The Weekly Roundup

Thursday, Oct. 20
President Bush came to town, and the governor avoided him like the bird flu.
But it also left an opening for our Media Stunt of the Day Award, which goes
to Democrats Dario Frommer and Jackie Speier. The two Democrats kept the
governor off message, and fed into the spat between the White House and the
statehouse. The two Dems criticized Schwarzenegger for not meeting with the
president during his quick, ATM stop in California, saying the guv missed an
opportunity to lobby for more federal dollars.

“This is about the governor doing his job, and part of his job is to get
California its fair share of federal dollars,” said Assemblyman Dario
Frommer, D-Los Feliz (Los Angeles County). “He’s just snubbing the president
because of anger.”

Translation: This is about tweaking the governor and piling on. But a job
well done, nonetheless.

Friday, Oct. 21
No subject is touchier in Los Angeles than traffic. And there’s no better
way for a Republican president to drive down his approval ratings even more
in Democratic Los Angeles than to add to the ubiquitous bumper-to-bumper in
the City of Angels.

The LA Daily News reports “On Friday, police were alerted just before Bush
began his commute. With only a few minutes’ notice from the U.S. Secret
Service, LAPD and city Department of Transportation cops shut down Sunset
Boulevard west of the San Diego Freeway from 8:15 a.m. to 10 a.m.
Thousands of commuters, unable to cross the legendary L.A. strip except for
intermittent breaks in traffic, were trapped with engines idling in
miles-long jams.”

Saturday, Oct. 22
The governor’s campaign team pulled all of the ads featuring Schwarzenegger
off the air today, conceding that average citizens may be more effective
spokespeople for the governor’s four ballot initiatives than the governor.
The governor’s campaign said the decision had nothing to do with the
governor’s personal approval ratings, telling the LA Times that after weeks
of running ads featuring the governor, “now we are putting a ton of [ads]
behind educating people about the campaign.”

Sunday, Oct. 23
A pair of small earthquakes hit southern California, a couple of miles from
Santa Monica. The first quake measured 3.1 on the Richter scale, followed by
a 3.0 aftershock, providing a small interruption to an otherwise uneventful
Sunday.

Monday, Oct. 24
The governor took his campaign directly to Bay Area viewers yesterday as
part of an unscripted Walnut Creek forum, the first such event since the
beginning of the special election campaign. After mostly favorable reviews,
the governor’s political team announced that Schwarzenegger would make more
real town hall appearances in the final two weeks of the campaign.

Schwarzenegger campaign strategist Mike Murphy said after weeks of keeping
the governor tightly scripted, the new, more open events will help the
governor down the homestretch.

“The challenge of our campaign has been to get our message through the fog
of lies and misinformation put out by the other side