ARNOLD UBER ALLES - PART TWO
The journos themselves are a lively crew. We receive regular updates from the New York Post's David Li who keeps us plugged into the latest Siegfried and Roy/white- tiger-mauling developments. ("Great news," says David, "Roy lives!") Our unofficial DJ is Adam Housley from Fox, a rangy former college baseball player who's secure enough in his masculinity to spin ABBA CDs on his laptop without buckling to ridicule.
But the bus's MVP has to be the reporter I spy when we cruise into Bakersfield. A crowd, mistaking us for Arnold's bus, greets us with the kind of enthusiasm Jesus would get if He were touring with the reunited Beatles. The reporter on our bus begins banging on the window with both hands, yelling back at them exultantly, "I'M THE MEDIA! YOU LOVE THE MEDIA!" I can't tell if the sinewy, leathered scribe with bandito facial hair is a former outlaw biker or a former pirate, since he looks like the bastard spawn of Sonny Barger and Jean Lafitte. I settle on the former. "What motorcycle magazine does he write for?" I ask one colleague. "The New York Times," they reply, "that's Charlie LeDuff."
Part Native-American, part Cajun, LeDuff won a Pulitzer after spending a month in a North Carolina slaughterhouse. Before becoming a journalist at around the age of 30, he did stints as a teacher, a tannery worker, and a bartender. But he seems to have taken to the sport. Like most good reporters, he inspires sources to perform for him because they like him, but also because he keeps them off balance. Throughout the bus tour, Charlie keeps people honest. Once, at a Sacramento bar, he shakes up all the media/staffer chumminess by breaking an empty wine glass on his forehead. ("It's a trick," he tells me later, "the glass is thin up at the top.")
His antics are not only a news-gathering method, but a performance-commentary on the whole preposterous kabuki dance. A mystery woman turns up in Modesto, making vague claims against Arnold, before she is rushed off to a car by a campaign staffer. We all write down her license plate, and LeDuff indicates he's having the plates traced. A few minutes later, on the bus, he acts like he has news when he receives a call. "Here we go, listen," he says urgently, putting his cell phone on speaker. It's one of his friends relating the unspeakable acts he's performed on Schwarzenegger. "I better take this privately," says Charlie.
Another time, in front of the press corps, LeDuff jabs a recorder in Mike Murphy's face and asks, "If Arnold is elected governor, do you vow right now that he will not grope women?" (Murphy feigns choking.) Then there are his fashion choices: bandannas, shorts, and a rival New York Post cut-off baseball shirt. But the outfit for which he draws resounding cheers comes when he rolls a pair of pants up to his knees, then parades around as if it's normal. "Why did you do that?" a staffer asks him. "Because of all the bull-- I got to wade around in here," he replies.
It's guys like Charlie that keep Team Arnold rightly reticent to open up to pack questioning, or to give us print guys much chance to slice and dice and weigh Arnold's every word and gesture. When I complain yet again about lack of access, Murphy explains it thus: "You can't be the chef at Nobu, which in the magazine business is what you guys want to be."
For this reason, we are forced to work out extra hard on Arnold's punching bags, Todd Harris and Rob Stutzman, with often ridiculous results. Here is a typical exchange between a reporter and Stutzman, after we've watched Stutzman escort the Modesto mystery woman to her sister's car, then watched Stutzman get in a car himself and speed away:
Reporter: Describe what it was like getting in her sister's car.
Stutzman: I didn't get in her sister's car.
Reporter: Whose car was it and can you describe what it was like?
Stutzman: I got into a car with a staffer who drove me to Pleasanton. It smelled like McDonald's.
