Posted on 10/04/2003 11:07:08 PM PDT by calcowgirl
SAN FRANCISCO — In the latest "Terminator" movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a robot who returns from the future to save a grand old civilization from chaos. In Tuesday's California recall election Mr. Schwarzenegger stands a chance of transforming a grand old political party, not just in California but possibly on the national stage as well. That prospect exhilarates national Republican leaders, even as some acknowledge that it carries risks as well.
The election goes beyond the prospect of salvaging Republican pride in Ronald Reagan's backyard. For many Republicans, a Schwarzenegger victory also carries an even more tantalizing promise with it: "rebuckling" the Republican Sun Belt, so that a revitalized libertarian Western wing balances the party's currently dominant moralistic Southern wing.
A Schwarzenegger victory would be "a political earthquake that will redefine what it means to be a Republican," said Frank Luntz, a political consultant who has advised Republicans from Newt Gingrich to Rudolph Giuliani. "People who have written the party off for being too strident on social issues will have a reason to re-examine their opinion."
In this view, a Schwarzenegger victory would send a strong message that the Republican Party is a tent big enough to include a pro-abortion, pro-gay rights Hollywood superstar who has acknowledged manhandling women and smoking marijuana. As Vin Weber, a former member of Congress and occasional adviser to the Bush administration, puts it, "many people will think, `If the Republican Party is good enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger, it is good enough for me.' "'
But first, a majority of Californians have to vote to recall Gov. Gray Davis on Tuesday, and Mr. Schwarzenegger has to win the most votes among the candidates to replace Mr. Davis. It is unclear what last-minute effect new accusations of sexual misconduct — "behaving badly sometimes" toward women, was how the action star put it — would have on voters' views. But polls last week, taken before the encounters were detailed in The Los Angeles Times on Thursday, showed a majority still in favor of the recall and Mr. Schwarzenegger outpacing other candidates.
If Mr. Schwarzenegger wins, his populist insurgency will mark a twist in the strange tale of California Republicanism. In the 1960's California was the cradle of Western conservatism, which emphasized individual freedom and demonized government intervention. That was in stark contrast to the Republicanism of East Coast patricians like Nelson A. Rockefeller and post-ideological managers like Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Orange County was a breeding ground for right-wing groups. The John Birch Society was founded in Massachusetts but flourished most luxuriantly in Southern California. The Australian-born Dr. Fred Schwarz established a school of anti-Communism that attracted thousands of local students (many excused from regular classes by their school boards). Freedom Forum shops sold books with titles like "You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists)."
The new creed soon found its hero in Barry M. Goldwater, who may have hailed from Arizona, but whose message of individualism found fervent supporters in the sprawl of Los Angeles and Orange County. Though President Lyndon B. Johnson easily carried California in 1964, many of the state's suburbanites responded rapturously when Goldwater proclaimed that the country would be "better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea." The Reagan Revolution was born.
Although Ronald Reagan was a more complicated figure than Republican mythology holds, he persuaded the faithful he was the real thing: a Western conservative (and frequent speaker at Schwarz's anti-Communism school) who had no doubts that government and taxes were the enemy.
By the mid-1970's California Republicanism had blossomed into a broader movement. In 1978, it produced the anti-tax Proposition 13 — a fervent revolution against the political establishment. It had gained an intellectual edge, with Hoover Institution analysts swapping ideas with Thatcherites in London. Meanwhile, the party consolidated its grip, holding the governorship from 1982 to 1998, first with George Deukmejian and then Pete Wilson.
The state's Republicans began to lose their edge when they were caught up in the Dixification of their party. They adopted race and religion issues in a state where neither had played much of a role in politics. In 1994, Governor Wilson, facing a re-election battle, endorsed Proposition 187, which called for withdrawing benefits from illegal immigrants. He won, but alienated the state's fastest-growing minority. Mr. Reagan used to win close to half the Latino vote; in 1998, the Republican candidate for governor, Dan Lungren, drew only 17 percent.
Meanwhile, the Christian right strengthened its grip on the party. Mr. Reagan was an easygoing divorced actor who, as governor, signed the country's most liberal abortion law. (His subsequent alliance with the Christian right was the price he paid for the support of his party's Southern wing for his presidential run.) Both Governors Deukmejian and Wilson were pro-choice (as was Goldwater). Since then the party has nominated anti-abortion gubernatorial candidates.
The 2002 state Republican convention in Anaheim reflected the change. Elderly white faces packed the rostrum. The only sign of demographic diversity was a James Brown song, played when Bill Simon Jr. somewhat awkwardly entered the hall.
Today California is arguably the most Democratic state, with the party controlling both houses of the Legislature and every statewide office.
Even now that providence has delivered them the recall, some Republicans are uneasy about Mr. Schwarzenegger. Despite his party's pleas to step aside, Tom McClintock, a conservative state senator, remained in the race as of Friday, siphoning votes from Mr. Schwarzenegger.
As for the problems that await a Governor Schwarzenegger, these are so great that a Republican governor in another state privately worried, "This might be a better race for us to lose." If Mr. Schwarzenegger raises taxes to resolve a budget crisis, it will infuriate a right wing that already loathes his social views. But he can't cut services without alienating many ordinary voters.
Yet it would be foolish to underestimate the potential national implications of a Republican victory in a state with 54 electoral votes. In the 2002 governor's race, Karl Rove, George Bush's political adviser, urged Republicans to nominate Richard J. Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles, whose liberal social views were in line with suburban California's. The recall has provided Mr. Rove with a socially liberal candidate with infinitely more star power.
Next year's Republican National Convention in New York would surely give a hero's reception to the slayer of Gray Davis. And it would be a huge blow to the Democrats' morale, at a time when their fortunes seem on the upswing, forcing them to devote more resources to defending a state they would like to take for granted.
"If the Republicans drop their uptight social agenda," predicted Edward H. Crane, head of the Cato Institute, "they will flourish in California." No wonder Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican, is pushing a constitutional amendment to allow foreign-born citizens to run for president.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, who write for The Economist and who covered California for the magazine, are writing a book about American conservatism, to be published next year.
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This is a silly statement.
Yet the Dems refuse to support him because he has an (R) next to his name.
Conservatives, on the other hand, don't fully agree with his liberal stances, but are for him because he is a Republican.
Whatever.
Astute observation. I think his comment about "uptight social agenda" explains it.
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