Arnie's Popularity Plummets As Californians Tire of His Reform Pledges

The honeymoon is over for California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician is facing plummeting popularity.

An opinion poll this week showed Mr Schwarzenegger with an approval rating of only 34% - a 31-point drop in the past year.

This puts him even lower than President George W Bush, who won an approval rating of 38% from Californians interviewed for the survey.

Mr Schwarzenegger tried to gloss over the dismal ratings in a series of radio interviews.

"I had a choice a year ago," he said. "Do I want to continue my 70% popularity rating and keep quiet and not create the reforms we need and not rattle the cage and upset the status quo? Or do I really want to keep my promise?"

He won election on a reformist platform in November 2003, promising to do away with "politics as usual" and to go directly to the voters if state politicians refused to embrace his ideas.

Almost two years on, people no longer see him as an outsider coming in to reform the government of a state that has one of the 10 largest economies in the world. Instead, say analysts, voters view him as a political insider - and therefore part of the problem.

His decision to go directly to the voters this November with a special election to push through a series of reforms has generated at best apathy and at worst outright hostility.

"It's very hard for him to be running an initiative campaign from inside the governor's office," Mark Baldassare, director of the Public Policy Institute of California, which conducted the latest poll, told the Sacramento Bee newspaper. "It's hard for people ... to at this point feel he is not part of [the] political process in Sacramento."

Mr Schwarzenegger's ratings have steadily declined since he proposed cutting benefits for public-sector workers, including nurses, teachers, firefighters and the police. Since the early summer, he has faced a stream of negative advertising from unions representing nurses and teachers.

Mr Schwarzenegger has still not said definitely whether he will seek re-election next year, although he said this week: "I am not here for the short run. I am a follow-through guy."