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In late April, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to address some five thousand travel-industry representatives from around the world who had gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center for their annual trade show. But first they were to watch a short film, made especially for the occasion. It was a barrage of mixed Arnold images. There was Arnold, last August, announcing on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" that he was going to run for governor. There he was on the campaign trail. But there he was as the Terminator, in "Terminator 3"! There he was delivering his State of the State address. There he was, the Terminator, again! As the film ended, a strange roar came from the back of the vast, dark auditorium; then a spot-light revealed a Terminator-like figure, in head-to-foot black leather and dark glasses, astride an enormous orange Indian motorcycle. Revving its engine, he rode it down an aisle, through the audience, and up a ramp onto the stage. He dismounted and strode to the center of the stage, and the words echoed through the hall, in that familiar Austrian accent: "I told you. I'll be back."
Suddenly, another figure—Schwarzenegger!—emerged from the wings, and walked to a microphone. Wearing a beautifully tailored cream-colored suit, he was a study in tawny-brown accents, with his skin a caramel tan, his hair a burnished-copper tint, and his tie a chocolate shade. After a wild ovation, Schwarzenegger thanked his stuntman. And then he addressed the crowd. "I thank you very much for changing the Constitution of the United States of America, and I accept your nomination to run for President." He paused. "Oh, wrong delegation. Sorry, wrong speech."
A week later, Schwarzenegger made a trip to Israel, with an itinerary befitting an American President: he met with the Israeli Prime Minister, and with many members of the Knesset; then he stopped off in Jordan to see the King; and, finally, he visited U.S. troops in Germany. There, in a speech to hundreds of soldiers, he used the changing-the-Constitution line again. "It's smart—he is getting it out there," a friend of his remarked, adding that it would take several years, at least, to pass the necessary amendment. There is a clause in the Constitution which states that only natural-born citizens are eligible for the Presidency; last summer, Senator Orrin Hatch proposed an amendment that would make it possible for anyone who has been a citizen for twenty years to hold the office. Schwarzenegger became a citizen twenty years ago.
As outlandish as such an ambition would have seemed just a short time ago, it is a measure of Schwarzenegger's effectiveness and popularity in his early months as governor that—but for the Constitution—it now seems eminently plausible. With a shrewdness surprising in a political novice, the former bodybuilder quickly defined the terms of his success as governor: he would provide action, in place of the political stasis that had affected the state, and he would set specific goals, and meet them. Whether the goals he set were optimal from a policy standpoint, and whether the state would rebound from its severe fiscal crisis because of them, was far less clear than the fact that he had achieved them. That was blazingly clear, because Schwarzenegger has combined marketing savvy and elaborate Hollywood staging to bombard Californians with this message: he is their action governor, just as he was an action hero—and together they will do the impossible!
All the bravura notwithstanding, he has positioned himself as a moderate, a throwback kind of Republican. From his first days in office—he was sworn in on November 17th—he both preached and practiced bipartisanship. As a Republican governor with a Democratic-controlled legislature, he may have had little choice, but he has pursued the approach with such zest that he has won from Democratic legislators concessions that they never made to Gray Davis, his Democratic predecessor, who lost his office in a historic recall election, last October. When I interviewed Governor Schwarzenegger recently at the state capitol, in Sacramento, I asked him about his emphasis on bipartisanship. "I think that always in the history of this country people wanted to see action, people wanted to see things done, not to talk about it but to get it done," he said. The way to get things done, he continued, was to "bring people together. We should not care who is a Democrat and a Republican—both are good people, both are good parties. There is no evil party, or this is the bad party, the good party—and I never looked at it like that, you know?" He said that when he wanted to make bodybuilding more popular he had taken a similar approach. "It needed everybody. Women bodybuilding, male bodybuilding, the freaks, the good-looking guys, the power lifters, the weight lifters—everyone had to come together to make it grow. And so to me the key was, O.K., when I win, I will make an effort to bring everyone together, because then the people will see hope. And then—not only the people in California but the people of America."
As for bipartisanship, he said, "I'm most proud of that, because everyone said, 'That will never happen.' . . . The fun part about it is to do something when everyone says it can't be done. . . . This is exactly what my life always has been about. When someone says you can't do it—you can imagine, when I was in Austria, you know, if I said to my mother, 'I want to be a world champion in bodybuilding,' she would have smacked me! 'Are you crazy?' She would go nuts, you know? And I had bodybuilding pictures all over my bedroom wall, and she said, 'What's wrong with this guy? He has naked guys up there, and all the other guys have naked girls.' You know? So I thrive on that, when someone says, you know, that it can't be done."
Shortly after Schwarzenegger first won the Mr. Universe title, in 1967, at the age of twenty, Reg Park—a bodybuilding champion who had become an actor, and whom Schwarzenegger idolized—invited him to his home in Johannesburg. Park's son, Jon Jon, a Los Angeles fitness trainer who has been a friend of Schwarzenegger's for decades, recalled that, during the visit, "he showed my dad a list of what he wanted to achieve. He had already decided he wanted to have the best physique in the world. He wanted to emulate my dad in terms of getting into movies. Then he wanted to direct movies. Then he wanted to get into politics."
Schwarzenegger had known as a youth that he wanted to escape the confinement of Austria; he felt that he was destined for a greatness he could not achieve there. His mother, Aurelia, was a housewife; his father, Gustav, was the police chief in the village of Thal, but that important-sounding job was very modest. ("His father's office was like a barn," Arnold's friend Neal Nordlinger, who visited Thal with Arnold after they met, in the seventies, said. "Arnold grew up in very, very tough circumstances.") As a young boy, Arnold was weak and sickly; he had a handsome older brother, Meinhard, whom their father favored. But Arnold would often watch television or movies, and picture himself, very differently, on the screen—and then imagine others seeing him there. As he explained in an article in Rolling Stone, in 1976, "At that point, I didn't think about money. I thought about the fame, about just being the greatest. I was dreaming about being some dictator of a country or some savior like Jesus. Just to be recognized."
He cast around for a pursuit in which he could be the best; he tried soccer, but, as he later recalled, "I didn't like that too well, because there I didn't get the credit alone if I did something special. I just avoided team sports from then on." He fixed on bodybuilding, and, by the age of fifteen, he knew he'd found his calling. He quickly came to understand that a positive mental attitude was critical; it affected his rivals, and the judges. Some people, he thought, looked like winners, and others looked like losers, and he was determined never to show such vulnerability himself.
Schwarzenegger was brought to this country in 1968 by the bodybuilding impresario Joe Weider, and was soon marketing himself furiously; he established mail-order training courses, sold photo albums, T-shirts, and posing trunks, and held seminars. In the early seventies, he began using his competition winnings to invest in small apartment buildings in Venice, California, and eventually his real-estate holdings grew to include office buildings and shopping malls.
Ultimately, he attained his supremacy in bodybuilding through a combination of natural physical advantages, indomitable drive, an extraordinary talent for manipulation, and a willingness to do whatever it took to win. Franco Columbu, a former bodybuilding champion, who has long been Schwarzenegger's closest friend, arrived in this country from Europe about eight months after Schwarzenegger and was his roommate for several years in Santa Monica. Columbu recalled that in 1969 Schwarzenegger lost the Mr. Olympia competition to Sergio Oliva, a statuesque Cuban bodybuilder known as The Myth. The next year, Columbu continued, Schwarzenegger was determined to vanquish Oliva. Describing that competition, Columbu said, "This shows Arnold's cleverness. He and Sergio were competing, and the judges could not decide between the two of them. They were posing forever. Finally, Arnold turned to Sergio and said, 'Let's go.' Sergio turned around and, without saying goodbye to the audience, he left. Arnold took two steps, as though to follow him, but went only to the center, and then he turned to the judges, and he motioned to the audience like 'He left!' And he started posing, posing, posing—and that was it! He did it! Some people called it a trick. Sergio was so demoralized, he lost every time after that. Arnold won every time."
Still, it was like being king of a sideshow rather than the star attraction in the big tent. The documentary "Pumping Iron," released in 1977, introduced Schwarzenegger to a wider world, and helped make weight lifting a national pastime. Suddenly, Schwarzenegger was being photographed by Candice Bergen, having his portrait painted by Jamie Wyeth, and being fêted at Elaine's with a group that included Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev, and (most thrillingly to Schwarzenegger, who was a Kennedy fan) Jacqueline Onassis. His metamorphosis had begun in earnest. "Arnold was one of the most ingenuous, naïve people I've ever met—the greenhorn to end all greenhorns," said George Butler, the co-producer and co-director of "Pumping Iron," who had met Schwarzenegger in 1972. Over breakfast at the Pancake House in Santa Monica, he listened as Schwarzenegger told him about his master plan, and his recurrent dream that he was king of all the earth.
Not long after Schwarzenegger attained his newfound celebrity, in 1977, his press agent got him an invitation to the Robert F. Kennedy Tennis Tournament, in Forest Hills, New York. There, he met Maria Shriver, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Georgetown University, whose parents were Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Robert Sargent Shriver. Maria brought Arnold back to Hyannis Port for the rest of the weekend. This was the famous occasion when Arnold, upon being introduced to Eunice Shriver, said, "Your daughter has such a great ass!"
In January, 1981, Schwarzenegger started filming "Conan the Barbarian," his first high-grossing movie. " 'Conan' was tailor-made for Arnold," said Tom Pollock, a former head of Universal Studios, who first met him in 1976. "He was supposed to speak with an accent. And his position as Mr. Olympia fed into it, because the character in the Robert Howard books was the strongest man in the world. It was as if you had a guy who could fly to play Superman." One of the movie's memorable lines occurs when Conan says that he likes to "crush enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women."
