40

Arnold's approval rating slips further:

The poll from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that only 40 percent of adults now approve of the way Schwarzenegger is handling his job as governor, a whopping 20 percentage point drop since January.

Among "likely voters," his approval rating was a higher 45 percent, but that fell from 63 percent at the start of the year.

Schwarzenegger aides dismissed the results as little more than a temporary slide after months of attacks from public employee labor unions and other critics of his policies.

Even though Arnold's movies got horrible reviews, people still went to see them. So while the poll numbers are dreary, he still has room to move. Opponents need to sharpen their critiques of Arnold's proposed policies if they are going to keep him sub 50 and out of the running for 2006.

I think, too, that this is becoming the general sentiment in the state:

"I'm a Democrat who voted for Schwarzenegger," says Wendy Bokota, an Irvine PTA activist and mother of two elementary school children. "Like everybody else, I voted without being really informed about the issues. I believed people when they said Gray Davis really was causing problems. I thought Schwarzenegger had the ability to make change — and he does, but he's trying to do it on the backs of education.

"I thought repealing the vehicle license fee sounded great and would save me a lot of money, but I didn't understand the problems it was going to cause the state budget."

Free candy is a wonderful thing, but someone has to bear the costs eventually, and Arnold made a bad political decision to charge it to the school system. Until he straightens out the $2 billion owed to the schools, I'm not sure how much movement we see in his numbers.