Schwarzenegger Pats er Hits Bottom

http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2009/07/poll-schwarzenegger-hits-bottom.html

Poll: Schwarzenegger hits bottom

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger earns the worst approval numbers of his tenure, according to a new poll, becoming another governor whose ratings have been dragged down along with the battered economy.

Today's poll from the Public Policy Institute of California shows just 28% of Californians give a thumbs-up to Schwarzenegger's job performance. Those are the lowest numbers for a Golden State governor since August 2003, when then Gov. Gray Davis was facing a recall election.

Only 14% of those polled say the state is headed in the right direction, and three out of every four residents say they expect bad financial conditions over the next year, according to the poll.

Of course, it's not the best time to be a governor these days, what with the struggling economy hampering state budgets. (Here's an earlier post from us on the dropping approval ratings for other governors.) In California, Schwarzenegger on Tuesday signed a new spending plan that closes the state's $26 billion deficit but slices funding for child welfare programs, health care for the elderly and the poor, and state parks.

Schwarzenegger is term-limited and can't run again. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and state Attorney General Jerry Brown are running for the Democratic nomination. On the GOP side, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is in.

:evilgrin:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/03/MNT118I9A5.DTL

Q: Do you think the 2003 recall of you as governor has played any part in getting the state to this point?

A: (Long pause). Every governor is faced with an economic challenge if they serve long enough. ... It's hard for me to know what role the recall played. Clearly, the fiscal management of the state was an issue in the campaign, but I stand by what I did. We reduced taxes overall and created jobs. (Schwarzenegger) faces a much more severe economic crisis than I did. Nobody seems to understand that the economy is like the tide. When you're in high tide no one thinks low tide is coming. Sometimes a crisis requires people to rethink how we got in this mess. That's a healthy process.

Q: It seems ironic at the least that fiscal management was a theme of the recall campaign and now it's like deja vu. How do you feel about that?

A: I never believed in pointing fingers, even when in office and I'm certainly not going to do it now. The public and the people in Sacramento need to realize that what they fund depends on revenues coming from the economy and the economy is going to have ups and downs. Not to take that fluctuation into account when making one-, two- or five-year plans is ridiculous.

You have to keep your eye on how the overall economy is going and not just whether ends meet in the current year. It's a totally foreign concept in the Democratic Party; they just think the economy happens.

His popularity should be on the minus side of zero