When "The Terminator" was released, in 1984, it established Schwarzenegger as the archetype of the superhuman figure who does the impossible. Over the years, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to reinforce this image, which was marketed to young males, especially, worldwide. Many stars begrudge the demands made on them to promote their films, but Schwarzenegger, Pollock said, "was the most tireless promoter in the history of show business." Schwarzenegger took an intense interest in everything, from over-all strategy to the size of the type on a poster to the complex statistical data that come from "tracking," a system of phone polls conducted before a movie opens. He would appear anywhere, from the Jay Leno show to Moscow to the opening of a supermarket.
The overseer of much of this activity was Maria Shriver, whom Schwarzenegger married in 1986, after a nine-year courtship. Arnold took her to marketing meetings, saying that he respected her judgment and that she was a media expert. (A longtime TV reporter, she has been an NBC news correspondent since 1986.) Schwarzenegger reads very little, and it was difficult even to get him to read scripts—but Shriver read them. According to several people who have dealt with her in connection with Arnold's movie career, she was tough, often intimidating, with a harder edge than her husband. "She was always very concerned about Arnold's image," one person who has known her for years said. "She was always wanting to be sure he didn't look foolish, wanting him to be taken more seriously. She would read the scripts, and say, 'Arnold shouldn't be doing this.' She would see the trailer. She would want to know about distribution. She would get involved with the marketing people, demanding things from them, and they didn't like it. They were working for Arnold, not Maria, and here she was, ordering them around. It would be, 'Do you know x?' 'Why don't you?' 'Well, find it out!' "
For a number of years, Schwarzenegger was the highest-paid star in Hollywood. "He was always the one who broke the barrier, from ten million dollars, to twelve million, to fifteen million," Pollock, who made a number of Schwarzenegger movies at Universal Studios, said. By the late nineties, however, Schwarzenegger, in his early fifties, was too old for most action-hero roles, and he had made a number of comedy films that did poorly. "As he got older, it was rough—he wasn't getting offered a lot of movies," a Hollywood agent who knew him well told me. In 1997, Schwarzenegger fired Lou Pitt, an agent at International Creative Management, who had represented him since "Conan." More unsuccessful movies ("End of Days," "The 6th Day," "Collateral Damage") followed. But in 2003 Schwarzenegger made "Terminator 3"—for which he received about thirty million dollars. "He held out for that money for a couple of years," the Hollywood agent continued. "For that one movie, he could do it, because they wouldn't really want to try to do a 'Terminator' movie with someone else."
"Terminator 3" brought him back into the stratosphere of Hollywood salaries. Now he often claims that, because he decided it was time to "give something back," he walked away from his movie career when he was the highest-paid star in the world.
Long before Schwarzenegger set out on his political career, he had begun addressing those elements which might hamper it. In 1991, he bought the rights to a series of unpublished photographs of him with nude women which George Butler had taken for Playboy. He also bought the rights to "Pumping Iron"; he subsequently sold the film to Home Box Office, and it has been aired dozens of times. In addition, he bought the outtakes, which contained some provocative material. According to an old book proposal of Butler's that was quoted in the New York Times a few days before the election, Schwarzenegger mused in the outtakes about "the feeling like Kennedy had, you know, to speak to maybe fifty thousand people at one time and having them cheer, or like Hitler in the Nuremberg stadium. And have all those people scream at you and just being in total agreement with whatever you say." There had been persistent rumors that his father had been a Nazi, and also stories about Arnold's doing Nazi salutes, and marching around his apartment to Nazi music, during his bodybuilding days in the seventies.
If Schwarzenegger wanted to exercise a kind of preëmptive damage control, he found the perfect agent in Rabbi Marvin Hier. Flamboyant, savvy, and promotion-minded, Hier has built a substantial enterprise on the base of the Holocaust. Sponsored in part by the wealthy Belzberg family, Hier founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center (named for the famed Nazi hunter) in Los Angeles in 1977, and today it is one of the fastest-growing Jewish organizations in the world. In 1993, Hier opened the fifty-five-million-dollar Museum of Tolerance, adjacent to the center. Over the years, some members of other Jewish organizations have criticized him for his aggressive tactics, marketing blitzes, and lobbying for millions of dollars from state and federal governments, a practice that encourages a blurring of boundaries between church and state. Hier's critics have not impeded him. His latest project is a two-hundred-million-dollar Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, designed by Frank Gehry; the groundbreaking ceremony was held on May 2nd, and the keynote speaker was Schwarzenegger.
Hier told me that Schwarzenegger had called him in 1984, saying that he wanted to attend an upcoming fund-raising dinner. Since then, Schwarzenegger has attended dozens of events sponsored by the Wiesenthal Center; become the biggest donor of all Hollywood stars; raised millions of dollars from friends and associates on his movie projects; and spoken at fund-raisers around the country. Hier has been to numerous parties at the Schwarzenegger home, and the two have become good friends. But it was not until six years after they met, Hier said, that "a call came that I wasn't prepared for." Schwarzenegger asked Hier to investigate what his father had done during the war. Hier found that Gustav had indeed applied for membership in the Nazi Party, in 1938, but that he was not wanted for criminal prosecution after the war and therefore, Hier concluded, he was not a war criminal.
Schwarzenegger's political persona, like so much else about him, was a work in progress. Not long after arriving in this country, Franco Columbu recalled, he and Schwarzenegger had watched President Nixon on television and decided that Nixon, and the Republicans, represented the opposite of the Socialist mentality in Europe that they had fled. Schwarzenegger's own experience made him an intuitive believer in self-reliance, but on social issues Maria and her family eventually had a moderating influence on him. On abortion, Schwarzenegger is pro-choice. According to Columbu, "Arnold would say, 'If you have sex with a woman for fifteen minutes and then you leave, why should she have to go through pregnancy for nine months and have a child? It's ridiculous!' "
For Schwarzenegger, however, the Republican hero was not Nixon but Ronald Reagan. ("I idolized him," he said recently.) Schwarzenegger saw himself as a businessman above all, and he felt comfortable with fiscal conservatism and a free-market philosophy. The economist Milton Friedman's 1980 "Free to Choose" TV series so impressed Schwarzenegger that he sought Friedman out, and he introduced a segment of the new "Free to Choose" series that aired in 1990. Through Friedman, he met former Secretary of State George Shultz. Schwarzenegger had long admired the investor Warren Buffett, for his business achievements and also for his ability to talk about a complex subject in a way that made it come alive. They became friends. Referring to Buffett, Schwarzenegger told me, "And he always said, 'If you ever run for governor'—this is a Democrat, right, talking—he said, 'if you ever run for governor, I'll move to California, and I will campaign for you, and do the fund-raisers for you. I'll give up everything that I have.' " Schwarzenegger also began cultivating political relationships around the world. Paul Wachter, a close friend and financial adviser, recalled that when the two went abroad on business trips Schwarzenegger often had an appointment to see the leader of whatever country they were visiting.
Schwarzenegger stepped out onto the political stage for the first time in 1988, when he campaigned for George H. W. Bush in his Presidential race. After Bush took office, he appointed Schwarzenegger to head the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. "Bush senior was a kind of godfather," Wachter said. "He embraced Arnold and gave him a platform." Schwarzenegger, for his part, contributed a weight room to Camp David. As the council's ambassador, Schwarzenegger travelled to all fifty states, meeting with governors and visiting schools. When he saw the governor of California, Pete Wilson, he told him that he wanted to start a California Fitness Council. "Wilson said, 'Terrific, but the state has no money,' " Camden McEfee, who was a special assistant to Bob White, Wilson's chief of staff, recalled. "In quintessential Arnold fashion, he took every 'No' out of the equation." Schwarzenegger said that he would expect no state money but would raise the funds himself. After White left the governor's office, in 1997, he formed a political-consulting firm, California Strategies, which McEfee later joined. Schwarzenegger became a client.
In early 2001, Schwarzenegger was considering running for governor against the Democratic incumbent, Gray Davis, in the 2002 election, and White assigned a number of people to work with him. One consultant recalled that Maria Shriver pinpointed issues that she thought Arnold ought to be talking about. "Maria was directing what she wanted," the consultant said. "She is more articulate. Arnold is at his best when he's being humorous, at his worst when he has to explain a position in detail." Joseph Rodota was assigned to explain policy issues to Schwarzenegger. The first task for Rodota, whose specialty was opposition research, was to read virtually all the articles in which Schwarzenegger had been quoted, going back to his bodybuilding days. He said that he found a quite consistent political philosophy—"very much about personal freedom, economic freedom, the importance of education, a concern about people being left behind. He was not a wedge-issue kind of person."
From the standpoint of opposition research, however, an article in the March, 2001, issue of the magazine Premiere, entitled "Arnold the Barbarian," was more significant. Garry South, Gray Davis's political consultant, immediately distributed it to the media. Allegations in the article ranged from Schwarzenegger's groping women to having a sexual encounter with a willing woman. Many who have known Schwarzenegger told me that the general behavior portrayed in the article was familiar to them; while some women have undoubtedly been pleased by the star's attentions, others have been repelled—and Schwarzenegger has been impervious to the difference. Once, when Schwarzenegger was shooting a movie in Mexico, he went to the home of the Mexican artist Francisco Zuñiga, to look at some sculptures, according to someone who was at the Zuñiga house that day. At a lunch served by Zuñiga's wife, Schwarzenegger was seated next to the young girlfriend of Zuñiga's son; he began stroking her arm, this person recalled, and then he remarked, to his lunch companions, "You know, the thing I love about Mexican women is how furry their pussies are."
