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California braces for
Schwarzenegger
By John Berthelsen
A bewildered world is looking on in awe over
the fact that California, the world's fifth-largest
economy and presumably one of its most urbane, has risen
up, ousted its previously-elected chief executive in
a special election and replaced him with Conan
the Barbarian -Arnold Schwarzenegger, guttural Austrian
bodybuilder extraordinaire turned action superstar.
This is old hat for California, which has done
this sort of thing before. The state 37 years ago
delivered up Ronald Reagan, another movie actor turned
politician, and sent him the 565 kilometers up from Los
Angeles to the state capitol in Sacramento to attempt to
prove it was possible to get a saddle and bridle on
state government and tame the politicians as well.
Nor was that even the first time. In 1964, the
voters elected to the US Senate one George Murphy, a
song-and-dance man who played in some 45 movies and was
mainly famous as a dancing partner to the child actress
Shirley Temple. Murphy snoozed through one term in the
Senate as a Republican before the voters ousted him. In
1994 they also delivered to the House of Representatives
Sonny Bono, the other half of the Sonny & Cher song
duo, who later managed to kill himself by skiing into a
tree. Then the voters promptly replaced him with his
widow, who immediately said Sonny had spent most of his
time high on prescription drugs. Reagan, Murphy and Bono
were all Republicans, as is Schwarzenegger, despite
Hollywood's reputation of being a liberal stronghold of
licentiousness, dissolution and sin.
Immediately
after Reagan, California came up with Jerry Brown, who
was characterized on a national chat show as "Governor
Moonbeam" for his alleged penchant for sleeping on the
floor and hiring people who ate macrobiotic rice. No
matter that much later it was discovered that Brown was
merely thinking 20 years ahead of everybody else in
advocating equipping the state with satellite
technology, wind and solar energy power and
co-generation of energy.
But Sacramento is agog
with excitement over Arnold. Unlike media-savvy Los
Angeles or sophisticated San Francisco, California's
capital is a somnolent river town that has been
characterized uncharitably as having been settled by
strong, courageous immigrants who had the nerve and grit
and determination to fight their way across 3,000
kilometers of the plains and rivers and deserts and
steep mountains of the American west by wagon train to
get there, but not the imagination to stop to hunt gold
in the mountains or get the other 150-odd kilometers to
the sea.
Consequently, numerous Arnold sightings
have been reported by a breathless local press. The
national media's space-age television trucks, their
dishes pointing eastward to bounce news off satellites
to New York and Washington, are routinely clustered
along 10th Street in front of the ornate state capitol
building.
Schwarzenegger
was seen twirling an unlit cigar - you aren't allowed to
smoke in California restaurants - over his salmon filet at
the Esquire Grill. He was reported sampling the beef in
Chops, the red-meat restaurant across the street from
the capitol where lobbyists hang out. He was said to be -
without foundation, it turned out - joining the Capitol Athletic
Club, where the same lobbyists and legislative staff
members pump their iron. It was also believed that he
had jumped out of a car at 15th and P Streets for a
takeaway latte at Cup-A-Joe, which unfortunately turned
out not to be true.
The outside world by and
large believes California is continuing to be totally
daft. The state's stunned Democrats are huddled in the
political wreckage, behaving as if an electoral car bomb
had gone off nearby. The party's leadership has been
decapitated.
According to a 92-year-old
reform measure passed to bring accountability to
California's political process, 1.6 million of the
state's perennially outraged voters signed a petition to
recall Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger's luckless predecessor,
from office. In their paroxysm of rage, they simply
ignored credible charges that Arnold was a serial groper who
had fondled at least 16 women against their wishes.
The ensuing election removed Davis and installed the
movie actor - over 135 other candidates including movie
actors, billboard models, smut peddlers, television
commentators and the like. (California gets its groove
back, October 4 )
Schwarzenegger
had announced his candidacy on the Jay Leno Tonight show.
He ignored the conventional political press and
didn't bother with debates or press "availabilities", as
they are called here. Even though Reagan, too, had been
an actor, he did pay attention to the
conventional protocols, such as party politics and the press and
the pols. Schwarzenegger campaigned completely in the
place where he was most at home - in the entertainment press
and the chat shows.
Schwarzenegger made as much
use as possible of his movie roles as The Terminator or
Conan the Barbarian or a myriad other flicks in which he
played the enormously muscled he-man there to wreak
vengeance. In the well-scripted interviews and press
moments where he did appear, he vowed to "terminate"
this and that and wherever possible told voters to bid
"hasta la vista, baby", a line from one of his movies,
to Davis. Issues were not on the agenda.
Davis, having made as many gubernatorial state appointments
as possible to give his political staff incomes while
they look for other jobs, is to leave office on November
17. Schwarzenegger is due to be inaugurated in
Sacramento the next day. He has no intention of living
there, having taken a 2,000-square-foot suite - equipped with a
smoking deck - at the Hyatt Regency across the park from
the capitol. He intends to fly back and forth from Los
Angeles when governmental duties call.
So what
comes next? Is this going to be a tent show of the kind
that Jesse Ventura, the former Navy Seal, bit actor and
wrestler brought to Minnesota in 1998 years ago before
leaving in a blaze of recriminations about the political
process?