BECAUSE OF THE NEAR TOTAL lack of access to the candidate--unless you're Tom Brokaw or "Entertainment Tonight"--reporters are forced to find their own entertainment. I find mine in Paul Walton, write-in candidate for governor of California. I stumble upon him one night at 1 A.M. as I'm walking through the parking lot of my Fresno hotel. He is holding court and mixing margaritas in a campaign bus as big as Arnold's. The back of his bus is emblazoned with "We're kicking ass," even though he's not. If he had the resources to poll this race, he'd be at zero percent and dropping like a rock.
But like every other candidate, Paul is an optimist. A telecommunications millionaire by the time he was 30, he took 11 years off to see the world, then got back to work as a spa owner in Escondido. Paul is not unlike most of the suckerfish on the Arnold tour (the campaign hacks, the press hacks, the other freak candidates) who are trying to get over on Arnold's publicity. But Paul is more overt about it. His official campaign press badges, which he distributes liberally, are a photo of him and Arnold shoulder to shoulder in tuxedos. It was taken at one of the awards shows he weasels his way into. "I'm an awards show junkie," he says.
Paul is 47 years old, favors expensive double-breasted suits bought at a discount in Bogota, and has the whitebread looks and lulling speech of a midnight-shift, easy-listening DJ. His three "security guys"--Dan, Achilles, and Andre--are all former military, and Andre used to bodyguard for MC Hammer. His bus driver, who pilots his "home on wheels," used to drive for REM. When he shows me the 12 bunks in his fully outfitted bus, he says, "If these bunks could talk, they'd have said a lot more when REM was here."
On this night, however, Paul, who's single, and his crew, have some female companionship. Christina and Crystal's skirts are as short as their hair is platinum, though they've only come back to the bus to give Paul a haircut. Christina, or maybe it was Crystal, works at "The Cutting Edge" in Bakersfield, and I compliment her on her handiwork. "It looks kind of boufy," she says modestly.
Like almost every alternative candidate I meet in this race, Paul is not a traditional freak. No sandwich boards, no fright wigs, no boring pamphlets about Mumia. Like others I meet who have real jobs as structural engineers or hazardous waste removal experts, Paul is just a guy with a dream--someone who wants to live outside himself, to in a sense live Arnold's life. "I see it as a two-man race," he says guilelessly, "That's why I took out my picture with Schwarzenegger. Let the battle begin."
Paul has spent nearly $50,000 of his own money to keep this crew on the road, and he's not even officially on the ballot. Not wishing to see him cause himself any further financial harm, I tell him he ought to think about dropping out, since the only way he can score Arnold's name recognition is to shoot somebody famous, possibly Arnold. He knows he stands an outside chance of catching Arnold with just a few days remaining, and he doesn't really have much of a platform to speak of, beside spending less on incarceration and more on education (a line that comes in handy when I later watch him try to pick up a girl whose boyfriend is in jail for drunk driving). But one gets the feeling Paul is in it for the pure sense of adventure.
Paul likes to read his USA Today--"my Bible"--to find out what's happening not just today, but also tomorrow. Frequently, he flies all over the world to worm his way into important events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or a peace summit in Jackson Hole. He also likes to read obituaries. "To some people, it sounds morbid," he says. "But for me, it's an uplifting thing to actually read that someone didn't make it through the day. It makes me happier that I'm alive. It trivializes any problem you have, including possibly losing for governor."
Before Paul became a rich guy, he used to teach high school civics. But he decided long ago that it was too boring. "How much more exciting to actually live history and be a part of it," he says. "That's an analogous sense of how I'm living my life. It's like catching the crest of the next wave, and you never know if it's going to take you all the way to shore, or if you're gonna come crashing down in the Banzai pipeline, losing life and limb."
It's hard work, living history, as Paul finds out in the next few days. Following Arnold all over the state, he'd planned to challenge him to a debate. (When I point out that Schwarzenegger won't even debate Davis, he responds that Arnold might think he'd lose to Davis, "but maybe he'll think he'll win against me.") Keeping one eye on Arnold, the other on Paul, I run into him again sitting on his bus at a Schwarzenegger rally in Modesto. I try to light a fire under him by telling him he needs to start working voters. There's plenty to work, since Arnold's turned out the crowds. Paul is shy, but he takes my advice and heads down to the rally. But just as it's getting underway, he demurs. He doesn't want to be seen "as some eccentric with a bullhorn. . . . I'll make my stand in Pleasanton," he promises.