In the end, Schwarzenegger decided not to run for governor in 2002 but to campaign for a ballot initiative instead. The initiative process had been written into California's constitution in 1911 (as had the recall). A Progressive-era instrument designed to let "the people" check the excesses of a state government dominated by special interests like the Southern Pacific Railroad, it gave voters the right to pass laws by placing initiatives on the ballot and voting for them. A watershed moment in the history of the modern initiative occurred in 1978, with the passage of California's famous Proposition 13, which drastically cut property taxes and ushered in an era of badly diminished public services. Proposition 13 also introduced a period of explosive growth in the initiative process itself. Since then, the initiative has become almost the opposite of what its progenitors intended, with its populist ethic largely subverted. Indeed, the process of getting an initiative on the ballot has become so expensive that it is undertaken mainly by extremely wealthy individuals, powerful political figures, and well-funded political and economic entities—including those which were originally meant to be countered, like the Southern Pacific. Even worse, though, from a public-policy standpoint, the profusion of initiatives—often ill-conceived and fundamentally contradictory—has reduced governmental discretion and made it much harder for legislators to respond effectively to changing situations. It is a peculiarly vicious cycle: the more hamstrung legislators are, the more direct democracy (through initiatives) trumps representative democracy, and the more unworkable the system becomes.
For his ballot initiative, known as Proposition 49, Schwarzenegger chose the issue of after-school programs for students in elementary and junior high schools—a topic about which he was knowledgeable, both from his work with the fitness councils and with the Inner-City Games Foundation, an organization that he had created in 1995. He assembled a sophisticated campaign team, composed, in part, of the Wilson alumni. At the start, he sat down with important constituencies across the political spectrum—from anti-tax ideologues to the teachers' union—and he crafted the initiative so cleverly that he managed to please nearly all of them. He used Proposition 49 as a chance to get to know people in the state who could be useful in the future—teachers, mayors, sheriffs, police officers, district attorneys, school-board members, county supervisors, Sacramento politicians, labor-union members. He created a Web site, joinarnold.com, inviting those who logged on to read about him or watch a video of him or listen to him. The ten-million-dollar campaign (he contributed a million dollars himself) flooded the airwaves with commercials. As the vote approached, he went to town-hall meetings and rallies packed with fans. There was little opposition, but the League of Women Voters of California and a number of editorial pages did try to deflect his hard sell. "Proposition 49 is a bad approach to a good cause," Barbara Inatsugu, the president of the league, said. By mandating the allocation of funds to these programs, she argued, it would restrict government's ability to assign revenues where children needed them most. "In fact," Inatsugu said on National Public Radio, "it could hurt children more than it could help them."
Schwarzenegger waved away such concerns with a decisive sound bite: "This is the best, safest, soundest initiative ever written, and that's why it's going to succeed."
On November 5, 2002, when Republicans lost every statewide election in California, Schwarzenegger's initiative passed, with support from nearly fifty-seven per cent of the voters—many of them the women, the moderates, and the swing voters whom Republicans in the state have generally lost in the past decade. It was an auspicious début for Schwarzenegger. However, the prospects for the kids who were supposed to benefit from the after-school programs were not nearly as bright. "Prop 49 was a new type of animal," George Gorton, one of Schwarzenegger's political consultants and a member of the Wilson team, explained. "It's not funded through deficit spending, or from raising taxes. It says, When you have $1.5 billion worth of growth in the state's general fund, then the next monies"—about half a billion dollars a year—"go to this."
After the stock-market bubble burst in 2001, state revenues fell sharply. Rather than raise taxes or make severe spending cuts, the state resorted to deficit spending, borrowing, and accounting gimmicks. By 2003, California was in such dire fiscal straits, and politicians were so deadlocked over how to deal with the crisis, that the state was given the lowest credit rating of any in the country. Prop 49 was designed to be implemented in 2004; by then, if the state's economy had recovered sufficiently, the funding would be triggered. That, of course, has not occurred. Gorton now predicts that the initiative will probably not go into effect for at least five or six years. He seemed sanguine about that, though; he told me that if Schwarzenegger had used either deficit spending or a tax increase to fund his after-school programs—to make them a current reality, instead of a future hope—it would have hurt him in his campaign for governor.
In April, 2003, Schwarzenegger travelled to Washington to see President Bush's adviser Karl Rove. It was well known that Schwarzenegger was considering a run for governor in 2006; but Rove had been quietly promoting the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, for the job, suggesting to reporters, in remarks that could not be attributed to him, that Rice was giving it serious consideration. Now, as Rove and Schwarzenegger walked down a White House corridor, they bumped into Rice. "That's your competition for 2006," Rove said to Schwarzenegger, according to George (Duf) Sundheim, the chairman of the California Republican Party. Contending with Rice and her White House backing seemed a daunting proposition for Schwarzenegger; polling at the time showed that she had a huge advantage over him—sixty-six per cent to seventeen—according to Sundheim. But Schwarzenegger did not necessarily have to wait for 2006, and could even escape a Republican primary, where his moderate views on social issues would seriously impair his chances. Within weeks of Gray Davis's inauguration for a second term as governor, in January, 2003, the effort to recall him had got under way.
When Sundheim became head of the state Republican Party, shortly after Davis's inauguration, it didn't appear to be much of a position. "We were a million dollars in debt," he said, "and we had just lost every statewide election." Sundheim wanted to turn the Party's hard-right platform toward a more mainstream, inclusive party that could win—and he remembers the day when he decided that the recall might point the way. In June, in an attempt to reduce California's budget deficit of some thirty billion dollars, state officials raised the annual registration fee, or car tax, that California motorists pay on their vehicles. It was a massively unpopular decision. "I was at a Wal-Mart in San Bernardino," Sundheim said, "and people were lined up twenty-five deep, in hundred-degree heat, to give their signatures to recall the Governor. They were the people we had not been able to get—moms with carriages, Hispanics, African-Americans—they were all there. I said, Whoa! This is our chance to reach out!"
Sundheim believed that Schwarze-negger was the Republicans' best hope in the recall. But Schwarzenegger said that he was undecided. About a week before the filing deadline, in early August, George Gorton began telling journalists and others that Schwarzenegger was essentially out—a position that seemed all the more convincing given that Shriver was volubly resistant to her husband's entering politics. "I struggled a great deal with it," she told me, in a strong Boston accent that reminds one of her Kennedy lineage. "I felt I had a nice thing going—in terms of my job, in terms of his job. I wasn't looking for this gig, as they say." When she married him, she said, "I knew that people thought I'd lost my mind. But, for me, Arnold and I are incredible, as he said, soul mates." And, in marrying him, she said, "I did do something different—it's just that, as my friend says, God smacked me back! It's ironic, the way it turned out."
Richard Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles and a Republican, had concluded that he would run only if Schwarzenegger did not. The two are good friends; on the weekend before Schwarzenegger's announcement, Arnold, Maria, and their four children spent the afternoon at the Riordan home. Riordan, too, believed that Schwarzenegger was not running. Indeed, hours before Schwarzenegger's announcement, Riordan met with the Republican congressman David Dreier, and, over a long lunch at Gladstone's, in Malibu, the two drew up Riordan's campaign strategy. That evening, a friend saw Riordan at an event at Disney Hall and asked when he found out that Arnold was running. "When a reporter called me," Riordan replied.
Sundheim later insisted he was convinced all along that Schwarzenegger was "playing possum," hoping to catch Senator Dianne Feinstein and other state Democrats unaware. California Democrats were facing a dilemma. The California recall ballot has two parts: the first asks whether a voter wants to replace the incumbent, and the second asks whom, if that incumbent is removed, on a list of people would the voter want to replace him. Polling showed that if a credible Democratic candidate emerged the recall would pass, so eager was even the state's plurality of Democrats to throw Davis out. A popular, highly respected senator, Feinstein would be heavily favored to win (whether Schwarzenegger was running or not), and other California Democrats were urging her to run. But Feinstein was adamantly opposed to the recall process. Bill Carrick, a Democratic political consultant who has worked for Feinstein for many years, said, "She had had the experience of a recall attempt herself, when she was mayor of San Francisco, and the extreme left and the extreme right ganged up on her. She had this principled position—it's one thing if an elected official has committed a crime, but if you're recalling someone because you don't like that person's politics it's abusive. And she had been supporting Davis, telling him he had to fight—how could she just turn around and run? But she did consider it for a long time."
Feinstein and other Democrats were convinced that Riordan, not Schwarzenegger, was going to run. And they viewed Riordan as unimposing, particularly since he had performed poorly in the Republican primary for governor in 2000. Had the Democrats thought that Schwarzenegger was running, Carrick said, that would have dramatically altered their calculus, since he was perceived as a far more threatening candidate. Finally, early on August 6th, Feinstein declared that she was not running—hours before Schwarzenegger announced that he was. If Schwarzenegger was lying low in order to mislead her, Carrick said, "That was very shrewd of him. Because, if she had known that Arnold was running, she probably would have run." He added that polling showed that Feinstein would have "demolished" Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger's plan to announce his decision on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" bolstered the prevailing misconception. "Everybody thought no potential candidate in his right mind would announce on the Leno show, so if he's going on the show it must be to say no," Sundheim said. "But Arnold sees it differently. Arnold sees it as entertainment. He thinks, How do I get the person who isn't ordinarily engaged, who's just flipping channels, to pay attention to me?"
To Schwarzenegger's old friend Franco Columbu, the surprise decision was vintage Arnold. He had done much the same thing, for example, in 1980, when, five years after having retired from bodybuilding, he decided to compete for the Mr. Olympia title again, but misled virtually everyone about his intentions until the night before the contest (throwing his opponents into disarray). This time, though, no strategic coup could conceal the fact that he was a political neophyte, which became apparent in his faltering appearance on morning TV shows the following day. Shriver was particularly distressed by those performances, and blamed the advisers who had arranged them. She immediately assumed a strong role in the campaign. "She is very politically astute," said Carrick, who worked with her in Senator Edward Kennedy's bid for the Presidency, in 1980. Now, according to two advisers, at Shriver's instigation there was a reshuffling of staff, with the addition of Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who had managed Jeb Bush's gubernatorial campaign in Florida and Senator John McCain's bid for the Presidency. Landon Parvin, a White House speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, joined the team, too. And Schwarzenegger was sequestered, studying sixteen hours a day under the tutelage of the Wilson team and its visiting experts in an enterprise that a team member referred to as "Schwarzenegger University." Since he is disinclined to read, any briefing memos had to be concise; he prefers to receive information orally.
