Mark Steyn: The Gubernator?

The best scene in The Last Action Hero (1993) was a clip from Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. Arnold Schwarzenegger, edited into the 1948 monochrome and taking dear Larry's role as the eponymous ditherer, starts off the soliloquy, cuts it short and opens fire on the castle, all the while puffing on his stogie. As the unseen narrator puts it, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark - and Hamlet is takin' out the trash!"

A week ago, it looked as if the roles had been reversed. The conventional wisdom was that Ah-nuld wasn't man enough for California politics. Instead of saying "Hasta la vista, Gray Davis!" and blowing the punk out of the Governor's office, he was nancying around in doublet and hose whimpering, "To be or not to be, that is the question". He'd been scared off. His Kennedy wife didn't want him to run, and, besides, too many people had too much dirt on too many of the sexual perks your big-time Hollywood star avails himself of over the years. He was going to wiggle out, no doubt promising that "Ah'll be back, maybe next election, or the one after, if my wife will let me."

And so not for the first time the experts underestimated Schwarzenegger. On Wednesday's Tonight Show, he announced that he was in. Something is rotten in the State of California - and Arnie is takin' out the trash! Collyvurnja, here he comes!

Whether or not he'll win, nobody can say for certain: the rules of the recall election are as whimsical as a sudden-death gameshow round. The standard line is that it's a "circus", but pre-Arnie it was more of a freak show, filled by various unsatisfying midgets: the pornographer Larry Flynt; the diminutive ex-sitcom-player Gary Coleman; a bounty hunter from Sacramento; the extravagantly-endowed self-proclaimed "Love Goddess" Angelyne (she's a one-woman circus, if only in the sense that she has a big top); and the wannabe celebrity, obscure populist and rumoured fourth Gabor sister Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, best remembered in Britain (if at all) as Bernard Levin's ex-squeeze. But no matter how many little clowns pour out of the miniature car, it is the entry of the muscleman that has made this a circus worth seeing.

Whatever happens, he has played his opening hand at a crowded table brilliantly. Arnold has wanted to be Governor of California for two decades, but October 7 represents his best shot. For one thing, there's no primary election in a recall campaign. In a normal election, Arnie wouldn't stand a chance of getting his watered-down "moderate Republicanism" past the death-before-electability crowd who dominate GOP primaries in California. He's unsound on almost everything that matters to them. On the other hand, that supposedly puts him closer to the average voter. As the commentator Andrew Sullivan put it, "Yay! A pro-gay, pro-choice, hard-ass Republican!"

Yet you don't have to be anti-abortion or unenthusiastic about gay marriage to question the hardness of Arnold's ass. When candidates run as "fiscally conservative but socially liberal", the former invariably buckles under the attendant costs of the latter. Arnold is married to Maria Shriver - a niece of Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy, and a daughter of George McGovern's running mate - and, as in many mixed marriages, the Democrat seems to have the upper hand ideologically.

But even a RINO - Republican In Name Only - can drive Democrats crazy, and, in desperation to find an attack angle, Dem operatives are currently testing three themes:

Okay, Arnold's not a Nazi. He was born in the Austrian town of Thal, but not until 1947, and thus was technically unable to join the Nazi Party no matter how much he may have wanted to. But he certainly has family ties to the Nazis. His wife's grandfather, Joe Kennedy, was one of America's most prominent Nazi sympathisers.

Oh, wait. That's not the Nazi family ties the Dems had in mind? No, as Katie Couric put it on NBC's Today Show, "He's the son of a Nazi Party member. He said he was prejudiced, before overcoming those feelings by working with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, and the dean of the centre said an investigation of Schwarzenegger's late father, conducted at the actor's request, found no evidence of war crimes."

Sorry, folks, you'll have to do better than that. The more you bring up the "son of a Nazi" line, the more you remind voters of what Arnold is: an immigrant who escaped and transcended his past. You can't saddle a man who chose to be American with the baggage he left behind in the old country.

