It was this same week back in March 2005 when Governor Schwarzenegger threw down the gauntlet with legislators and interest groups and launched the most dramatic, and ultimately disastrous, chapter of his political career. And so it was worth noting that on the very same week in 2008, he returned to both a neighborhood… and an issue… that tripped him up last time.

Three years ago, the governor marched out of a statehouse press conference, jumped into one of his personal military-style Humvees, and drove himself (press corps in pursuit) to an Applebee’s restaurant in the Sacramento suburb of Natomas. There, he tried to cajole diners into helping him reform state politics — in part, by stripping legislators of their power to draw political districts.

We all know how that turned out.

This morning, Schwarzenegger went back to Natomas — but this time he stopped at the shopping center on the other side of the road (three-tenths of a mile away) — to launch another intiative campaign to reform redistricting. Working the early lunch/late breakfast crowd at a Mimi’s Cafe, the governor promoted a new redistricting initiative, this one written by Common Cause and AARP.

Tagging along was the governor’s old bipartisan pal, former state controller Steve Westly. Westly and Schwarzenegger, who teamed up in 2004 to convince voters to approve the deficit measures Proposition 57 and Proposition 58, will serve as co-chairs for the new redistricting campaign. Their goal is to collect enough signatures to get the constitutional amendment on the November ballot.

Westly was clearly enjoying himself, some 21 months after losing the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to challenge Schwarzenegger. The Bay Area Democrat hugged Schwarzenegger as the guv stepped out of his black SUV, and the two were joined at the hip as they made their way from table to table in the restaurant. (My favorite moment: a young mother asked the governor whether he wanted to hold her little boy. Schwarzenegger seemed as though he never heard her. Westly, on the other hand, jumped at the chance and had the blond haired little tyke bouncing in his arms in no time.)

Schwarzenegger still evokes the Hollywood reaction from average folks. But unlike 2005, he seemed to find a little more skepticism on the menu at this restaurant. One patron in particular, who identified herself as a Democrat, wanted to know why she would ever vote for a measure that would give Republicans a chance to win more elections. Both Schwarzenegger and Westly tried to answer her by talking up the virtues of more competitive races. “You want competition,” said the governor. “You want the best person to win.”

Of course, a bevy of independent researchers have concluded that even a non-partisan drawing of political maps will result in, at best, a few more than a dozen truly competitive seats in the Legislature. Many parts of California have self-segregated themselves when it comes to party affiliation and in those places you can’t draw districts with relatively even numbers of voters who are D’s and R’s.

And neither the governor nor the former controller told diners about what is not in the new initiative: independently drawn districts for members of Congress. “That’s another step we can take later on,” the governor told reporters when asked about that omission from this proposal. In an interview before the governor arrived, I asked Westly whether leaving congressional maps in the hands of legislators wasn’t really a way to keep the two political parties — jockeying for power in Washington — from spending a lot of money to defeat the initiative.

“There is no doubt it will be easier to pass in the current form,” he said.

What will be interesting is what happens next. Will a true bipartisan campaign team develop? What will the political parties do? And what happens to the initiative’s fortunes if voter turnout for an historic presidential election is huge come November? Yes, Governor Schwarzenegger has lent his time and efforts to subsequent initiative campaigns since his 2005 debacle. But this is the issue that time and again he comes back to as the primal political wound in the body politic. And so as he worked the booths and tables of another Sacramento restaurant to again try and change redistricting… just across the street from where he did so in 2005… one had to wonder whether the outcome this time will be different.