The campaign appeared to lose its already shaky footing when Warren Buffett, whom Schwarzenegger had asked to join it as an economic adviser, spoke his mind in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Buffett suggested that California's property taxes needed to be higher, though he stopped short of calling for the reversal of Proposition 13. Buffett made his point succinctly: his house in Omaha, Nebraska, is valued at about five hundred thousand dollars, and his annual tax bill is $14,401; one of his homes in Laguna Beach, California, is valued at four million dollars, and his annual tax bill is $2,264.
In the past twenty-six years, the loss of revenue resulting from the passage of Proposition 13 has had a devastating impact on California's public services—schools, universities, medical care—and its infrastructure, contributing to what the writer Peter Schrag calls the "Mississippification" of a state that was once the progressive model for the nation. The diminution of property tax has also meant that California is more heavily dependent for revenues on personal income taxes, which tend to be more volatile—when the stock-market bubble burst, its impact was that much greater. But, however damaging Proposition 13 has been, it has also become the symbol of the state's neo-populist fervor, and it is seen as untouchable. So Schwarzenegger convened a meeting of his financial advisory committee, the Economic Recovery Council, led by Buffett and George Shultz; and at a press conference, with a chastened Buffett at his side, he declared that if Buffett issued any more statements about Proposition 13 he would make him do five hundred sit-ups. Since then, Buffett has not uttered a word about Proposition 13. "Warren didn't have to be told—seeing the firestorm his remarks created—that it wasn't an idea whose time had come," said Robert Denham, a Los Angeles lawyer whom Buffett had brought in to help rescue the scandal-plagued Salomon investment bank, in 1991, and who became a Schwarzenegger financial adviser. "I was delighted, though, that Warren said it, because at least it reminded people that there's this giant gorilla in the closet that has to be dealt with sometime." He paused, and added, somewhat ruefully, "Don't know when and how."
Schwarzenegger insists that this episode actually worked to his advantage. "Because it showed leadership," he told me. "It was like, you know, here is the guy, one of the most powerful and richest guys in the world, that says 'A,' and the [candidate for] governor says 'B.' And not changing at all, one ounce, because he said that. I understand where he was coming from, but I believed that he was wrong."
The Schwarzenegger campaign was long on Hollywood theatrics and populist rhetoric, and short on substance. He swore that he would "terminate" special interests, used a broom to illustrate how he would "clean house" in Sacramento, and, as a crane dropped a giant weight onto an Oldsmobile Cutlass and crushed it, shouted, "Hasta la vista, car tax!" He largely avoided political reporters, but he made good use of right-wing talk radio, the entertainment press, and interviews on shows like "Oprah." Schwarzenegger skipped nearly all the candidate forums and debates, agreeing to participate in the single debate where questions were provided in advance. Even so, his performance there was only middling, but voters had such low expectations of his debate skills that they were impressed. (Schwarzenegger is fond of saying that it's fine with him that people have always underestimated him, because it only works to his advantage.)
In the last few days before the election, however, elements from his past threatened to derail him, when his quotes about Hitler, from George Butler's book proposal, surfaced in the Times. Members of the Schwarzenegger campaign were livid; Butler subsequently said that he had unearthed the transcripts of the "Pumping Iron" outtakes and found that Schwarzenegger had said he admired Hitler for his power but not for "what he did with it." Reporters asked Schwarzenegger to produce the outtakes or the transcripts, but—despite the fact that he had gone to great lengths to acquire them, and that he maintains a library containing virtually every article in which he has ever been quoted—he claimed that he did not know where they were. Rabbi Hier, who had come to Schwarzenegger's defense earlier in the campaign, when information emerged that his father had been a Storm Trooper, did so again.
Even more potentially damaging were stories in the Los Angeles Times which contained accounts from women who alleged that in the previous two decades, and as recently as 2000, Schwarzenegger had made unsolicited physical advances toward them, in many instances grabbing their breasts or putting his hand under their clothes; they described feeling humiliated, shaken, and infuriated by his actions. The first story, with accounts from six women, appeared on October 2nd, five days before the election. In subsequent stories, nine more women came forward with allegations. At first, the campaign issued a blanket denial; a key campaign aide, moreover, suggested to reporters that one of the women might have a criminal record. (She did not, and she has since filed a libel suit against the aide, the campaign, and the Governor.) Sundheim saw Schwarzenegger on the morning that the first L.A. Times story appeared, as he was preparing to address a rally. "I didn't know what he was going to say. I was behind the stage, and I saw him rehearsing, standing alone, off to the side, with note cards," Sundheim said. "He was practicing looking up and saying, 'I'm sorry.' " Schwarzenegger did apologize, in a convoluted way: "I know that the people of California can see through these trash politics. Yes. And let me tell you something—a lot of those, what you see in the stories is not true. But at the same time, I have to tell you, I always say wherever there is smoke, there is fire. . . . So I want to say to you, yes, I have behaved badly sometimes. . . . And, to those people that I have offended, I want to say to them that I am deeply sorry about that."
"I have what I call these canaries in the mine shaft—women who are swing voters," Sundheim said. He telephoned them just as the story broke. "They said, 'If Maria's at his side, he's got me; if she's not, he's lost.' " Sundheim had seen enough of Shriver to know that she could be a fighter if she was so inclined. "In the campaign headquarters, when Arnold entered, there was respect," he said, "but when Maria entered there was fear." Shriver has been explicit about how highly she values family loyalty. Someone who has known her for many years recalled that she was critical of Hillary Clinton for not defending her husband far more aggressively during the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio. Shriver accompanied Schwarzenegger as he swung through the state, sticking close to his side, patting his arm affectionately, kissing him for the cameras. She attacked the reports as "gutter journalism." In a harsh tone that conveyed just how little she thought of the women who had aired their grievances, she said, "You can believe someone who met him for five minutes thirty years ago, or you can believe me!"
Sacramento is a bucolic, unhurried kind of place, where hitching posts still stand in front of buildings in the historic district, and many inhabitants greet one another as they pass on the street. Previous governors have had to struggle for media attention here, but when Schwarzenegger took office the capital was inundated with press from around the world. The combination of the recall and Schwarzenegger's celebrity changed Californians' general attitude; suddenly, politics mattered. Schwarzenegger knew, however, that all this momentum would dissipate if he did not find a way to pacify the warring California legislature. Thanks in large part to a redistricting deal struck by Democrats and Republicans after the 2000 census—it created solidly Democratic and Republican districts, which tend in each party's primary election to reward the more extreme and punish the more centrist—the legislature has become a place where nothing is more rare than common ground. Term limits—among the strictest in the nation—have aggravated the situation, as there is barely time for members to grow to trust someone across the aisle. Moreover, term limits have diminished the legislature's institutional strength; a longtime Assembly Speaker like Willie Brown had many more carrots and sticks at his disposal than does the current Speaker, Fabian Núñez, who is thirty-seven years old and was elected to the Assembly only a year and a half ago. And although the legislature is controlled by Democrats, California is one of only a few states that have a two-thirds-vote rule for passing a budget, a spending bill, or a state tax increase; so a rump minority can block any action. Such minorities have done so frequently in the past several years, producing a great deal of gridlock, which has fuelled voter anger. Individual legislators may be popular with their constituents, but polls have shown that the legislature, as a body, was more disliked than Davis.
Schwarzenegger took the measure of those who were in positions of power—Democrats in particular—and sought to disarm them. In the capitol building, he had a large canvas tent set up on the inner patio that is encircled by his horseshoe-shaped office complex, and invited legislators there to smoke cigars. Formidable politicians have long used this kind of camaraderie to good effect, but Schwarzenegger has an added edge. "Arnold brings heretofore unknown star quality to an all-powerful but backwoods place," Carole Migden, the chairwoman of the state Board of Equalization and an assemblywoman until December of 2002, said. "On a very personal level, the legislators feel outmatched, a little overwhelmed. . . . I think we've gotten pixillated." A Wilson team member who has observed Schwarzenegger in action commented, "Grown men get so silly in his presence." He has dispensed a steady stream of personal tokens. The dapper Willie Brown, the man many California Republicans loved to hate, received a hat from his favorite San Francisco clothier with a note inside that read, in part, "Help me run the state." Assemblyman Herb J. Wesson, Jr., who recently stepped down as Speaker, received a needlepoint pillow, stitched with the words "Need a lift?" (Wesson is short, and he has had a running joke with Schwarzenegger about how tall the Governor, who claims to be six feet two, really is.)
At the same time that he was constantly invoking his celebrity, Schwarzenegger used self-deprecating humor (about his role in a dreadful movie like "Hercules in New York," or his never having received an Oscar) to show that he did not have an inflated sense of his own importance. And—despite the fact that he had his name inlaid in large gold letters above the door to the governor's office, something that no previous governor had done—he has made gestures to minimize any air of imperium. When he wants to see Senate Leader John Burton—the single most powerful Democrat, by virtue of his position, longevity, and commitment to a liberal agenda—Schwarzenegger often goes to his office, rather than summoning him. (These office visits are a strikingly effective tool. When I asked Jim Brulte, the Senate Republican minority leader, whether he thought Schwarzenegger was an imperial governor, he responded, "No. In one day—my birthday—this governor was in my office twice. More times than Davis and Wilson together, in thirteen years.") And, when Fabian Núñez was sworn in as Speaker, Schwarzenegger appeared in the chamber in the final moments of the ceremony—something that a governor from the opposing party traditionally does not do. Núñez, one of twelve children, had thirty-five family members at the event, and Schwarzenegger offered to pose for photographs with them. At a press conference about half an hour after the ceremony, Núñez said, "The Governor is probably still there, taking pictures."
