As Arnold Schwarzenegger steps down this month, California voters can only marvel that a leader of such apparent strength is leaving the Golden State such a weakling—its institutions eroded and its finances more of a mess than when he took over from Gray Davis after the 2003 recall. Even among Schwarzenegger’s earliest detractors, few would have dared to predict that by his last summer in office, the governor who had entered the statehouse a movie star would bottom out with a 22 percent public approval rating, tying Davis for the lowest recorded approval rating in California history.
Granted, Schwarzenegger had leaped onto the political stage without any practical experience, but he wasn’t doing anything Ronald Reagan hadn’t done more than three decades before. Though a pro-business conservative and a supporter of the death penalty, Schwarzenegger was no Reagan Republican. He was moderate on social issues like gay unions and abortion. Marrying into a Democratic dynasty, he worked with the developmentally disabled and was a defender of poor children, chairing the Inner-City Games Foundation and pouring his wealth and celebrity into the passage of Proposition 49, a 2002 initiative that guaranteed state funds to after-school programs.
