SACRAMENTO — On July 11, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger scored his biggest victory of the year, signing a budget in which the Democratic-controlled Legislature gave him almost everything he wanted in his effort to cure this debt-plagued state government.
But hard on the heels of that triumph, one of Schwarzenegger's aides told me last week, "Ka-chunk, ka-chunk. It was like getting run over by the front and rear wheels of a truck."
On July 13, news reports revealed that just before taking office in 2003, the governor had signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the publisher of two muscle magazines that rely on ads for nutritional supplements — and then vetoed a bill that would have regulated some of those supplements. After 24 hours of brutal editorial condemnation of what another aide called "that $8 million mistake," Schwarzenegger gave up that income and scrapped another multimillion-dollar deal to promote a body-building festival in Ohio.
Then a California court threw one of Schwarzenegger's key initiatives off the ballot in the November special election he had ordered — a measure aimed at transferring the power to draw legislative and congressional district lines from the Legislature to a panel of three retired judges. Those the governor had entrusted with qualifying the initiative had mistakenly submitted a title and description to the attorney general slightly different from the language on the petition forms signed by voters — a big enough discrepancy for the judge to invalidate the petitions.
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