While Schwarzenegger was enlivening Sacramento, he was also zeroing in on legislators' weaknesses. Many legislators felt unnerved by Davis's recall and its possible implications for them in the 2004 elections, when the entire Assembly and half of the Senate are standing for reëlection. Schwarzenegger has probed that tender point at every opportunity. "If I would have put all of them on the ballot, they all would have been recalled—that's the reality of it," he has claimed. Shortly after he became governor, he threatened "severe casualties" if lawmakers did not agree to put his measures on the ballot. Many Democrats would prefer tax increases for the state's wealthiest people, for drinkers, and for smokers, but Schwarzenegger has stated, publicly and privately, that he believes tax hikes would further cripple the state's economy. Instead, he has pursued a strategy of heavy borrowing, combined with severe budget cuts. He came up with a bond measure that would enable the state to borrow fifteen billion dollars, repaying it with interest over a nine-to-fourteen-year period; and he paired it with a spending-cap measure. But in order to place these two measures, Propositions 57 and 58, on the March 2nd ballot he needed a legislative vote. In early December, he began travelling to the districts of lawmakers facing tough reëlection fights, railing against them as "spending addicts," exhorting voters to call their legislators and demand that they vote for his plan. Then he changed course, and invited some legislators to accompany him on his visits to their districts. "Part of his strength is he always keeps people off balance," Joseph Rodota said. "The legislators don't know how to deal with him. They ignore him, they attack him, then they think they should work with him."
The Democratic assemblywoman Christine Kehoe, whose district, in San Diego, is being targeted by Republicans this November, recalled travelling on his private plane to her district. "We were talking about all kinds of things. He said most wives don't like their husbands smoking cigars, but Maria can't object because it was Sargent Shriver who introduced him to cigars. He had just started dating Maria, he was at the Shrivers' home, and after dinner Sargent offered him a cigar. He said, 'No, I don't smoke.' And Sargent said something like 'Aren't you man enough?' After that, he said, he smoked every night." But then the subject of his proposed budget cuts came up. "And when I said something simple about how the cuts will fall most harshly on those who can least afford them, he turned to George Plescia, a Republican assemblyman, and said, 'They've been overspending for years and now they don't want to face the penalty.' It was much more strident, as though his business sense was so offended by the fact that we could have let spending go as far as we did, even if cutting back falls on the elderly, children, the poor." Still, Schwarzenegger changed his mind on a proposed cut that had triggered a statewide protest—about two hundred and seventy-four million dollars, from services to the developmentally disabled—after receiving a call from Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics.
Schwarzenegger won the legislative vote to put his measures on the ballot, but only after he compromised significantly with Democrats, replacing the spending cap that Republicans wanted with a much less restrictive balanced-budget amendment that would limit, though not prohibit, future borrowing. (When negotiations were at an impasse, Maria Shriver gave a speech in Sacramento to a women's group in which she scolded the legislators. "I say that if some of these legislators were children, we'd give them a time-out," she said. "We would teach them that with every person you can find common ground, that you should play nicely with them.") Schwarzenegger's deal-making skills and flexibility were impressive. But it was not a new solution to the state's budget crisis—hardly worthy of the "change agent" that his campaign billed him as. Gray Davis, too, had tried to cope with the deficit, through a measure to issue eleven billion dollars in bonds (the measure had been delayed by a court challenge). "Schwarzenegger jacked the eleven billion dollars in bonds up to fifteen billion dollars, but it's quite similar," Kehoe said. "And the balanced-budget amendment is a gesture toward spending restraint—it gives him cover in stumping for the largest deficit bond in the history of the state."
Schwarzenegger's own party has in some ways been more problematic for him. Many conservative Republicans are profoundly ambivalent; after having endured the electoral pounding of the past decade in California, they are almost giddy at having retaken the governorship, and with such a popular, powerful figure, but they are suspicious of his emphasis upon bipartisanship. He has many of the Wilson team working for him, including his chief of staff, Pat Clarey, who was Wilson's deputy chief of staff, and he has a number of staffers who formerly worked for Jim Brulte, a very conservative Republican (famous for having shown Republican members samples of ads that would be run in a Republican primary against anyone who voted for a tax increase). But he has appointed many Democrats and independents to key state jobs. His senior adviser is Bonnie Reiss, a liberal Democrat and environmental activist and a close friend of Shriver's. And Shriver spends one day a week in Sacramento.
Schwarzenegger enjoys making decisions by sitting at the head of a table and listening while the opposing sides fight it out. Still, it is an unconventional setup, and stirs Republican fears that he may be a Kennedy in disguise. "I don't blame them," Schwarzenegger told me. "I mean, you know, it's natural that they would think that, that it worries them, and they say, 'Oh, my God, that maybe has an influence on him.' " Referring to the Shriver and Kennedy families, he added, "I've been around now with them for twenty-seven years, almost, and hopefully learned some great things from them. But I'm still a Republican, so nothing has changed."
For her part, Shriver said, "I don't worry that some people are a little ruffled." She went on, "I don't care if you're a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican, my job, the way I see it, is to watch out for Arnold. And that means sometimes liberal Democrats are mad, sometimes conservative Republicans are mad. I'm very aware that people go, 'Omigod, she's talking to him.' Well, too bad!
"The bottom line is, I speak to Arnold about everything," she continued. "It seems to me people should be worried if I didn't talk to my husband. Talk about old-fashioned!"
At the California Democratic Party convention, in mid-January, members agonized about how to handle the popular Governor, and left the decision about the Party's stance on the ballot measures to the party chairman, Art Torres. He and the party leaders eventually decided that they would support Propositions 57 and 58, and Senator Feinstein—whom Schwarzenegger had been courting relentlessly, and who gave her support reluctantly, after long deliberation—agreed to do TV commercials with him and to hold a joint press conference. ("I love your passion for Propositions 57/58!" Schwarzenegger said to a flustered-looking Feinstein.) But at the opening of the Republican Party convention, in Burlingame, on February 20th, little more than a week before the March 2nd vote, it was still not certain that delegates would vote to endorse the measures.
Schwarzenegger, of course, won world championships by outmaneuvering his opponents. After he was introduced by Sundheim at the convention on Friday evening, he told the crowd of about seven hundred Republicans that he had just sent a letter to the state's Attorney General, directing him to take legal steps to stop San Francisco from issuing wedding licenses to same-sex couples. It's questionable whether Schwarzenegger even had the authority to direct the Attorney General, an elected statewide officer, to do his bidding, but that did not matter here. Conventioneers sprang to their feet, clapping and cheering. He said he would deliver California to George W. Bush in November. Raucous cheers. He promised workers'-compensation reform. "As I said in my State of the State address, the time is over to just move boxes around—I want to blow them up!" Huge ovation. But when he called for the passage of Propositions 57 and 58 the room was suddenly subdued, except for the ruckus in a back corner, where Schwarzenegger's appointed cheerleaders screamed and jumped up and down. And when he said, "We will find common ground with the Democrats," and, also, "We will be the party of all Californians," applause was tepid, many people looked dour, and some shook their heads.
Still, the gay-marriage announcement had been a tonic for this assemblage. In the next thirty-six hours, Sundheim and his forces worked hard to round up support for 57/58 from every Republican delegate. There was considerable resistance from the more ideological delegates, who wanted sharp spending cuts instead. But on Sunday morning, shortly before the vote, Schwarzenegger appeared on "Meet the Press," and threw a little more oil on the fire. He said that it was important to take immediate action against gay marriage because the situation was in danger of spinning out of control: "All of a sudden, we see riots, we see protests, we see people clashing. The next thing we know, there is injured or there is dead people. We don't want to get to that extent." The San Francisco Chronicle published an editorial, entitled "calm down, governor," chiding him for comments that were "reckless," "out of touch with reality," and "even dangerous." But in Burlingame the vote passed.
Those Republicans who were thrilled by Schwarzenegger's hard-line position—and on a social issue—may have felt somewhat betrayed a week later. In the final days before the March 2nd vote, Democratic support, particularly in the liberal stronghold of Northern California, was soft. Schwarzenegger went on the Jay Leno show, and when Leno, who is his friend, asked, "This gay-marriage thing—what's your position on this?," Schwarzenegger fixed him with a withering look. But then, seeming to recover, he said that if the people wanted to change the law "it's fine with me." Leno also introduced a "surprise guest"—Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger seemed taken aback at the sight of Davis, but the two talked amiably. It was, of course, all staged. It had been recommended to the Schwarzenegger campaign staff that this joint appearance would give "permission" to many Democrats, still rankling from the recall, to vote for Schwarzenegger's measures. And it was Schwarzenegger who had called Davis, on the day of the show, and—without mentioning that there was a softening in Democratic support for 57/58—invited him to appear.
