Early polls showed the Republican actor far ahead in the race to recall the Democrat Davis, who will be fired by the public if 50.1 percent vote “yes” in the first question on the October 7 ballot. With Arnold enjoying a double-digit lead over the nearest of the 134 other candidates listed on Question Two, conventional wisdom figured he would just coast on his celebrity and postpone the alienating business of taking positions until the last possible moment. If he could glide into the statehouse as a fuzzily defined “fiscally conservative social liberal,” well, why not?

This analysis, however, totally misses the two things that make Schwarzenegger’s candidacy potentially seismic: Yes, Arnold does indeed have a defined political (and campaign) philosophy. And what’s more—if he survives the attacks from Right and Left, the muscle-bound monosyllabist may just re-cast American politics in his own chiseled image.

Arnold has been a Republican almost from the day he arrived in the U.S., in 1968, at age 21, and began tuning in to presidential debates between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. “This much I learned,” he recounted in a September 21, 2001, speech to the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce. “Humphrey talked about protectionism, more government planning, and a lot of liberal solutions. It sounded like the socialism in Austria. The Republican—Nixon—talked about less government, lower taxes, the free market, international trade, and a stronger military. After the translator finished, I realized: Yes! I’m a Republican!”

Enthusiastically so. “I pretty much thought it was as simple as the movies,” he continued. “The Republicans were the Good Guys—and the Democrats were the Bad Guys.” But two events eventually jolted him from his partisanship: First, he married into the country’s most famous Democratic family, the Kennedys, when he wed Maria Shriver in 1986. Second, four years later, he was named chairman of President Bush Sr.’s Council on Physical Fitness, a position that sent him to playgrounds across the country. “This was where I got my biggest and rudest awakening,” he told the Sacramento Chamber. “Because as I went around from inner city to inner city, I saw first-hand that this is not the land of opportunity for those kids. Most of them don’t get any of the tools that I got.”

Since then, Schwarzenegger has focused the bulk of his political energies on expanding after-school programs for kids (culminating in the passage, last fall, of Proposition 49 in California, which increased state spending on such programs by $450 million a year). He has also discovered the civilizing virtues of bipartisanship.

“Both parties had good ideas—so it was dead wrong to see things only as us versus them, Republicans versus Democrats. That was destructive,” he said.

American politics, at its base level, is a screaming match over a handful of social issues that clearly divide the two deadlocked political parties: abortion, gay rights, environmentalism, gun rights, affirmative action, attitude toward business. On the first three counts, society is moving demonstrably toward the Democratic side of the aisle, especially in coastal states like California and New York. On the latter three concerns, they are beginning to lean Republican. Schwarzenegger’s positions on wedge issues basically mirrored the country’s, except he spent as little time as possible talking about them, so as not to alienate anybody.

That’s why his candidacy drew the most fire from social conservatives and partisan Democrats: If he wins the election, they are threatened with irrelevance.

California Republicans are hopelessly divided on social issues—the moderates think the conservatives lose elections, the conservatives think they define Republicanism. The moderates have on their side none other than George W. Bush, who is eager to woo Latino voters to the gop (immigration restrictions are a favourite conservative cause, and the main reason why California’s booming Hispanic population votes Democrat). Last year, a conservative slate was routed at the polls, shutting Republicans out from statewide office for the first time since the 1880s.

A Schwarzenegger victory could bring the Republicans back from California’s political wilderness, and pave the way for similar moderate gop victories in states where the anti-abortion, homosexual-bashing platform is on the wane. It could give Bush a crucial toehold in a state that has rejected him thus far, and force venal Democrats like Gray Davis to come up with something better than a least-worst scenario.