Long, funny article by LaBash on Arnold's last days. A good "process" story. This win puts Mike Murphy back in the big time with Carl Rove. And he must hate Rove!
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Arnold Uber Alles
From the October 20, 2003 issue: The wild, final days of the Schwarzenegger campaign.
by Matt Labash
Weekly Standard Cover Story
San Diego, Calif.
IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY YESTERDAY that I was jetting around California with Arnold Schwarzenegger, enjoying one-on-one access, eating Arnold's food, laughing at Arnold's jokes, choking on Arnold's cigar smoke. In fact, it was a year ago, when Arnold was campaigning for his ballot initiative promoting after-school activities. Back then, he was running a modest little jobs program for former Pete Wilson aides. Now, five days before the 2003 recall election, at the kickoff of his home-stretch bus tour at the San Diego Convention Center, it's apparent that Schwarzenegger has gone Hollywood. There are so many staffers on the ground that it's hard to know who to suck up to.
I start with a woman standing by a velvet rope, behind which sit 200 journalists' suitcases. It's a bad call. "I'm just the luggage lady," she says. "I'm a hanger-on. I used to be with [former candidate] Bill Simon." I have better luck with Rob Gluck, a Troy Aikman doppelgänger who describes Schwarzenegger's warp-speed, two-month campaign for governor of California as having to "lay track full speed ahead as fast as we can, trying to get to the Pacific before the train does." Gluck is part of a small but all-powerful clique within the campaign known as the "Murphy Mafia." It's a reference to their leader, Mike Murphy, the evil genius behind John McCain's presidential bid. Three years ago, Murphy launched McCain's Straight Talk Express, the rolling cocktail party in which journalists engaged in back-slapping, glad-handing, and finally tearful goodbyes with the candidate. Now, Murphy has launched what will be nicknamed the No Talk Express--in which he invites hundreds of access-starved journos along for the ride, then essentially tells them to buzz off.
It's not a dumb strategy, considering the circumstances. There are some days in the campaign business when it would be easiest for an aide to wake up, put on her best dress, then step in front of a bus. Today in Arnold World is one of those days. The morning sees charges that Schwarzenegger is an ass-grabbing lout. By evening, he'll stand accused of loving Adolf Hitler. As one colleague puts it, "Any day spent on the trail talking about Adolf Hitler is not a good day."
The Los Angeles Times kicks things off with a morning story in which six different women allege Arnold's non-consensual touching. While four of the six remain unnamed, and none has filed legal action, the Times claims that even if their story smells like a ninth-inning political black-bag job, none of Schwarzenegger's opponents helped the paper find the women. The charges involve several breast-grabs, a hand-under-the-skirt buttock clinch, an elevator groping, a simulated sex act, and several mature-language propositions too clinical to replicate here. These charges, and some that follow them, are enough to convince me--someone who likes Arnold, thinks he's utterly charming, deceptively smart, and a charismatic leader--to rethink my drink. Now, I'm quite prepared to believe that despite his good qualities, he's additionally a big creep, to borrow a coinage.
But critical thinking isn't in evidence at the convention center during Schwarzenegger's final-swing kickoff rally. Outside the building, Christian schoolgirls who say they're slightly troubled that Arnold is "pro-abortion," still squeal like he's the lost Backstreet Boy and wear pro-Arnold bumper stickers on the perky derrieres of their jeans (not a visual the campaign desires today). When I charge into a cluster of stageside Arnold supporters, some of whom are holding "Remarkable Women Join Arnold" signs, and ask them about the charges, they are uniformly dismissive: "It's just the usual dirt they dredge up before an election. . . . It's a bunch of hooey. . . . You got to do something while you're in an elevator. . . . The Hollywood agenda is just different than what we're used to."
Schwarzenegger takes the stage to raucous applause. Even at his age (56), his face and body look chiseled from sheet-rock, never mind that the hair and overly taut skin are a tint not found in nature, the color of an apricot Fruit Roll-up. He sounds all his usual campaign themes about rescinding the car tax, reforming workers' compensation. He delivers his money lines: "Gray Davis has terminated jobs! Gray Davis has terminated opportunities! Now it is time that we terminate him!" And he delivers the money lines of others: "We are mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!" Of the morning papers, he says that "the people of Cal-eee-for-nee-ah can see through this trash politics."