As useful a platform as the Leno show is for Schwarzenegger, nothing allows him to display his star power the way his campaign events do. On the weekend before the vote, he set out on a bus tour, the "Road to Recovery Express." The kickoff rally was at a soundstage at Universal Studios. Like all Schwarzenegger events, this one seemed like a Hollywood production, a neat blending of show business and politics. Once again, as in his campaign for Proposition 49, Schwarzenegger had assembled a diverse coalition, from labor unions to the California Chamber of Commerce, from the United Farm Workers to the California Farm Bureau Federation. There was a sea of "Join Arnold, 57/yes/58" placards and banners; a red bus featured the Arnold countenance, slightly smiling, his eyes gazing upward; representatives from supporting groups, lined up across the stage, were wearing color-coded T-shirts (dark blue for taxpayer advocates, yellow for teachers, red for firefighters, green for environmentalists); and a cordoned-off press section included reporters from local, national, and international media. Dan Schnur, a political consultant who had worked for Pete Wilson when he was governor, commented, "The only time when I was with Wilson that we had that many cameras was during the L.A. riots." And the actor Rob Lowe, who introduced Schwarzenegger, suggested that the man who had been "the biggest movie star in the world" had now assumed his best role yet. "It turns out that he's not the superhero of the movies," Lowe declared. "He's a real man, and he belongs to us!"
Enter Arnold, to wild clapping, cheers, and the sounds of U2's "Beautiful Day." (During his campaign, the theme song was Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It.") "Ar-nold, Ar-nold, Ar-nold, Ar-nold!" the crowd chanted. He did not so much walk as spring onto the stage, as though buoyed almost off the ground by the adulation. Aglow in the sunlight, bronzed as always, his hair styled to perfection, he was wearing a black cotton bomber-style jacket, which he had designed for this campaign, just as during his Hollywood career he had designed a jacket for each movie production. "It's wonderful to be back here at Universal Studios," Schwarzenegger began. "This studio brought me a lot of luck. 'Conan the Barbarian'! Remember that movie? And I campaigned for Proposition 49 here." He thanked Lowe ("He's such a sexy guy!") and Steve Westly, the state controller, whom he had tapped to be the campaign's Democratic co-chairman, and whom he referred to now, grinning, as "my twin brother." (Westly is short and slight.)
A month earlier, polls had found that voters were resistant to the idea of the state's borrowing its way out of its fiscal predicament; only a little over a third of voters favored Proposition 57. Schwarzenegger thought that he had found a way to overcome that resistance. He would say that the measure was merely a consolidation of old debt, and involved no new borrowing—despite the plain language of the state's voters' guide, which declared that the bulk of the fifteen billion dollars would replace bonds that had been approved by the legislature last year but were now under court challenge, and that four billion dollars would provide the state with "additional one-time funds to address its budget shortfall." In other words, what Schwarzenegger was proposing was new borrowing—and, moreover, new borrowing to cover the loss in revenue incurred by the state when Schwarzenegger, immediately after taking the oath of office, repealed the car-tax increase that had been instituted under Governor Davis. Schwarzenegger, however, is committed to the notion that perception is reality. He had made "no new debt" the centerpiece of his campaign for the propositions. And, even when the polls were negative, he had insisted to his advisers, again and again, that "failure is not an option. Tell me what we need to do to succeed, and I'll do it." One of them said, "He's got this attitude—you create the aura, and it happens."
Now he told the crowd, "They said it cannot be done, people will be afraid of borrowing. But I educated people. It's not new borrowing! I inherited twenty-two million dollars in debt. I am doing what any financial counsellor would tell you to do. Consolidate the debt! Tear up your credit cards and throw them away!" (This was a reference to the balanced-budget amendment, Proposition 58—which, in reality, still allows some borrowing in the case of a budget shortfall.)
"This is a massive weight, alone I cannot lift it," Schwarzenegger said, repeating the line that had become his mantra. "All the people must work together. Democrats and Republicans can fix the problems, they together voted to put this on the ballot. Now you see Democrats and Republicans, together campaigning. My wife yesterday went to the Bay Area, campaigning with John Burton, the great senator. I just came from a union rally in Costa Mesa. Everyone knows we must pass this to get out of the hole." And he gave the closing lines he never tires of: "We will make it again the golden state it once was, the golden dream by the sea!" With that, he began throwing out T-shirts, as the crowd erupted in cheers. He moved across the front of the stage, leaning over to shake hands, reaching further and further into the crowd, giving thumbs-up signs to those he could not reach, until, finally, he made his way to the door of the bus, where he posed for a few moments, alone. Then he embraced other elected officials and had photographs taken with them, while some in the crowd screamed, "We love you, Arnold!"
Propositions 57 and 58 passed overwhelmingly, further aggrandizing Schwarzenegger's power and control. He turned instantly to another campaign promise, workers'-compensation reform. Workers' comp is a hot-button issue in the California business community; although workers' benefits are only average, California's premiums are the highest in the country. There was a broad consensus on the need to fix the system, but not on the remedy. Schwarzenegger's staff assembled a bill that was a compilation of reforms long sought by the California Chamber of Commerce, which would lower costs by reducing treatment options and coverage for injured workers. Now, emboldened by his fresh ballot victory, Schwarzenegger threatened legislators that if they did not give him a deal he would place the contents of his proposed bill as an initiative on the November ballot, and "the people" would vote for that, too.
"We knew we would have been really harming workers if we let the initiative go to the ballot, so instead, with one arm twisted behind our back, we engaged in a kind of negotiation with the Governor, and extracted one or two concessions," State Senator Sheila Kuehl said. She and many of her Democratic colleagues wanted some kind of rate regulation in the bill so that the savings that insurance companies achieved would be passed along to employers, in the form of reduced premiums. Last year, under Governor Davis, the legislature made several cuts in benefits for injured workers, with an estimated savings of five and a half billion dollars each year; insurance companies did not agree with that assessment of savings, and passed relatively little on to employers. But rate regulation was anathema to the Chamber of Commerce, the insurance industry, and Republican legislators. Schwarzenegger had angered many Republicans with his compromise on the spending cap, last December; now he would not yield to the Democrats. In the negotiation process, Schwarzenegger employed his familiar tactic of keeping legislators off balance. "He'd be meeting with us, saying, 'I want to work with you,' " Kuehl said. "And then he'd go from those meetings out to Costco, where he was gathering signatures for the initiative, and he'd say, 'The legislators are the problem! Sign here!' "
Unlike most of her colleagues, Kuehl, a former television actress ("The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"), is familiar with celebrity. She witnessed at first hand the way in which many people believe that something is good because a celebrity tells them it is. In his combined role of celebrity and governor, she said, "Schwarzenegger has that power in spades. And I was incredibly offended that he was touting this workers'-comp initiative at Costco, to workers who were rushing up to sign the petition because he asked them to. They had no idea what it entailed. He would say, 'This is good! This will create jobs!' When he should have said, 'This is bad! This will cut your treatment when you are injured!' It is a misuse of celebrity."
At one point, when the deal seemed to be in danger of falling apart, Schwarzenegger—on vacation in Hawaii—mentioned to a Los Angeles Times reporter that he thought a part-time legislature might be a good idea for California. The last day for filing signatures to qualify the worker's-comp initiative for the ballot was Friday, April 16th, and Schwarzenegger made that the legislators' deadline. The legislative conference committee received the bill after 3 a.m. Thursday, April 15th, and minutes later approved the seventy-seven-page measure. Even Keith Richman, a Republican assemblyman and a staunch Schwarzenegger ally, complained that, while Schwarzenegger had promised during his campaign to end closed-door dealing in Sacramento, this extraordinarily complex piece of legislation had been achieved just that way, with no opportunity for public participation. And, while workers' benefits were reduced, it was not clear how much employers would save, inasmuch as there was no regulation to guarantee that insurers' savings would be passed along to employers. (Indeed, several weeks after the bill passed, some insurers stated that they could not commit to lowering premiums anytime soon. Stanley Zax, the C.E.O. of Zenith National Insurance and a major contributor to Schwarzenegger, eventually cut the rate by ten per cent, although the insurance commissioner recommended a reduction of twenty per cent.) The bill itself contained no estimate of savings. Experts agreed that whether or not this bill was any more successful than a measure passed last year, and many previous overhauls, would depend on its implementation. But Schwarzenegger declared unequivocal victory. He signed the bill at a Boeing plant in Long Beach, standing on a podium in front of a yellow U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane and a blue backdrop that read, "Promise made. Promise kept." As usual, the scene had been staged with care—lit to perfection, the plane angled just so, the much-deliberated choice of music ("Takin' Care of Business"), the path of the Governor's entry. "It will produce billions and billions of dollars in savings," Schwarzenegger claimed. "At the same time, it will protect the workers. And we are going to say, 'Hasta la vista, baby!' to all the people who committed the fraud and the abuse of the system. . . . With this great reform, I can say to everyone, 'California is open for business!' "
It was a terrific pitch, performed with the kind of delivery that makes people believe. It was also, once again, so oversimplified as to be misleading. But Schwarzenegger knows he can take license with the truth, and particularly in complex subjects like fiscal measures and workers'-compensation reform, where no critique will resonate with the public in the face of the power of his performance. Indeed, the popular perception of his success is now so strong that he seems almost invulnerable. It will not become clear for some time whether his measures have helped or harmed the state, but, like Proposition 49, what they have done for him is indisputable.
By using all the weapons at his disposal against Democratic legislators who might have opposed him on workers'-comp reform—the threat of the initiative, of a part-time legislature, of punishment in the coming elections—Schwarzenegger essentially won their surrender. ("It's a privilege to be one of the field commanders in Arnold's army," Senator Brulte, at the Boeing signing ceremony, declared.) In the weeks before the current negotiations on the state budget commenced, Schwarzenegger found a way to humble the legislators further. In order to remove especially contentious cuts from the table, he made side deals with local governments and public universities, traditional allies of the Democratic legislators. These stakeholders agreed to accept billions of dollars in budget cuts now, in return for Schwarzenegger's promise that they will be treated well in the coming years.
