By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES - As Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California prepares to leave office in January, the lesson from his seven-year effort may be this: Being a political independent can win you a lot of things: an election, even re-election, and new policies. But that’s not the same as having people like you. If the mark of a real independent is a lack of friends, Mr. Schwarzenegger is the quintessential nonpartisan .

His approval rating has not risen above 30 percent since May 2009. California remains in deep fiscal distress, with a $19 billion budget deficit. He is despised by the state’s workers (whose pay he cut), Democrats (who loathe his aversion to new taxes and his desire to cut entitlements) and Republicans (who wish those respective aversions and desires were stronger), as well as college students, public school parents and people who hate the smell of cigars.


“You drive through
Sacramento, and
people are screaming
at you from the
window.”


“There were people all the way through, people who were disappointed,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said as he pulled on a cigar in his Santa Monica office. “ Everything you do, you think that that will make you more popular,” he said, but found that it wasn’t so. “You drive through Sacramento, and people are screaming at you from the window.

” Mr. Schwarzenegger’s accomplishments have been significant, largely bipartisan and likely to have a lasting impact . His most notable strike is at politics itself. He persuaded California voters to approve nonpartisan primaries, in which the top two vote getters, regardless of their affiliations, face off in a general election.

And in 2008, he took the drawing of legislative districts out of the hands of lawmakers. “He clearly goes down as the biggest political reformer in the modern history of California,” said Jim Brulte, a Republican and a former lawmaker .

Mr. Schwarzenegger has tackled issues that have bedeviled lawmakers for decades, like conserving and storing the state’s limited water supply, reining in workers’ compensation costs and fixing the state’s prison system. Yet most of his accomplishments have been reached less through compromise and more through cleverly aligning himself with the strongest proponents of a policy .

In 2006, re-election time, the governor sided with Democrats, imposing America’s most stringent controls on carbon-dioxide emissions, raising the minimum wage by $1 an hour and demanding that Washington let Californians import cheaper drugs from Canada . Yet once he was re-elected, he and Democrats parted ways over the budget . Republicans taunted him for agreeing to tax increases to close a large budget gap.

Then he fought with Democrats over cutting the wages and benefits of public workers. This governor will always be tied to one of the state’s worst budget cycles .

“He made the problem worse in some key respects,” said Jean M. Ross, the executive director of the left-leaning California Budget Project. What life will spell for Mr. Schwarzenegger after he leaves office, he won’t reveal. But his athletic past has taught him to look to the next victory.

“You will look at my bicep and you will see a 20-inch bicep and you say, ‘Wow, look at what this training has done’ ? that’s the obvious,” he said. But it’s what the training does inside you that is more meaningful, he said. ? “the harder you work, the more you gain, there’s no shortcut, and that each time you fail, that you just got to get up and try again.”