SUPERMODERATE.(the movie career, political rise and governing style of actor and Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger)

In late April, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to address some five thousand travel-industry representatives from around the world who had gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center for their annual trade show. But first they were to watch a short film, made especially for the occasion. It was a barrage of mixed Arnold images. There was Arnold, last August, announcing on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" that he was going to run for governor. There he was on the campaign trail. But there he was as the Terminator, in "Terminator 3"! There he was delivering his State of the State address. There he was, the Terminator, again! As the film ended, a strange roar came from the back of the vast, dark auditorium; then a spot-light revealed a Terminator-like figure, in head-to-foot black leather and dark glasses, astride an enormous orange Indian motorcycle. Revving its engine, he rode it down an aisle, through the audience, and up a ramp onto the stage. He dismounted and strode to the center of the stage, and the words echoed through the hall, in that familiar Austrian accent: "I told you. I'll be back."

Suddenly, another figure--Schwarzenegger!--emerged from the wings, and walked to a microphone. Wearing a beautifully tailored cream-colored suit, he was a study in tawny-brown accents, with his skin a caramel tan, his hair a burnished-copper tint, and his tie a chocolate shade. After a wild ovation, Schwarzenegger thanked his stuntman. And then he addressed the crowd. "I thank you very much for changing the Constitution of the United States of America, and I accept your nomination to run for President." He paused. "Oh, wrong delegation. Sorry, wrong speech."

A week later, Schwarzenegger made a trip to Israel, with an itinerary befitting an American President: he met with the Israeli Prime Minister, and with many members of the Knesset; then he stopped off in Jordan to see the King; and, finally, he visited U.S. troops in Germany. There, in a speech to hundreds of soldiers, he used the changing-the-Constitution line again. "It's smart--he is getting it out there," a friend of his remarked, adding that it would take several years, at least, to pass the necessary amendment. There is a clause in the Constitution which states that only natural-born citizens are eligible for the Presidency; last summer, Senator Orrin Hatch proposed an amendment that would make it possible for anyone who has been a citizen for twenty years to hold the office. Schwarzenegger became a citizen twenty years ago.

As outlandish as such an ambition would have seemed just a short time ago, it is a measure of Schwarzenegger's effectiveness and popularity in his early months as governor that--but for the Constitution--it now seems eminently plausible. With a shrewdness surprising in a political novice, the former bodybuilder quickly defined the terms of his success as governor: he would provide action, in place of the political stasis that had affected the state, and he would set specific goals, and meet them. Whether the goals he set were optimal from a policy standpoint, and whether the state would rebound from its severe fiscal crisis because of them, was far less clear than the fact that he had achieved them. That was blazingly clear, because Schwarzenegger has combined marketing savvy and elaborate Hollywood staging to bombard Californians with this message: he is their action governor, just as he was an action hero--and together they will do the impossible!

All the bravura notwithstanding, he has positioned himself as a moderate, a throwback kind of Republican. From his first days in office--he was sworn in on November 17th--he both preached and practiced bipartisanship. As a Republican governor with a Democratic-controlled legislature, he may have had little choice, but he has pursued the approach with such zest that he has won from Democratic legislators concessions that they never made to Gray Davis, his Democratic predecessor, who lost his office in a historic recall election, last October. When I interviewed Governor Schwarzenegger recently at the state capitol, in Sacramento, I asked him about his emphasis on bipartisanship. "I think that always in the history of this country people wanted to see action, people wanted to see things done, not to talk about it but to get it done," he said. The way to get things done, he continued, was to "bring people together. We should not care who is a Democrat and a Republican--both are good people, both are good parties. There is no evil party, or this is the bad party, the good party--and I never looked at it like that, you know?" He said that when he wanted to make bodybuilding more popular he had taken a similar approach. "It needed everybody. Women bodybuilding, male bodybuilding, the freaks, the good-looking guys, the power lifters, the weight lifters--everyone had to come together to make it grow. And so to me the key was, O.K., when I win, I will make an effort to bring everyone together, because then the people will see hope. And then--not only the people in California but the people of America."

As for bipartisanship, he said, "I'm most proud of that, because everyone said, 'That will never happen.' . . . The fun part about it is to do something when everyone says it can't be done. . . . This is exactly what my life always has been about. When someone says you can't do it--you can imagine, when I was in Austria, you know, if I said to my mother, 'I want to be a world champion in bodybuilding,' she would have smacked me! 'Are you crazy?' She would go nuts, you know? And I had bodybuilding pictures all over my bedroom wall, and she said, 'What's wrong with this guy? He has naked guys up there, and all the other guys have naked girls.' You know? So I thrive on that, when someone says, you know, that it can't be done."

Shortly after Schwarzenegger first won the Mr. Universe title, in 1967, at the age of twenty, Reg Park--a bodybuilding champion who had become an actor, and whom Schwarzenegger idolized--invited him to his home in Johannesburg. Park's son, Jon Jon, a Los Angeles fitness trainer who has been a friend of Schwarzenegger's for decades, recalled that, during the visit, "he showed my dad a list of what he wanted to achieve. He had already decided he wanted to have the best physique in the world. He wanted to emulate my dad in terms of getting into movies. Then he wanted to direct movies. Then he wanted to get into politics."