His deal with public-university administrators was particularly controversial. The state's Master Plan for Higher Education, adopted in 1960, established a system in which every qualified Californian could attend college—in the University of California, California State University, or community-college system. California's higher-education system, embodying both access and excellence, became the envy of the nation. For decades, the University of California prided itself on the high percentage of Nobel laureates on its faculty. (U.C. Berkeley has seven reserved parking spaces marked "NL.") But in the nineties, facing severe budget constraints, it offered early retirement to thousands of professors, including the very stars who had been aggressively recruited. California's most recent fiscal crisis had severe repercussions on higher education; since 2001, the U.C. system, for example, has had its budgets cut by five hundred million dollars, raised fees by five hundred million, and offered salaries ten per cent lower than those at other universities. Now—in the deal struck with Schwarzenegger—the U.C. and C.S.U. systems agreed to cut freshman enrollment by ten per cent and to increase fees: fourteen per cent for undergraduates and twenty per cent for graduate students. The enrollment cut means that some qualified California students, who have earned the academic records that were supposed to grant them admission to U.C. or C.S.U., will instead be told to go to community colleges for two years, before transferring to a university. Senator Kuehl said, "We've been trying to convince the Governor to restore some of the money for the U.C. and the C.S.U. systems, by coming up with proposed cuts in other places. But because U.C. and C.S.U. are so frightened of him they have said to him, 'Let me help you cut me!' So it destroys our ability to do the least bit to save their systems. I think Schwarzenegger will go down in history as the man who eviscerated higher education in California.
"He is trying to marginalize the legislature," Kuehl continued. "The problem in going around the legislature is that it is a deliberative body; we have rules, committee structures, and, most important, public hearings. We argue with each other. The Governor gets up in the morning, has breakfast with himself, and decides what the policy will be. It's faster, yes, but it's not transparent; there is no public input; and it often does not benefit constituencies, Republican or Democrat." The nonpartisan and highly regarded Legislative Analyst's Office seemed to agree. Pointing out that the Governor's compact made future funding commitments that are not presently required and may not even reflect future needs, the L.A.O. recommended that the legislature not endorse the deal. It said, "We believe the legislature should make decisions about funding for higher education during annual budget deliberations, where legislative priorities for all sectors of state government can be addressed and performance evaluated."
Of all the Sacramento legislators, the one who would have seemed most likely to have the inclination and the power to blunt the Schwarzenegger blitzkrieg is the Democratic Senate Leader, John Burton. An old-fashioned San Francisco liberal and a recovered cocaine addict, famous for his profanity, Burton, who was in Congress for eight years and has been in the California legislature for twenty-six, is proud of his status as the arch-defender of the powerless. "No one in this capitol building is left of me," he told me. He was deeply offended by what he saw as Governor Davis's lack of core Democratic values, and he sabotaged him at crucial moments. Many of Burton's colleagues expected him to do everything he could to subvert the new Republican governor, who had come to power in such an anomalous and, some thought, illegitimate manner. Instead, Burton was soon coöperating with Schwarzenegger, in a way he never had with Davis, and it was the state treasurer, Phil Angelides, who became known as the "anti-Schwarzenegger," for his constant critiques. Angelides, however, wants to run for governor in 2006, so his attacks are viewed as opportunistic; and also—unlike Burton—he is not in a position to block Schwarzenegger. When I interviewed Burton recently, he launched into a comparison of Schwarzenegger and Davis. "Arnold gets more into stuff than Gray did," Burton said. "He's willing to engage, to get his hands dirty, to look at all sides of the issue. He's more proactive than Gray was. And his personality is closer to mine than Gray's was.
"I spent about six months in Austria, in the military, in 1954," Burton went on. "Arnold and I were bullshitting about that the other day. I said, 'I am not working late unless we get schnitzel.' So we got it to go and Arnold had to say it was good." He paused, and added, "How bad of a Republican can you be if you're married to a Kennedy?"
Another Sacramento official commented that Burton, like so many of his colleagues, had been targeted by the Schwarzenegger "charm offensive." "Burton is powerful, supposed to be a curmudgeon, tough," the official said. "So what did Arnold do? He brought Eunice"—Eunice Kennedy Shriver—"in, they went to lunch, and Eunice and John were reminiscing about the old days in California, about Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez."
One way or another, in these early months of the Schwarzenegger governorship, opponents and obstacles seem to have folded before him. He promised just before his election that an investigation would be conducted into the charges of sexual harassment and groping that women had made; once he was governor, he scrapped it—and the mild criticism in the press quickly evaporated. After the initial stories and his election, many women are said to have approached the Los Angeles Times with further allegations, and the newspaper has had a team of reporters working for months on the subject. In the published stories, some women said that they had not filed complaints about him in the past because they were afraid that he would blacklist them in the entertainment industry; now attacking a powerful governor might seem threatening, too. "You don't want to get on the wrong side of Arnold—he will do anything, within the bounds of what is moral," Jon Jon Park said. "But if you're his friend he'll go to the _n_th degree, and be loyal."
Gray Davis was lambasted for his aggressive fund-raising and for taking contributions from those who had business with the state. In Schwarzenegger's campaign, he railed against special interests, and swore that he would engage in no fund-raising from the time he proposed his budget (he did so in early January) until it was passed. In the event, however, he has set a fund-raising record, easily surpassing Davis. On a single day in February, when he was in New York campaigning for Propositions 57 and 58, he raised $1.8 million—some from the very Wall Street investment bankers who would likely profit from the issuance of the bonds. "Voters cut him slack they don't cut the rest of us," Willie Brown said. "If Gray Davis had done that, he would have been drawn and quartered." Schwarzenegger also continued to raise funds from insurance companies in the weeks leading up to the negotiations on workers'-comp reform.
In March, Schwarzenegger signed on to be the executive editor of a pair of magazines, Muscle & Fitness and Flex, which in 2002 had been sold by Joe Weider to American Media, the owner of the supermarket tabloids the National Enquirer and the Star. It seemed an altogether odd thing for a governor to do. The tabloids had long shown an avid interest in Schwarzenegger; just three years ago, the Enquirer ran a story about Schwarzenegger's alleged seven-year affair with an actress. During the campaign, however, the tabloids were virtually free of negative stories about him. And Weider told the News last August that the owner of American Media, David Pecker, had assured him that the tabloids would "lay off" Schwarzenegger. Pecker denied having said this.
As provocative as Schwarzenegger's moves have been, none have tarnished his image. Californians have been enchanted by his energy and enthusiasm. Associates point out that he is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Indeed, his "vision," one might argue, is Arnold as leader. It is as though everything else had been a mere prologue. "This is his most natural career yet," his friend Paul Wachter said. "He loves being a leader." (As Schwarzennegger said years ago, in outtakes from "Pumping Iron" that have been obtained by "Inside Edition," "There is a certain amount of people meant to be leaders, and to control, and another, large amount, ninety-five per cent, are followers.") But Republicans who envision Schwarzenegger leading a statewide Republican sweep in 2006 may well be disappointed. "He isn't focussed on doing anything for the Republican Party," George Gorton, his consultant, said. "He could care less about Republicans at these state Party conventions in their funny hats. He is not a partisan politician."
Schwarzenegger has been quietly underscoring his independence. Despite his assertion at the Republican convention about delivering California to Bush in the coming election, he has made it plain that his efforts are contingent on Bush's willingness to show generosity to California. Schwarzenegger would like to see as much as a billion dollars from Washington for costs related to illegal immigration; no further cuts to military bases in California; and a federal buyback of leases held by oil companies, which would prevent further offshore drilling, among other things. When the President came to Bakersfield for a campaign event in March, Schwarzenegger was absent. He told me that he is supporting the President, but he went on to say, "My responsibility, and the reason why people voted for me, was to fix the state, not to campaign for Bush or anything like that." Besides, he claimed, his success will help Bush. "If I can fix the state well, as well as I can, people are going to look at it and say, 'A Republican governor, you see? This is terrific.' . . . So I think that the Party—without me ever saying Republicans—it will have a positive effect, the very fact, if I do well." Meanwhile, Shriver attended a John Kerry fund-raising lunch with Teresa Heinz Kerry in February in Bel Air, and Schwarzenegger is said to have invited Kerry to California to go motorcycling with him.
Recently, with an intimate circle of friends, Schwarzenegger was talking excitedly about how the American people, in these perilous times, shadowed by the threat of terrorism at home, are increasingly going to turn away from partisan politicians. "He was happy, beaming, like a guy who struck gold," a friend who listened to him said. If bipartisanship were indeed to become the movement of the future, Schwarzenegger—with Shriver at his side—would be uniquely positioned to lead it.
When I asked Shriver about bipartisanship, and Arnold's affinity with it, she replied, "I think you will see more and more of that. I think that when people yearn now for John McCain it's a direct result of that. People come up to me all day long, every day, 'Omigod, Arnold's doing a great job—I didn't even vote for him and I feel like this is a whole new way of looking at politics.' I don't think anybody's naïve enough to think you can come together on every issue, but I think people see that there is common ground between parties on certain issues. I think most people who grow up in one party or the other or are steeped in politics, they look at the other side as the enemy. I mean, that's my experience. And Arnold has never done that. He doesn't ask people what their party is, doesn't ask them where they went to college, doesn't ask them where their parents are—he doesn't get bogged down in a résumé, so to speak. And I think that's refreshing to people.
"What's great about Arnold is that he's not closed-minded to the other side, and he mixes it all together. I have met thousands of Republican women who are pro-choice all over California—women who are fiscally conservative, running small businesses, have traditional family values, but want a woman's right to choose. I used to call certain kinds of Catholics 'cafeteria Catholics,' and I think that now you have a huge amount of cafeteria Democrats and Republicans who aren't strictly one way—they may call themselves Republicans, but they're not voting on a party line, or they're taking aspects of the party they identify with and mixing it up into their own version."