In Pleasanton, I never see him. So I call him in between press gaggles on new Arnold bimbo eruptions. In "an ugly new low," Paul alleges, the California Highway Patrol diverted his bus when it came too close to Arnold's "Running Man." "At first, I thought they were giving me a police escort to the Fairgrounds," he says naively. Then he learned the ugly truth. By the time he gets to Sacramento for Arnold's big-finish bus tour rally on the statehouse steps, he is hopping mad, pushing press releases about the incident to reporters, who mostly push them back.
As I set out to meet Paul on the morning of the mega-rally (it's nice to have access to some candidate), I make my way through our hotel lobby, where a National Federation of the Blind conference is adjourning. Throughout the hall, a flood of visually impaired types are bumping into furniture while probing with their sticks. "Kind of reminds you of voters," says one colleague. Paul first stops by the fringe candidates' microphone stand (over 100 candidates, plus the write-ins, are supposed to share it), but there's no crowd around. So he decides to go campaign in the maw of Arnold madness.
For a Sunday morning political rally, it's quite the spectacle. A large black man runs down the street claiming he's been groped by Arnold. Behind the press risers, feminist groups and pro-lifers join forces against Schwarzenegger, proving that he's a uniter, not a divider. Stutzman is surveying the campaign staff's magnificent handiwork, but he doesn't seem to enjoy it. "Goddamn it," he says. "I'm going to get the bald-spot burn. Middle-life sucks." I decide to hit him up anyway. "Tell me something inside," I say. Stutzman eyes the stage with Dee Snider singing Arnold's theme song, "We're not gonna take it" (a song we've heard so many times that LeDuff now sings "We can't f--ing take it"). "Lip-synch," Stutzman nods.
It's loud as all get-out: the percussive Asian drums, the Chinese paper dragon snaking through the audience, the stylings of "Twisted Sist-ahhhh," as Arnold calls them. But there is one sound that stands out above all others: the sound of irony being lost on people. Every protesting lefty I encounter at the rally, who spent the entire '90s hibernating while the likes of Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey alleged that Bill Clinton had groped them and worse, thinks Arnold is a beast. Every conservative who spent the '90s playing moral scold, saying that behavior reveals character and that character counts, maintains that Arnold is a victim of dirty tricks and liberal media bias, and ignores charges for which he's apologized.
The Arnold supporters of course outnumber the Arnold detractors about 250 to 1. There are Ranchers for Arnold and Farmers for Arnold, Bikers for Arnold and Immigrants for Arnold. I approach an Arnold staffer, saying, "You guys dropped the ball--no Lepers or Hermaphrodites for Arnold." "No," he says, but we have those, pointing to a sign that says "Iranian American Republican Council For Arnold." LeDuff, who has taken to alternating his bike-messenger wear with crisp jackets and khakis to look more like Arnold's security guys ("I'm making it to the front line," he says giddily), comes and collects me. "C'mon!" he says, "They're going to let the foreign press look at Arnold's empty bus! We can talk our way on."
Two by two, reporters are shepherded through. One British crew actually shut themselves into his bathroom and report, "This is where Arnold takes his 'Terminator 2's." LeDuff is by now in full mockumentary mode, keeping up a running commentary to whoever will listen: "I need to see that toilet, I'm on east coast deadline. . . . I just want to look at it. . . . Do you think it's made of gold?" After 40 minutes in line, it is my turn to walk the empty bus with a BBC camerawoman. But I'm stopped by Skip, Arnold's bus driver, who spies the Paul Walton/ Arnold lammie that I've taken to wearing out of solidarity with Walton's lost cause. "You just shot yourself in the foot," Skip says. "You're not getting on the bus."
