COMMENT & ANALYSIS: California responds to some strong-arm tactics
By Christopher Caldwell
Late on a Saturday night in Los Angeles three weeks ago, I watched a gang of young men destroy a parked car with sledgehammers. It was one of those graceful, large Audis from the early 1990s, and they hammered at it mercilessly, cheering as they made the bonnet buckle with a sickening crunch, howling as they smashed windscreens, mirrors and headlamps and sent glass tinkling on to the pavement. Ordinarily, this kind of vandalism fills voters with insecurity and drives them into the arms of the Republican party.
This time, though, the vandals were Republicans - a gang of delegates from the party's autumn convention. Tom McClintock, the flagging gubernatorial candidate, had sent them out to trash the car, contributed by a party donor, as a protest against the state's car tax, which has tripled under Gray Davis, the incumbent Democratic governor.
This Clockwork Orange routine must have been a hit. Like every other gimmick in the McClintock campaign, it has been plagiarised by the rival campaign of Arnold Schwarzenegger. At a campaign appearance in Orange County last week, Mr Schwarzenegger promised to "terminate" the car tax, while a giant wrecking ball swung down from a 200ft crane and demolished a 20-year-old Buick.
Mr Schwarzenegger appears more and more likely to be elected California's next governor in the state's two-part special election next Tuesday. A Los Angeles Times poll taken last week showed that 56 per cent of voters favour "recalling" Mr Davis, against 42 per cent who do not. Among candidates to replace Mr Davis, Mr Schwarzenegger is backed by 40 per cent of voters, eight points ahead of his closest rival. His surge in recent days has been accompanied by no changes in his platform and no big speeches - in fact, no direct interaction with the public at all. The more spectacle supplants policy, the faster he rises. In the one debate to which he agreed, he offered no specifics on fixing California's migraine-inducing budget problems. He simply threw off familiar lines from his movies, offering to "terminate" various taxes.
The anti-Schwarzenegger California Voter Project has been running radio advertisements warning that "California needs a governor, not a punchline". California appears to disagree. Mr Schwarzenegger's strategy is to conflate his identity as a candidate with the taciturn icon people know from movies, and the strategy is working. California has been in the vanguard of many hardy political exports, from elaborately choreographed campaign events to consultant-driven policymaking. The post-verbal campaign may be next.
Some observers use the example of Ronald Reagan to claim that there is nothing novel about Mr Schwarzenegger's move from showbiz to government. They are wrong. By the time he ran for governor of California in 1966, Reagan had been involved in politics for decades - first as a Democratic trades-union activist in Hollywood, later as a corporate spokesman for General Electric, and then, after switching parties, as a barnstorming orator who mapped out a new direction for Republicans. Mr Reagan sought to show that he was versatile enough to make the transition from success as an actor to competence as a politician.
Mr Schwarzenegger, by contrast, leaves the impression that he will make no such shift - that he will govern as the on-screen simulacrum the public has come to know.
When voters are polled on which candidate has the experience that would best qualify him for the job, Mr Schwarzenegger finishes rock-bottom, with only 8 per cent of the vote. But when they are asked who would make the best leader, he finishes 15 points above his closest rival.
Mr Davis, who pleads for an honest debate on the issues, saw no need to offer the same courtesy to his Republican opponent last autumn, choosing instead to defeat him through machine politics and a television campaign marked by innuendo. In this election, California Democrats have already raised $100,000 to contest the results if Mr Davis loses. Mr Schwarzenegger is tapping a voter mistrust that the Democratic party has done much to earn.
In fact, Californians have stopped their ears against all politicians, even the traditional Republican opposition represented by Mr McClintock. That is why the usually prudish Republican party endorsed Mr Schwarzenegger last week. Voters have been rendered cynical by their recent political experience and now assume all policy - no matter how straightforwardly stated - will result in fraud. They are ready for someone covered in woad. When the Los Angeles Times published allegations from six women accusing Mr Schwarzenegger of sexual misconduct, he admitted that he had "behaved badly" and occasionally been "rowdy" and "playful". The revelations produced some outrage among women's groups, but no groundswell of disgust. Few expect large-scale voter defections.
There is a process at work that is reminiscent of the old Soviet workers' joke that "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". In California, Mr Schwarzenegger is pretending to submit himself to popular scrutiny and the public is pretending to scrutinise him. And the press pretends to cover the process. Mr Schwarzenegger's campaign is being run by Mike Murphy, the brains behind John McCain's insurgent run for the presidency in 2000. It closes this weekend with a bus tour resembling Mr McCain's "Straight Talk Express", so named because it left him totally exposed to reporters and the public. But there are two differences here. First, Mr Schwarzenegger will be sealed off from reporters in his own bus, emerging (one assumes) only to demolish the occasional Buick. Second, the buses will all be named after Schwarzenegger movies: Running Man, True Lies, Predator 1, etc.
For voters, Mr Schwarzenegger is running literally as a strong man - a pre-verbal, pre-Guttenberg candidate whose only claim to lead is the charisma of his physical prowess. He is probably intelligent enough to seek the governor's office by making his points in debate, but has decided not to bother. He and his handlers reckon we are entering an age in which non-rational appeals reach voters more effectively than rational arguments. Next Tuesday, they stand a good chance of being proved right.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard