Terminator 4: Voting Day

[T_i_B]

Article about Arnold Schwarzenegger running for governor from the UK Guardian. (The UK press seems really quite bemused by the goings on in CA). Question is, what are you lot going to run to beat Arnie?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1014379,00.html

What a difference a couple of years make. In March 2001, Hollywood was agog at a sensational article about Arnold Schwarzenegger in Premiere magazine. It was entitled "Arnold The Barbarian", and Arnie was accused of harassing, groping and fondling female reporters in his trailer - one came in to find the great man engaged in a certain sex act with another woman which he later reportedly laughed off with the deathless phrase: "Eating isn't cheating." And Arnie's ticker, as well as his pecker, was supposed to be leading him into trouble: his heart was weak, following surgery in 1997, said the magazine, and he is hardly in tip-top physical condition.

Yet two years on, and Arnie is still with us; he's back with a third Terminator movie and he's finally decided to run for governor of California - as a Republican, despite the Democrat sympathies of his wife, Maria Shriver, niece of John F Kennedy. Schwarzenegger, of course, follows in the footsteps of that other eminent movie-star-turned-politician Ronald Reagan, although Austrian-born Schwarzenegger is not eligible for the White House.

It's not easy to see if Schwarzenegger, or any modern movie star, has the aptitude for political candidature: an existence that is less protected than the life of the Hollywood A-lister. And politics is different from showbiz in one important respect: the past matters. In Hollywood, if you do a terrible movie that bombs at the box office, it needn't matter - if you follow it up with a smash, then all is forgiven. But in politics, you can make a mistake that comes back to haunt you even after your poll numbers have come back up.

Even if the voters of the sunshine state ignore the racy rumours about Arnie, there is still his family past to consider. His policeman father was a member of the Nazi party in Austria in 1938; Schwarzenegger will find that this will be publicised and investigated as it has never been before. Will he have to apologise? Repudiate his father's past? Visit the Holocaust exhibition? None of this is particularly good political PR.