Yes, he's not a professional politician. And that's a disadvantage? The professional politicians are the ones who got California into this mess. This is a "throw the bum out" election, so the successful challenger will be the one who looks least like the bum. Gray Davis has been on the public payroll his entire adult life: he represents the full-time political class. Arnold represents the other California: entrepreneurial energy, wit and invention, the California that understands that if Hollywood and Silicon Valley were run by "qualified" people like Davis we'd still be watching flickering silents and you'd need union-approved quill-feathers to send e-mail.

Arnold made his first business investment at 19, using savings from his bodybuilding contests to buy a failed Munich gym. He turned it around. The first really big money he made in America in the early 1970s came when he and a fellow bodybuilder started a bricklaying business. He's one of a very few actors who was a millionaire before he ever acted. And, if you think it's no big deal being the world's highest-paid movie star, you try it - with a guttural German accent so thick you can barely do dialogue and a body frame so large you're too goofy for playing love scenes. From his gym to his mail-order company to his masonry business to his shopping malls, Schwarzenegger has shown a consistent knack for exploiting the fullest financial value from even his most modest successes. Who would you say best embodies the spirit of California? The guy who has made all his own money? Or the fellows who've squandered everybody else's?

Arnold has been married to Maria Shriver for 17 human years, which in celebrity years is the equivalent of a Diamond Jubilee. Any dirt Democrats dig up is going to have to be nuclear. When you've been a popular celebrity for 20 years, the only way you can be damaged is with something that's dramatically inconsistent with what the public thinks it knows about you. "Womanising" won't cut it, not for a movie star. If it's oral sex with a starlet in his trailer, the public will shrug. If it's beating up a pre-op transsexual hooker, you're in business. But in a two-month campaign anyone who wants to take him down is going to have to move fast.

Ever since he became a US citizen in 1983, Arnold has taken care, in his marriage and business interests, to remain politically viable. This is his window of opportunity: he's the man who seems most in tune with the moment. Is it likely that Californians have got themselves all whipped up with the Recall Fever just to install another rent-a-hack like Lieutenant-Governor Cruz Bustamante? Or will they figure, what the hell, let's go all the way and take a flyer on Arnie? Everything about this race - from the compressed schedule to the multiple candidates - favours him. "It's the most difficult decision I've made in my entire life, except the one I made in 1978 when I decided to get a bikini wax," he told NBC's Jay Leno, stealing Arianna Huffington's best line. Arnold waxes, everybody else wanes. Hasta la vista, Grayby.

Arnie wouldn't stand a chance of getting his watered-down "moderate Republicanism" past the death-before-electability crowd who dominate GOP primaries in California. He's unsound on almost everything that matters to them. On the other hand, that supposedly puts him closer to the average voter.
Yes, he's not a professional politician. And that's a disadvantage? The professional politicians are the ones who got California into this mess. This is a "throw the bum out" election, so the successful challenger will be the one who looks least like the bum.
Arnold represents the other California: entrepreneurial energy, wit and invention, the California that understands that if Hollywood and Silicon Valley were run by "qualified" people like Davis we'd still be watching flickering silents and you'd need union-approved quill-feathers to send e-mail.
Ever since he became a US citizen in 1983, Arnold has taken care, in his marriage and business interests, to remain politically viable. This is his window of opportunity: he's the man who seems most in tune with the moment.

Hehe, wonderful! It feels really good that someone like Mark Steyn agrees with me.

California Insider

A Weblog by Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

« "What happens if Gray resigns?" | | Meanwhile... »

August 09, 2003

A campaign like no other

The recall campaign now underway will really be several campaigns in one. They will each operate in their own spheres but will also overlap with each other at times. Following it all, and analyzing it, will be extremely tricky. If it’s a close race, I think the polls toward the end will be worthless. We have never been to this place before. The experts can’t rely on the past to predict the future, this time.

