarian stances. Both are competing for the support of die-hard Republicans, the ones likeliest to vote in the June 2010 primary and the ones who, not incidentally, are unhappiest with Schwarzenegger.
Poizner and Whitman not only oppose the $42-billion budget-balancing package the governor negotiated with the Democratic-run Legislature but also three ballot measures, Propositions 1A, 1B and 1C, that would keep the deal intact. "Before asking taxpayers for more money, government should cut bureaucracy, cut spending further, improve efficiency and provide better services for less," Whitman wrote in an opinion piece earlier this month in the Sacramento Bee.
Poizner said he opposes the three measures as well as three others on the ballot, Propositions 1D, 1E and 1F, because of the "backroom wheeling and dealing" between Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers that resulted in the May 19 special election. "The result was not real structural reform," he said in an interview.
