Most years, Californians can’t be bothered to learn the basics about their elected leaders, let alone vote. But every generation or so, a groundswell of popular anger creates a wave of reform that crests over the nation, from the tax-cutting of the late 1970s to the immigration backlash of the early 1990s. Perhaps the greatest of such citizen movements was the Progressive Revolt of 1910–1930, which beat back the perfidious influence of railroad companies by giving voters a series of direct-democracy tools, such as the ballot initiative (whereby any resident of California can write a proposed law, collect enough signatures, and put the question up for a yes-no vote), and the recall.
For ninety-two years, the recall mechanism lay mostly dormant. What changed in 2003? A deeply unpopular governor with no natural constituency, who barely won re-election last November against a clueless Republican with social-conservative views far to the right of most Californians, revealed not long after the polls closed that his budget deficit was not the disastrous $24 billion to which he’d admitted, but an unfathomable $38 billion. Gray Davis had won statewide elections by portraying his opponent as an anti-abortion, anti-environment creep, but he squandered a $9-billion surplus, bungled a multi-billion-dollar energy deregulation fiasco, and increased government spending. Also, unfortunately for him, a rich conservative Republican opponent with gubernatorial ambitions of his own decided to shell out $1.5 million (U.S.) to collect the necessary 900,000 recall signatures.
That Republican, United States Congressman Darrell Issa, was the public face of the recall movement until August 6, four days before the deadline to file for the election. That’s when Arnold Schwarzenegger— whose own advisers were certain he wouldn’t run—shocked the country by throwing his hat into the ring. Issa withdrew, nearly sobbing, two days later.
Arnold’s sudden move was perfectly in step with his style of competing. From his early bodybuilding days on, Schwarzenegger has exhibited a “reliance on…psychological warfare,” wrote Robert Tagorda, who has been maintaining a sort of ongoing political profile of the candidate at
Nevertheless, skeptics from across the political spectrum were quick to charge that the Terminator had an empty hard drive where his political philosophy should have been.
“All these Republican orgasms over Arnold Schwarzenegger are…fake,” thundered right-wing talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh. “His own words prove he’s not a conservative.”
“I’ve heard only clichés so far,” sniped U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, California’s most popular Democrat. “I’d like to have him answer, ‘How would you solve this budget dilemma?’”
“He has yet to demonstrate a grasp of any issue whatsoever,” snapped Slate.com.
The Austrian-born robot thespian did little to ease concerns in his first vague pronouncements on the campaign trail. When asked about a controversial and expensive family-leave bill, he told nbc’s Today Show, “I will have to get into that, because, as you know, I’m very much for families and very much for children and children’s issues and all that stuff.” Asked by another reporter about his position on the environment, he said, “I will fight for the environment. Nothing to worry about.”
