you prefer this?
The circus known as the California recall
By DOUG SAUNDERS
From Monday's Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 10:12 AM EDT Monday, Oct. 6, 2003
SACRAMENTO — A special-effects man pushes a button. The two-tonne ball of pig iron plummets from the top of the crane, striking the late-model Oldsmobile with a deafening crunch and a cloud of debris. The crowd goes mad.
A recognizable voice echoes across the suburban parking lot. "Hasta la vista, car tax," Arnold Schwarzenegger shouts over an adoring crowd that resembles a rock concert more than a Republican Party rally. "Hasta la vista, car tax!"
Teenaged girls are perched on their boyfriends' shoulders. Intense young men in T-shirts reading, "My Governor Can Beat Up Your Governor" clutch copies of a body-building encyclopedia.
Several thousand people dance and wave their arms as a deafening sound system begins blasting the 1980s Twisted Sister hit We're Not Gonna Take It.
On the other side of the parking lot, a group of women has quietly emerged on the edge of the crowd. They hold up placards reading, "No groper for governor," and are soon bullied by a throng of large, male Arnie supporters, the scene recorded by dozens of TV cameras. One man yells repeatedly, "Are you some kind of lesbians?" A woman in an Arnold T-shirt yells, "Everyone has a history!"
Inside the campaign bus, the Washington election-strategy professionals look on nervously. "This is getting ugly," says a young man named Trent. "I've worked on half a dozen Republican campaigns, and I've never seen anything like this."
Nobody in California has ever seen anything like this. The strange circus leading up to the state's recall election, in which voters will be asked tomorrow if they want to remove their Democratic governor and replace him with one of 135 candidates, has been transformed into a one-man personality campaign.
Aboard Mr. Schwarzenegger's campaign bus, it is a breathless scene as Republican Party operatives, whose activities are closely watched by the White House, struggle hard to maintain a political figure who is as charismatic, as mysterious, as silent and as bulletproof as his rock-jawed screen characters.
This has not been easy. For the past four days, The Los Angeles Times has been discovering women who say they were groped, propositioned or sexually threatened by the actor on movie sets or in public places (a total of 15 have come forward so far). Women voicing these allegations have disrupted rallies with increasingly clever protests, throwing Mr. Schwarzenegger off his stride and leaving him flustered.
Other media outlets have discovered favourable references to Adolf Hitler made by Mr. Schwarzenegger in his youth. And his lack of any discernible policy position on most matters, plus his campaign strategy of keeping himself away from direct contact with reporters, has allowed these allegations to fill a media vacuum.
In spite of this, it is very likely that Mr. Schwarzenegger will become governor. Weekend polls, taken after the groping allegations hit the stands, showed his support dipping slightly: Those who would remove Gray Davis from office lead those who would not by 54 per cent to 41 per cent (with a 3.2-per-cent margin of error). Mr. Schwarzenegger leads the replacement candidates with 37-per-cent support (down from 49), with leading Democrat Cruz Bustamante trailing at 29 per cent.
As he made his way up California's dusty highways to the state capital of Sacramento over the weekend, Mr. Schwarzenegger attracted a flood of public attention never before seen in U.S. state politics -- and became increasingly elusive about his actual views on any political matters, if he has them.
On his main TV ad, broadcast almost nonstop in these final days, he intones: "I know what needs to be done, and I know how to do it."
On Thursday morning, the same could be said for Mike Murphy. The bearded political strategist, who has the bearing of a linebacker, was commanding his armada of buses with a jolly confidence. "We don't use bus tours much in American politics, but they can be really effective if your timing is right," he says, as the vehicles rev their engines along the Pacific coast in San Diego.
Mr. Murphy is the Republican Party's tough-jobs man. His Washington firm, Navigators, has close ties to the White House, which may be so worried about Mr. Schwarzenegger's personal life that it does not want to support him directly. Instead, Vice-President Dick Cheney has sent along a top staff member to work with the dozens of operatives like Mr. Murphy, who was flown out to live in a Santa Monica hotel during the campaign.
Navigators has run presidential campaigns for Bob Dole and John McCain, and successful state governor campaigns for the President's brother Jeb Bush (Florida) and businessman Mitt Romney (Massachusetts). What he calls, "earned media" is his trademark technique. Instead of paying for ads, you get the world's media to give you free publicity.
The Arnie campaign has already taken this strategy to new heights.
The vehicles are named after Mr. Schwarzenegger's movies. The first, Running Man, carries the candidate himself, his top campaign staff, and his exercise equipment. The second, Total Recall, is described as a "VIP overflow bus," a category that does not exist in most election campaigns.
The four media buses, carrying almost 200 journalists, are dubbed Predator 1 through Predator 4. "We thought of calling one of them True Lies," Mr. Murphy says. "But we wanted to be above the board."
