Arnold Schwarzenegger is newly humble and bipartisan, so he says, after he took a beating for his hard-right politics and crass attempt at a power grab in last year’s special election.

Nobody with a pulse should believe that.

Schwarzenegger 2006 is shaping up to look like Bush 2000, complete with compassionate conservative rhetoric from the top of ticket for the general population, hardcore Republican fire-breathing from the #2 slot, and carefully targeted negative attacks on his opposition based on voter’s “anger points”. Don’t take my word for it. Schwarzenegger’s campaign preparation says so.

First, Schwarzenegger is teaming up with Movement Conservative Republican Tom McClintock:

Typically in California, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor don’t campaign as running mates — but you’d never guess it by watching Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom McClintock lately.

The 2006 campaign is still young, but Schwarzenegger, the incumbent governor seeking an uncertain re-election, and McClintock, a state senator from Ventura County running for lieutenant governor, look very much like a tag team.

Personal friendship — and political necessity — have forged an alliance between the two that mirrors a presidential-vice presidential slate, with each shoring up the other’s weaknesses.

Schwarzenegger helps boost McClintock’s visibility and fundraising ability. McClintock, in turn, has recently rushed in to aid Schwarzenegger by tamping down trouble from his right flank.

Schwarzenegger is Bush, McClintock is Cheney. We all know exactly how compassionate the Bush brand of conservatism has been, and hopefully we will all remember how aggressively Schwarzenegger pushed the extremist Republican agenda in last year’s special election. If you want to know what another Schwarzenegger administration would look like, listen to McClintock, not Schwarzenegger.

Second, look at the team that Schwarzenegger is assembling for the 2006 Election.

• Campaign Manager Steve Schmidt:
  

  Deputy assistant to President Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney who is responsible for Cheney’s press relations and communications …

  White House point man in charge of strategic communications for the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel Alito …

  [H]eld the same post for the nomination of John Roberts, who was confirmed in September as the nation’s chief justice.

  [E]arned his reputation as a steely political strategist who ran the Bush 2004 war room and became a member of the exclusive Breakfast Club, the small group of top operatives who planned the campaign during regular meetings at the home of White House political strategist Karl Rove.

• Chief Strategist Matthew Dowd:
  

  And what came from that analysis was a graph that I obviously gave Karl, which showed that independents or persuadable voters in the last 20 years had gone from 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent of the electorate in 2000. And so 93 percent of the electorate in 2000, and what we anticipated, 93 or 94 in 2004, just looking forward and forecasting, was going to be already decided either for us or against us. You obviously had to do fairly well among the 6 or 7 [percent], but you could lose the 6 or 7 percent and win the election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, “Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.”

  And so when that graph and that first strategic imperative began to drive how we would think about 2004, nobody had ever approached an election that I’ve looked at over the last 50 years, where base motivation was important as swing, which is how we approached it. We didn’t say, “Base motivation is what we’re going to do, and that’s all we’re doing.” We said, “Both are important, but we shouldn’t be putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation,” which is basically what had been happening up until that point, because of — look at this graph. Look at the history. Look what’s happened in this country. And obviously that decision influenced everything that we did. It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff. All of that was based off of that, and ultimately, thank goodness, it was the right decision.

• Communications Director Katie Levinson:
  

  [D]irector of White House television operations … is viewed in GOP circles as a major recruit in the 2008 presidential staff sweepstakes, [and] handled television strategy and planning for the Republican National Committee in 2004.

• Deputy Communications Director Matt David:
  

  “I’m deputy director of communications for Supreme Court nominees at the White House. I work with the media and make sure our supporters are briefed on our current message. This requires identifying potential issues in the media, drafting talking points, and talking to the press. Our objective is to convey the qualifications of our nominee and respond proportionally to attacks from his or her critics. I’ve worked on the nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts, White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Judge Samuel Alito.”

• Matt McDonald (apparently controls rapid response team): Ran rapid response for Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign, and for Bush Administration after 2004 election.
• Sarah Simmons, former aide to Karl Rove in the White House political office, serving as strategist Matthew Dowd’s liaison in California.
  

  SARAH SIMMONS, a former Wisconsin GOP political operative, has moved from the polling firm Public Opinion Strategies to the White House. Simmons will be dealing with strategic reaction to polling data in her position as assistant director in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. (WISpolitics 5/13/05)

• Deputy Campaign Manager Reed Galen: Best evidence is that he was Director of Scheduling for Bush/Cheney 2004.
• Jon Berrier, Assistant to Steve Schmidt: Executive Assistant to Steve Schmidt in Schmidt’s role as Counselor to Vice President Cheney.

That team is custom-built to replicate the Bush campaign strategy in California. Schwarzenegger’s going to be a moderate front man for a classic Bush Republican campaign. Proxies for Schwarzenegger will attack Phil Angelides and Steve Westly with radical smears directed at what the Dems consider to be their strengths. Schwarzenegger will float above the fray, saying little of substance, while his hard men do their dirty work.

It’s not as if the Republicans have a lot of new tricks. They just hammer on the old ones with great vigor. I just hope the California Dems can learn from the National Dems.