But then he admits that it is true he has "behaved badly" sometimes. The crowd titters, expecting him to let himself off the hook, possibly with one of his corny movie one-liners, like "Game Ov-ahhh" or "Milk is for babies." But instead, he goes earnest, saying that on movie sets, he may have done things that he thought then were "playful," but that "now I recognize that I offended people." To them, he says, "I'm deeply sorry about dat, and I apologize." If elected, "I will be a champion for da women. I hope dat dey will give me the chance to prove dat."
It's a remarkable moment, even by the standards of the Remarkable Women for Arnold. Except it serves as a Rorschach test. To Arnold supporters, it's a heartfelt apology, a tidy way to put an end to something ugly before it begins. To journalists, it's waving the red cape. With a general apology, he has tacitly admitted specifics, meaning that Topic A for the rest of the election won't be the economy, or offshore drilling, or other things we couldn't care less about.
He concludes the speech with his signature "I'll be back," which makes little sense in this context but pleases the crowd anyway. Then Arnold's tour bus, which looks like it was spray-painted by Leni Riefenstahl, as the entire side bears Arnold's oversized Aryan mug looking off beatifically into the middle distance, drives up behind the stage. The crowd nearly keels over from excitement. As the arena is filled with his theme song, Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It," Arnold boards the bus, hangs out the door, and shoots thumbs-up to everyone. The bus does a racetrack pattern around the now stampeding crowd before taking off out the back of the arena.
Reporters take off after him, hurriedly mounting our buses. All the buses on the tour are named after Arnold movies. His own tricked-out coach is "The Running Man," while his slightly less elaborate VIP bus is "Total Recall" (get it?). The wags in Arnold's press shop titled the media buses "Predator 1-4." But we get the last laugh. In light of the new allegations, we call them "Sexual Predator 1-4."
I'm initially assigned to Bus 2, which in the social pecking order ranks behind Bus 1 (TV anchors, big-circulation print reporters, favored California press) and ahead of Buses 3 and 4 (technical people and leftover foreign press, respectively). Bus 4, Gluck tells me, "is like that room in 'Animal House'" where all the uncool kids kept getting steered." Foreign reporters, the campaign constantly reminds us, won't get Arnold any votes in California.
My bus is initially acceptable. Our "bus captain," Patrick Dorinson, a former flack for a failing energy company, does a flawless Arianna Huffington impression, which he regularly treats us to over the PA system: "Oooo, sir! That's such a good idea. Let's have a hand for ze man vith ze good idea! I'm going to put that idea in my new constitution." I take a seat next to some Japanese TV people, who do their best to communicate with me in Godzilla-movie English. An Asahi TV producer tells me Arnold is big in Japan, where he does Cup O' Noodles soup and energy-drink commercials. He says they call him "Schwa-Chan," which loosely translates as "childish boy." Since it is fairly clear early on that access to Arnold will be next to nil, journalists interview other journalists from foreign countries. When my seatmate's colleague starts interviewing the French documentary crew in front of me, the producer feels compelled to quickly get his face out of the shot. He dives into my lap, barking orders in Japanese which are muffled in my crotch. It leaves me with steely resolve to get off this bus and make it onto Sexual Predator 1.
At the next stop, the Orange County Fairgrounds, it's a homer conservative crowd. But still, the freaks are out in force at presidential-campaign levels of weirdness. A man with two gold teeth in an otherwise toothless mouth stalks the grounds yelling "Free Tommy Chong!" An elderly Vietnamese albino in a flowing ceremonial robe walks around pumping a pro-Arnold sign but speaks no English. I fall in with Alan Schwartz, an audio-visual technician in a Triumph motorcycle jacket.
He's a Democrat who's come to torment Arnold over the allegations, though even he admits he probably couldn't stomach voting for Gray Davis again. Schwartz holds a visually complicated magic-marker sign that says "GOP, OUI"--that last bit being a reference to an ancient Oui magazine article in which Arnold explained his dabbling in group sex. Between the "G" and the first "O," Schwartz inserted a small "R," and after the "P" he added a small "E"--making it "GrOPe" to the eagle-eyed. As Arnold stumps, Schwartz gets a cool reception. Arnold supporters yell at him to take down his sign, to "sit on it," and tell him his "penmanship sucks." Schwartz is convinced he's drawing extra heat because "Oui" is French, and this is a freedom-fries-eating crowd. So he subtly mocks them back. When one befuddled woman reads his sign, Schwartz says, "It's French and subliminal." Yeah, she says, catching on, "it means, 'You're a jackass.'"
