The supposed topic of today's Arnold Schwarzenegger event in San Diego was his agenda for reform. But it became overshadowed by The Announcement.

Just after 11:00 am, CNN broke in with a news alert... quoting the Associated Press that Schwarzenegger was running for a second term. Anchor Wolf Blitzer introduced a live feed of the event around 12:15 pm, only to end up breaking away before the big revelation. It seems the governor's long discussion of the initiatives was taking too long for network TV.

In the interest of full disclosure, our friends at NPR also aired reports all morning long about the expected announcement. The celebrity governor is still big national news.

All of this gives us a chance to examine the Schwarzenegger political style since he landed in the top job two years ago. On this weekend's newsmagazine edition of The California Report, we take a look at a governing strategy that's fluctuated between compromise and confrontation.

[You can listen to the story here]

In the course of my reporting, I asked more than a half-dozen political and policy folks (on and off the record) "when do you think the political tide turned for the governor?"

Some say it began with his decision to back off some of his budget cuts in 2004, which emboldened Democrat; others say things changed when he started what one insider called a "holy war" with the unions; and one GOP source pegged the demise to this past spring's controversy over the pension reform initiative, which Schwarzenegger had to scrap after questions arose about its effects on death and disability benefits of law enforcement officers.

The reporting also seemed to find a consensus that Schwarzenegger's style of "governing by threat of initiative" works best when the proposed initiative is well-vetted, something that did not seem to happen in 2005.

"They did everything backwards," said GOP political analyst Tony Quinn. "They went with the election before they had the proposals." Quinn's take on when the tide turned: March 1, when Schwarzenegger jumped in a Humvee and left the Capitol to campaign-- almost a month before the initiative now called his centerpiece, Proposition 76, was even cleared for signature gathering.

By the way, one sign of just how bad things were between the governor and majority Democrats by the end of this year's session: a bill carried by Assemblymember Joe Canciamilla (D-Pittsburg) to keep private some data and documents on the state's infrastructure system was actually sponsored by Schwarzenegger. Canciamilla says he never told anyone that the bill, AB 1495, was being carried for the administration because he feared it would be killed purely for political reasons.