There are those who believe that
Schwarzenegger is merely going to be the hood ornament
on a Republican machine being driven by the real brains
of the party. Certainly, his appointments so far reek of
the administration of former governor Pete Wilson, a
dour ex-Marine Republican who left town in 1998, himself
immersed in California's perpetual voter ferocity, to be
replaced by Davis.
But Schwarzenegger doesn't
appear to be the type to let others do the driving. And,
despite his gargled syntax, in addition to star power,
he has what Ronald Reagan had. He is a trained actor,
having spent years in front of the camera and audiences,
with the professional capacity to project himself to
people and make them respond. While US politics may be
characterized as Hollywood without the cameras, few
politicians can actually act. Schwarzenegger can.
In addition to being a superstar, he is also a
businessman and he seems to be a fairly sharp one,
having become a multimillionaire in real estate and
other pursuits, and having married into the Kennedy
family, the closest thing in the US to a political
aristocracy. In short, this appears to be a man who
knows what he's doing, something that couldn't always be
said of Reagan.
Schwarzenegger, if he chose,
could probably do the minimum and still get away as an
enormously popular governor, flailing away at a peevish
legislature and blaming Davis for his troubles. His
predecessor is the victim of strapping energy costs that
actually were the product of faulty legislation signed
by Wilson, and of an economy that started to deflate in
2000 as the result of a national economic slowdown.
Politics being the art of taking credit where possible
and blaming somebody else when it isn't, Davis was never
able to figure out how to pin his troubles on his
predecessor. Schwarzenegger and the voters have already
very definitely pinned the blame on Davis.
In
macroeconomic terms, there is little Schwarzenegger can
in fact do anyhow. "Governors and legislatures do not
create recessions, nor do they have the tools to end
recessions,"says economist Steve Levy of the Institute
of Regional and Urban Studies in California. "Moreover,
state governments do not have tools to affect short-term
industry trends or the stock market. The desire of state
elected officials to help residents overcome layoffs and
unemployment is not matched by any effective means of
doing so."
But they can benefit enormously
from the perception of action when things do get better
on their own. And, against all odds, things are
getting better in California - at least marginally. While job
growth is still stagnant, the economy is picking up.
California's whopping budget
deficit, variously estimated at US$36 billion, $58 billion - or the
current actual figure of $12 billion - is certain to shrink as
the US economy recovers. Nobody knows how much. The
State Controller's office projects about $2 billion in
new tax receipts. Schwarzenegger, in grand US political
tradition, will take the credit.
"You may
have the paradox of a recovering economy that he didn't
do anything about," Levy told Asia Times Online.
Levy cautions that increasing revenues won't solve
the state's budget deficit, especially if
Schwarzenegger follows through on one of his few campaign promises - to
cut a phenomenally unpopular state auto license fee that
is bringing in an estimated $4 billion annually to state
coffers and which played a major role in Davis'
ignominious defeat.
Schwarzenegger is
also certain to benefit from whatever largesse
President George W Bush can deliver in the way of state aid
to California. Bush and his Republican conferees
see Schwarzenegger's tenure in California as a
heaven-sent occurrence that could pry the state away from the
clutch of the Democrats, who have dominated
statehouse politics, even during Republican governorships,
for decades. The last time the lower house of
the legislature was in Republican hands was in 1968 - for
two years - after which it was promptly reclaimed by the
Democrats.
That doesn't mean the Terminator
isn't going to terminate. He has appointed as his
finance director a Texas chainsaw budget-cutter named
Donna Arduin, a neo-con Republican currently working in
the state government office of Bush's brother, Jeb, in
Florida.
In her previous incarnations in other
statehouses, Arduin's mantra included massive layoffs of
state employees, major cuts to medical programs serving
the poor, tuition and fee increases for state colleges
and universities and across-the-board percentage
increases to all state bureaucracies. There are certain
to be no tax increases.
All well and good. But
the fact is that by and large the governments of
individual states in the US don't really matter very
much. Much of the budget is largely passed through state
hands from the federal government to local governments.
Nobody ever touches prison funding for fear of being
thought weak on crime. Money for highways and social
welfare is also passed through from the federal level.
Money for fire and police protection is usually
sacrosanct because no politician in his right mind would
ever vote against a fireman or a cop.
Schwarzenegger's government is almost certain
to be composed of people who have been in government
before - if not in Sacramento under former governor Wilson,
then in Washington, DC. Others will be drawn from the
southern California business community, as were the top
people of Reagan's gubernatorial administration.
There is liable to be a great deal of rhetorical
flourish. Catchphrases from many movies are to be
uttered to reporters. It remains to be seen how much of
it will matter. One barnacled official who spent 38
years in California's transportation department
counseled against panic. Bureaucrats are wily about
thwarting the plans of the most feverish politicians.
They have their own constituencies and they play to
them.
"I have seen six governors come and go,"
he said. "Every one of them came into office vowing a
new era. But you know what? None of this stuff ever gets
below the third level from the top."
The
voters already seem to have returned to hibernation. In
city and other local elections last week, only about
20 percent of them turned out - compared to 61.2 percent in
the recall, the highest total in decades. It is unclear
when they will awaken again.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
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