As Arnold crescendos, telling the crowd how much more they are paying in car taxes for each specific make and model, Schwartz winces, yelling, "How much is a burger at Planet Hollywood?" (a restaurant chain in which Arnold once owned an interest). But then Schwartz gets upstaged by the big finish. "Let me show you exactly what we are going to do to de car tax when we get to Sacramento," says Arnold. He points to an empty parking lot near the crowd, where a lonely Oldsmobile sits, inscribed with the words "Car Tax." A crane right next to the car crushes it with a wrecking ball. Schwartz is struck dumb.
It's part of the intended effect. Mike Murphy tells me that when he initially talked to Arnold's pyro people about the stunt, the campaign advance guys thought it was "the scariest thing in the world. But to Hollywood stunt guys, blowing up a car is like going to McDonald's," says Murphy. "They said, 'What kind of car?' and 'Do you want anybody in it when it blows up?'" Murphy determined an explosion posed too many safety risks, and "though it broke my heart," he settled for the wrecking ball.
Impressive as it is, however, Hollywood spectacle can't completely inoculate the campaign. On the far end of the parking lot, a media feeding frenzy is underway. A new woman has materialized, claiming that back in 1978 one of Arnold's friends picked her up and pinned her against a wall, while Arnold yelled from his vehicle that he was going to rape her, after which she managed to run away. As we labor to get the details, Schwarzenegger staffers yell that "the buses are leaving." Immediately, they go into debunk mode, and in this case, it's relatively easy, since the woman showed up with a bunch of other women in matching "Working Women Vote" T-shirts. They are affiliated with a union that has vowed to defeat the recall. Whether or not her story is true (the campaign denies this one categorically) we don't have time to tell. The buses are leaving. And our Quiznos sandwiches are getting cold.
In a strange way, the new allegations are a good break for the campaign. It allows them to perfect their elegantly simple defense strategy: Whatever happens, blame Gray Davis or the Los Angeles Times. It is a strategy they will employ with nearly every allegation (15 women will come forward in all). The campaign will try out any number of combinations: Blame the Los Angeles Times for opening a can of worms too close to the election, blame Gray Davis for unleashing his Democratic henchmen who doubtless supplied the tips to the Los Angeles Times (this is never proven), blame the Times for not spending enough time blaming Gray Davis (they never, for instance, gave wide play to the New Times's charges that temper-tantrum-throwing Davis physically attacks members of his own staff, women included). The campaign does everything, in fact, but blame Gray Davis for reading the Los Angeles Times. And this, it turns out, is a devastatingly effective strategy for two reasons: (a) Voters hate the media, and (b) if there's anything Californians hate more than the media, it's Gray Davis.
The next stop, at Riley Elementary School in San Bernardino, gives them a chance to put their plan into action. The school provides the ideal, scripted setting. Small people of color are everywhere, eager to meet the action star. The backdrop banner has prints of all their little hands, with an inscription thanking "Mr. Schwarzenegger" for promoting after-school programs. The busload of perpetually trailing alternative candidates, who've attempted to crash the scene in order to generate publicity for their own boutique issues like limiting population growth and getting junk food out of public schools, have been cleared from the premises. Reporters wishing to talk to them must reach over a tall chain-link fence to shake their hands or receive their literature. It makes us all feel like extras in some sort of Turkish prison movie.
Former NFL player and star of the '80s detective show "Hunter" Fred Dryer comes off the VIP bus to warm up the kids by taking questions about Arnold. They ask if he's married, did he really play The Terminator, what time is this going to be over, and can he run for president? "No," says one child, of the Austrian actor, "he can't run for president, he's from Canada."
The kids love Arnold and Arnold loves the kids, and the staff loves Arnold with the kids because kids don't ask questions about women showing up in parking lots claiming that Arnold threatened to rape them. The same can't be said of the big kids on the press bus. The men who must deal with our queries, the conservative versions of "War Room"-era James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, are Arnold spokesmen Rob Stutzman and Todd Harris. They both do their work brilliantly, and if I ever run for office and get accused of being an ass-grabbing Nazi in the final stretch of a campaign, I will hire them without blinking. Stutzman wears white "Join Arnold" golf shirts and is witty, convivial, and downright jolly except when we confront him with new allegations. Then the mercury rises in his face, as he works up a full head of steam about the L.A. Times/Gray Davis nexus. He is slowly transformed from a 35-year-old California political consultant into a professional wrestler who's gotten an unfair call and who's about to send the pencil-necked referee careening into the turnbuckle.