As Shriver described Schwarzenegger's appeal, she sounded like someone who has seen the future—and it is Arnold, an unstoppable phenomenon. "He's a populist," Shriver said. "He appeals to people who might not have been interested in politics, he appeals to the whole American-dream concept. His movies are that way, too." She said that she sometimes used to worry about the New York Times reviews of his movies, but he did not. And when the Times published a positive editorial about him as governor recently, she was thrilled—"but Arnold put as much stock in that as the guy at the gas station who tells him he's doing a great job. You have to remember, he didn't grow up with the New York Times. He hasn't been successful because of the Washington Post. He has been successful in all of his fields because the people supported him—so that is really who his audience is. He's frankly very real. He transcends so many different worlds. He transcends political life, to me. He's in life, you know? He's a figure that I think people feel a certain ownership of, connection with, more than anyone I've ever seen. When you go out with him, people come up about a hundred things. They come up about sports, about fitness, about movies, about military. Kids from high school come up, guys in their forties and fifties who grew up with 'Pumping Iron' come up, guys still trying to be in shape in their forties and fifties come up, mothers come up about their kids, people who are interested in politics come up, people who want Arnold to go back in the movies come up, 'Terminator' freaks come up, 'Predator' freaks come up, people come up about after-school programs." She paused for breath. "I can't think of anybody else like that."
Schwarzenegger's office in the capitol building is an attractive, dark-wood-panelled room, with sculptures and paintings of the American West, and, facing his desk, a large Andy Warhol portrait of Shriver; among the framed family photographs on a table is one of his father. But he prefers his tent in the capitol's inner patio, and we spoke there. Open on one side, the tent is outfitted with comfortable rattan chairs and a circular glass table; Schwarzenegger sat on the far side of the table, with his back to the tent wall, so he could see into his glass-walled office complex. He affects a kind of easy bonhomie, but he is noticeably wary, vigilant, sizing up the participants in his every moment. Up close, he looks disconcertingly unreal—almost mannequin-like, with his square head, his unlined countenance, his helmet of bronze-colored hair, and his perfectly fitted, gleaming white shirt.
It was just two days before he would offer a revised state budget, of a hundred and two billion dollars—one that would include no new taxes, spare the most severe projected budget cuts, and (as Gray Davis had done before him) push the hardest choices off for another year. A report by the Legislative Analyst's Office later concluded that Schwarzenegger's budget created a persistent deficit of more than six billion dollars into future years; that the level of borrowing, with fifteen billion dollars in bonds, is unhealthy; that the deals the Governor cut with local governments, university systems, and others would make the budget gap harder to close in the future; and that the deficit might grow even larger, because of overoptimistic projections. Comparing this budget with the Governor's January budget, the L.A.O. concluded that, while California's near-term fiscal situation had improved, the longer-term situation had worsened. And the plan "misses an important opportunity to make more meaningful inroads toward eliminating the state's long-term structural imbalance"—between its revenues and its expenditures.
Once again, the substance appeared both familiar and flawed—but that was likely to be obscured by the Schwarzenegger sales pitch. He had already defined success by setting a goal: an on-time budget. Two years ago, budget battles dragged on through the summer, until September 5th—a record for tardiness. He said that he was hoping not only for an on-time budget—that would mean June 30th—but "the earliest budget ever." Referring to the pending budget negotiations between him and the legislature, he said, "The whole kaboogie will start all over again. That's what Bob Hertzberg"—the former Democratic Speaker of the Assembly and a close Schwarzenegger ally—"calls it, 'kaboogie.' So the whole kaboogie will start all over again, which means that we could sit down and we could solve the problem in an hour, but some people can't do that," he said, with a slight, deprecating smile, "because they have to do the song and dance" of Kabuki politics.
I mentioned that some legislators object that he has so diminished the role of the legislature that he is operating an imperial governorship. He shot a knowing glance at his spokesman, Rob Stutzman, and quipped, "It's the Austrian-Californian monarchy."
A little later, Bonnie Reiss, Rob Lowe, and Peter Siggins, the California legal-affairs secretary, strolled by. "What you see here is the saviors," Schwarzenegger said. He is fond of superlatives, and often refers to his staff as "my geniuses." Lowe remarked to Schwarzenegger that years from now this tent would be part of a historic tour—people would be told that this was where Governor Schwarzenegger had conducted the business of the state. "You know what it is?" Lowe continued. "It's Arnold's big-tent politics. People talk about the big tent, and that's what he does. And then I walk out and he literally has one. I said, 'Don't you take the metaphor a little too far?' "
The three moved on, and I mentioned the subject of Shriver. She obviously brings him a great deal politically. But it is not clear whether her role is strictly supportive, or whether she affects policy to a significant degree. "Well, it's very hard to say what Maria is," Schwarzenegger said, slowly, seeming to weigh each word, "because she is literally everything. . . . I know people ask her a lot of times, what does she do, exactly? You can't say that—'What do you do, exactly?' You can't measure it, because, whatever I do, she's a part of it."
Schwarzenegger was distracted by the sight of Senator Burton, in the office of Pat Clarey, the chief of staff. Burton, who was carrying a bag of cherries, was making signs to Schwarzenegger, pointing at his watch. "He's bringing probably cherries," Schwarzenegger said. "Look at him, every day he's coming down with flowers or something." The watch gesture was just a joke, Schwarzenegger told me—their meeting was an hour away. "But he's always cruising in my offices."
Schwarzenegger resumed counting the ways in which Shriver has been valuable to him. In 1980, when he was secretly training for the Mr. Olympia competition, she had understood what he had to do to win, and she banished sweets from his house. She had a familiarity with the entertainment business, because Joseph P. Kennedy, her grandfather, had owned a film company for a time. She has been steeped in politics. And as a journalist she can advise him; for example, he said, "If she wants to go and track me down and do me in, what would she do?" Despite the fact that he and Shriver belong to different parties, he continued, there is "never a dispute. Never, never. Because she would just say, you know, that it's too bad with education, that right now there's such a crunch. . . . But she would never say, 'No, I think that we should just put money, even if you have to raise the tax you have.' None of that."
(In a subsequent interview with Shriver, when I told her that her husband had said they never have disputes, and she would never suggest raising taxes, she laughed hard. "My brother says, 'You could ask Arnold how the skiing is, and he could be standing on a mountain, and it's all rock and the snow is melted and he'd say, "It's fantastic! Come on up right away!" ' " Then she continued, "I think the great thing for me, let's just say, is that Arnold has always asked my point of view and I give him my point of view—and I think sometimes it disagrees with his point of view, and sometimes he does what he wants to do. Sometimes one has an impact, maybe not immediately but later.")
Schwarzenegger wants to make it plain that, however unconventional his résumé may be, it is not a drawback. On the contrary. "I say it many times here," he told me. "My background was much more valuable than the background of working your way up through the halls of Sacramento." In bodybuilding, after all, "you get to know the real you . . . the real you that is identified in the gym, when it comes to that last rep and everyone else faints, and everyone else falls apart, and everyone else maybe screams in pain—can you do that extra rep, which we call the forced rep? Do you have that in you, to be able to fight through that?" He even tends to see the state through the prism of bodybuilding. "In bodybuilding, you can have the best deltoids, the greatest chest, the most spectacular back and abs, but if you have no calves you lose. And so this is the same here with the running of the state. You can have all the great pieces, but if people are suffering, because they don't have jobs, you have nothing. You cannot really feel proud of the rest of what you have accomplished."
Perhaps most significant, though, was what he had learned as an actor. "In acting, what is important is that it's organic, whatever you do, and that you connect to the people so they can look at the scene and buy in. But it's the same here. You have to connect with the people, and the more organic you are—the more you reach down and the way you really feel about people, and to really feel what you feel, your passion for certain things and all this—that's what then makes people buy in. . . . It starts with the legislators, it starts with the team that works with you. And also then it goes out to the public, and to the business community, for instance, or the leaders and everyone. . . . So, you know, that is really what it's about, is to be able to communicate, and that's why the greatest Presidents, as you can see, were Kennedy and Reagan, because they were incredible, and the latest was, of course, Clinton. They were all great communicators. And it's important to be organic, to have it really come from your heart rather than being fake."
As Schwarzenegger spoke about Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton, it sounded like a pantheon that he was positioning himself to join. And surely this would be the ultimate instance of achieving that which people thought could not be done—something, even, that was prohibited by the Constitution. Hadn't those lines about the constitutional amendment in his recent speeches, like virtually everything in his remarkable life, been strategic?
No, Schwarzenegger replied. It was merely a joke. He looked at me sharply. "I mean, believe me," he said. "It's the last thing I think about, is that." ♦


text:
Thomas: Hill's response to letter puzzling
Bud Hill, I find your response to a critical letter puzzling. You claim that you are not bigoted toward gays, yet your letter seems otherwise. To use the cliche… 'If it quacks like a duck."
Two sections in your letter stand out. The one where you refer to active gays today … "not like those in the 1980s." If you and the Internet were here in the 1960s you might have sent a letter warning us that the negroes of the '60s were not like the negroes of the '40s and '50s. Gays are seeking the same legal protections that the rest of society enjoys.
The other is the friend who was assaulted by a gay couple. If this really occurred, then it is both heinous and tragic. Not justified under any circumstances. But, it does not, as you imply, represent the gay community. Before moving to the county my wife and I worked in Los Angeles where we had many gay acquaintances and friends. I can assure you and others that gays do not have a recruitment program. They seek others who have gone through the torment of coming out. This incident is very unusual.
Admit it Bud, you don't like gays.
Ted Thomas, Breckenridge
Start a dialogue, stay on topic and be civil.
If you don't follow the rules, your comment may be deleted.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Socially Conscious
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