This magnanimity toward the media will not last: By the weekend, the Schwarzenegger team seemed to be campaigning not against Governor Davis but against the Los Angeles Times, whose reporters revealed the history of sexual incidents. In the town of Stockton, Calif., Mr. Schwarzenegger was introduced by a local radio host who noted that a Times reporter was present and asked the crowd to "find him and beat him up, will you?"
Aboard the buses, the friendly media environment rapidly transforms from one of punch-drunk jollity to one of muted insurrection as it becomes apparent that even The New York Times and CNN will not be granted interviews. Perhaps goaded on by an ample supply of beer and the presence of several documentary crews filming them, the U.S. news photographers stage a protest rally in the back of the second bus, chanting, "What do we want? Access! When do we want it? Now!"
Trailing behind Arnold's buses, like pilot fish behind a school of sharks, is a ragtag group of vehicles: A red bus carrying no fewer than 20 people whose names will also appear on the ballot, a Rolls-Royce, a gold Mercedes and a Beechcraft airplane each bearing a fringe candidate hoping to get a moment of media attention. Those candidates had briefly considered starring in their own Survivor TV show, before settling on the bus-chase strategy. Their hopes will be thwarted: With few exceptions, this show is all Arnold's.
On Saturday morning in the sun-blasted farming city of Fresno, some 4,000 people are packed into an aircraft hangar to see him. There are 51 TV cameras pointed at him. Less than 24 hours before, Mr. Davis had held what was to have been a key rally in the Los Angeles district of Long Beach, attended by the state's top Democrats. The crowd was roughly 35 people, only slightly more than the number of reporters.
"This is like going from a small wedding to a Pink Floyd concert," says a man who has just come from a rally for Mr. Davis. "I've never seen anything like this in California politics."
Not quite. Almost 40 years earlier, another strong-man actor made a bid for governor that seemed ridiculous at first but quickly became a sensation. Ronald Reagan's transformation is a precedent mentioned frequently by Mr. Schwarzenegger's handlers (though not by the candidate himself, nominally a moderate conservative who is hoping to win the votes of Democrats by avoiding mention of any Republican). In Orange County, he is introduced by a Republican assemblyman: "Together with Arnold, we're going to win the war that Ronald Reagan started!"
Indeed, Arnold seems to be reading from the Reagan playbook. This is from Mr. Reagan's stump speech from 1964: "I am not a politician. I am an ordinary citizen with a deep-seated belief that much of what troubles us has been brought about by politicians, and it's high time that more ordinary citizens brought the fresh air of common-sense thinking to bear on these problems."
And this is from Mr. Schwarzenegger's speech in Modesto on Saturday: "I could no longer stand by and watch the politicians in Sacramento chase businesses out of the state and chase jobs out of the state. I'm not beholden to anyone, I don't own anyone up there -- I can go up to Sacramento and kick some serious butt!"
Unlike Mr. Reagan, Mr. Schwarzenegger's speeches seem to occupy no ideological position and contain little material related to policy. They are about as long as a movie-junket interview: 10 to 15 minutes, with plenty of time for Arnold to toss T-shirts into the air and sign autographs.
And they are easily derailed. In the town of Pleasanton, about as close as Mr. Schwarzenegger will ever come to the left-leaning San Francisco Bay area during his campaign, a dozen members of the huge crowd remove their Arnold shirts to reveal themselves as members of CodePink, a subversive feminist group. They hold hands and scream "You groper -- you disgust us!"
As quickly as campaign workers can drag one set of protesters out, another appears in the crowd. Mr. Schwarzenegger looks lost and bewildered, unable to ad lib his way out of this position. He plows ahead by rote, but seems infuriated.
Later that day, the campaign hands reporters a carefully researched dossier showing that key figures in CodePink are former employees of Mr. Davis. This instant-fire research is pure Washington.
It also becomes apparent why Arnold is being isolated from the media. When asked, in a rare interview, why he has not apologized earlier to the women he groped, he suggested that they should have dropped by his house in Santa Monica. When the Hitler issue was brought up on Saturday, he replied quite frankly that some of his best friends are Jewish.
"This wasn't an easy campaign to decide to do," a member of the Navigators says over a beer. The company had planned on running the campaign of Richard Riordan, the former Los Angeles mayor, a seasoned, cosmopolitan politician with great speaking skills -- a man who could speak to the media for hours without hurting his case. But he disappeared in the polls, and they had to decide whether to take a contract with the decidedly riskier Mr. Schwarzenegger.
"Look at what we had to face -- a candidate who has no experience in politics, the almost certainty that there would be dirty tactics at the end of the campaign, a really steep learning curve in teaching him how to campaign and not enough time to do it. Did anyone think this would be easy? No. Did we know it was going to be this hard? No."
As Arnold finally disappears into his bus on the Stockton fairgrounds, the sound system plays, We're Not Gonna Take It for the 28th time that day. It is beginning to wear on everyone. One campaign organizer jokes: "At least if he wins, you won't have to hear that song again."
Back in 1984, nobody was really sure just what it was that the members of Twisted Sister were not going to take any more, but it didn't prevent the song from climbing the charts. Few things have changed.
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