Todd Harris, 32, is the second-highest-ranking member of the Murphy Mafia (behind Murphy). He is rumpled and bleary-eyed, with cheese-grater growth and the thousand-yard stare of a campaign aide who has suffered too many box lunches. It doesn't dampen his laconic good humor. He gives his title alternately as "Minister of Truth and Enlightenment" and "First Piece of Meat."
It's in this latter capacity that he is interesting to the press. While we encircle him on the Riley Elementary playground, we ask him exactly zero questions about Arnold's after-school programs. Harris sets about decrying "puke politics," saying that these "ridiculous allegations" bear "the first Democratic fingerprints of union involvement and the Democratic party." When reporters fall back on the morning paper's allegation, which Arnold has not categorically denied and in some ways has admitted, Harris insists that his boss is taking responsibility for what he's done, "in sharp contrast to the way Gray Davis has handled the budget crisis, the energy crisis, and the special-interest crisis." A reporter asks Harris what he thinks the headlines will be tomorrow. "Harris dazzles media with impromptu press conferences," he deadpans. The piranhas are circling and Harris is the chum bag, but he knows how to end a press conference. "There's beer on every bus and it should be cold," he loudly announces.
But by the time we get to our hotel in Los Angeles, ABC is moving news that a book proposal by "Pumping Iron" director George Butler has Arnold saying in a 1975 interview that he had admiration for Hitler as a public speaker. It doesn't help Arnold that his father was a Nazi, or that the New York Times simultaneously reported that Butler claimed in the proposal that he played "Nazi marching songs, . . . frequently clicked his heels and pretended to be an SS officer." Arnold immediately went on World News Tonight to say he remembered none of this, and that he despised Hitler. But the campaign knows we won't be sated, so at the hotel, they arrange a conference call for us with a pool reporter who attended a fundraiser where reporters were allowed to ask a few brief questions of Schwarzenegger.
Staffers and reporters crowd into a conference room to get the play-by-play from Joe Matthews of the L.A. Times. As we wait, someone asks Harris what was served at the fundraiser. "I had a little bit more to do today than to worry about whether they served chicken or steak," he replies. Matthews relays both important and ancillary details: Arnold's wife Maria Shriver's expression was "businesslike" while Arnold's was "subdued," "Kenny G walked by," a security guard slammed Matthews's arm in the door, Arnold reported that he'd "misbehaved" and that he didn't "have memory" of many of the alleged incidents. So many incidents had now been alleged that reporters forgot the entire point of the pool--to ask Arnold about Hitler--so Rob Stutzman, Arnold's own staffer, had to ask him what he thought of the Führer. ("I always despised everything Hitler stood for," said Arnold.)
A very long day is winding down. In one corner, I hear a reporter relaying the day's events to his editor ("So then this chick says he threatened to rape her . . . "), while in another corner, TV people are making all kinds of Nazi talk. As I exit the conference room, I overhear one more thing: an Arnold staffer saying, "I want my mom."
The next day, at the L.A. Arboretum, Rob Stutzman tells us that their campaign has actually jumped a point or two in the polls, despite the allegations. It's insane, but apparently true. The way some of us figure, if Arnold can get on the trail and goose some Jewish women, they might not even need to have the election: Davis will be forced to concede. But my mind, quite honestly, is on more important things. Today, with Stutzman's help, I will leave behind the Japanese lap-dancer on Bus 2, and I will make it all the way to Sexual Predator 1.
As I suspected, life is better on Bus 1. Snacks taste fresher, beer is colder. While I miss Patrick, the Arianna impersonator, Stutzman and Harris keep up a constant patter, spinning us silly. Harris even shares his best press-secretary-isms. "Okay, this one's my favorite," he says. "Off the record--'yes'; on the record--'no.'" He also provides complimentary air-sickness bags inscribed with a Ghostbuster crossbar through the word "puke politics." The bag contains a foam rubber Sacramento capitol dome and a tin of a substance called "grip goo." I ask what the purpose of the latter is. "None," he says, "it's just fun."
END PART ONE |