I SPEND ELECTION MORNING covering the race poolside at the Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles. I tell my waitress, Mashia, that I should be working the polls, but I've had it with real people. "That's okay," she says, "there's not many of them left out here." I ask her who she voted for. She says she hasn't and she's not going to, because she doesn't really know the issues, and she doesn't think ignorant people should vote. I want to hug her, and not just because she's hot and wearing a sarong.
That night, at the Century Plaza Hotel, the polls have not yet closed, but the celebration is already on. Arianna Impressionist-In-Chief Patrick Dorinson is viewing the night through the eyes of the Greek socialite and erstwhile gubernatorial candidate: "Vell, I think it's a lovely affair, there's just so many people in favor of the recall. I've changed my mind again." Todd Harris sits at a table drinking a light beer, jokingly recounting the path to victory: "It takes a confluence of incredible political skills, brilliant strategy, and pedestrian reporting."
LeDuff, wearing a black leather motorcycle vest and tie, approaches former candidate Bill Simon, who's telling a television crew what a "good family guy" Arnold is. Charlie points at Simon and asks, "Catholic?" Simon nods in assent. "Catholic," says LeDuff, pointing to himself. "Conservative?" asks LeDuff. Simon says yes. "Conservative," says LeDuff, again pointing to himself. So how is "snatching women" a family value? LeDuff asks Simon.
"There's a saying in our church that goes like this," says Simon. "Forgive the sinner, but not the sin." I pile on, asking Simon if he felt the same way about Clinton.
"Certainly," he says.
Whatever. Tired of being too far away from the action, I put on the staff bracelet that a campaign aide slipped me. I use it to get all the way up on stage during Arnold's acceptance speech, just to prove to myself that I still can. I stand in the hot lights, alongside Arnold and Maria and their supporters. There's director Ivan Reitman and comedian Jay Leno and actor Rob Lowe and professional nutjob Gary Busey. In such close proximity to all the Shrivers, my teeth feel smaller and my hair thinner.
I listen to Arnold thank his fahn-tas-teek wife, and watch them sweep into the wings, to endure another grueling interview with "Access Hollywood." I take in all the sights: the belching confetti cannons, the balloon drops, the stripper who hops up on stage and gets down to her thong before security practically dive-tackles her. But it feels like something's missing: I have no one to share this spectacularly surreal moment with. And that's when I bump into Paul Walton.
He is overjoyed to see me: "We are unstoppable!" he says. "It doesn't matter where in the world, we're there." I ask how he even got in, let alone all the way up to the stage, without the proper bracelet. He knows the hotel like the back of his hand, he tells me--he comes here for awards shows--and he slipped in with Darrell Issa, the congressman and publicity tapeworm/father-of-the-recall. "He was denied!" Paul says. "He couldn't even get in. He had to find his own way in through a service elevator. Woo-hoo!"
Paul is amped like I've never seen him amped, and he's brought company--a woman named Janet who identifies herself as "Paul's lover when he's in San Diego." He tells me that at the polls that morning, he found his name on the write-in list. It had been wadded up and thrown in the trash, but he got it out, and it "felt wonderful to finally see my name in print, even if it was on a crinkled piece of paper."
I'm ready to head back to press quarters at the bar, but Paul's not quite set to go. "Matt," he asks, "are you right-handed or left-handed?" I tell him I'm right-handed. "Then stand on this side of me," he says, aligning us shoulder to shoulder as we face the blinding lights of the camera crews using the stage for their nightly news backdrop. "One, two, three," he counts, "We're gonna wave." And we do. He then asks Janet to throw some fallen confetti on us, just for the full effect. I feel ridiculous, but not much more than I have all week. "That's what it's all about, I'm really enjoying this," he says, beaming. "If you can't win, at least you can feel like a winner."
Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
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