One of the campaigns will be about Gray Davis. Should he stay or should he go? Davis is the underdog in that race. A majority of the state’s voters think he is doing a bad job and the state is going down the wrong track. But that campaign won’t be conducted in isolation. As we consider his fate, we will be thinking about question two: if Davis goes, who should replace him? The governor had wanted this question to give people pause. But now, as the field shapes up, we know that there are plenty of candidates on the ballot who we could plausibly imagine serving as governor. This hurts Davis, because he risks being forgotten as we rush to examine the shiny new alternatives in the political shop window.

But the “race to replace” will be conducted on at least two different levels as well. One is within traditional political circles, the consultants, pundits, and analysts for whom politics is job one. This is the realm where most of the candidates – Garamendi, Simon, McClintock, Ueberroth – will be operating. But there will be another campaign, on television entertainment shows, on college campuses, in movie lines and elsewhere, in which one candidate – Arnold – will be trying to reach and motivate the 7.6 million California voters who are registered but did not vote in the last election. If Arnold can get just one out of seven of them, or 1 million people, to vote this time, for him, those new voters would probably provide the margin he would need to win.

Arnold has a huge advantage with these voters. He has universal name recognition and the ability to reach them with an attractive message: we need an outsider to “clean up the mess” in Sacramento. These are people who cared enough to register to vote but did not vote last time. Most of them probably feel disconnected from their government. Arnold gives them a chance to plug in. And they give him a chance to turn the tables on the traditional political process.

Wealthy candidates have not fared well in California. And Davis and the Democrats have tried to paint the recall as tainted by millionaires seeking to buy a public office. But Arnold isn’t going to sit back and take that punishment. He has gone on the offensive, using his wealth to his advantage. He has enough money, he has said several times, so that he doesn’t have to take campaign contributions from the interest groups buying influence in Sacramento. He will make decisions “for the people.” We can debate forever how he will know what “the people” want or need, and whether “special interest groups” aren’t simply collections of like-minded “people.” But Arnold’s got a powerful line and a brilliant strategy for minimizing the wealth issue or even making it work for him. Especially with those voters turned off by the connection between money and politics, who think that every politician is in the pocket of the big contributors.

The other thing about these voters is that, being casual observers of politics, they probably care less about the nitty-gritty policy details than do regular voters. This plays into Arnold’s other strength. He can appeal to them not with policy white papers but with calls for new leadership, shaking things up, bringing people together. He can run as the outsider. The Democrats already are telling us that Arnold has only voted occasionally. This can be a liability in a traditional campaign. It makes the candidate seem irresponsible. But watch for Arnold to turn this one around as well. I predict he will not apologize for his infrequent voting but try to use it to his advantage. “I have rarely voted because the candidates have all been terrible,” he will say. “They have all been the same. Professional politicians who didn’t connect with me, didn't speak to me.” Thus he becomes the voice of the occasional voter, their poster child. He gives them cover for their own lack of participation and a reason to change that now. It wasn't their fault they failed to vote. It was the politicians' fault. Now we can punish those pols for their sins.

Only one other candidate, Cruz Bustamante, has much chance of reaching new voters, of expanding the base. He would be the first Latino governor in modern times. California has about 2.5 million Latino voters. But exit polls suggest that only between one-fourth and one-third of them voted in the last election. If Cruz connects with them, is adopted by them, becomes their hope and aspiration, he could generate significant new turn-out and benefit from it. And his campaign for those votes will be largely unseen and, perhaps, undetected by the mainstream media, and by pollsters. Like Arnold’s attempt to reach disaffected voters, we may not know if Cruz’s campaign is working until Election Day.

Despite the record number of candidates, I would not be surprised if this became a two-man race. Arnold v. Cruz. The immigrant against the son of immigrants. Both of them are going to be doing everything they can to expand the number of people paying attention to politics and participating in it. Combine that with the more traditional, between-the-lines game to be played by most of the other candidates, plus the work of mavericks like commentator Arianna Huffington, and you have the chance for a huge voter turnout, perhaps greater than last year, perhaps greater than any recent election for governor.

And I thought the recall was supposed to be anti-democratic.
Posted by dweintraub at August 9, 2003 08:20 AM

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