STRONGMAN.(Arnold Schwarzenegger gubernatorial candicacy)(Biography)

A political campaign, like an act of love or a basketball game or a night at the opera, has an arc that is shaped by the participants' knowledge of how long it is going to last. As far as the California recall is concerned, last Monday's decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ordering the postponement of the whole thing from October 7th to God knows when, blew that knowledge straight to hell. The candidates were running flat out in a race that was supposed to be all homestretch. Each of the four major ones could see things going his way. The incumbent Governor, Gray Davis, was picking up speed. Bill Clinton was in the state, campaigning for him; Al Gore was on his way; one by one, starting with Howard Dean, the Democratic Presidential candidates were arriving to pledge fealty. The polls still showed a majority for yanking the Governor, but the gap was narrowing. So Davis was hopeful. In the other part of the election, which counts if Davis is recalled, the self-selected, not quite official Democratic candidate, Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, was ahead of the pack. He was drawing thirty per cent in the polls, five points ahead of his nearest rival. So Bustamante was hopeful. That nearest rival, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was raising cash at a tremendous clip, attracting big crowds, consolidating the support of the state's Republican establishment, and flooding the airwaves with thirty-second spots. His campaign was confident that the other important Republican in the race would eventually withdraw. So Schwarzenegger was hopeful. That other Republican, Tom McClintock, a state senator, owns the hearts of California's movement conservatives, who for a decade have dominated the Party's activist core and primary electorate. McClintock didn't have much money, but he was gaining ground. In both of the state's leading polls, the Field Poll and the Los Angeles Times Poll, he was up by half, to thirteen per cent and eighteen per cent, respectively. So McClintock was hopeful. The two visible candidates on the "progressive" left, the columnist Arianna Huffington and the Green Party's Peter Camajo, were not hopeful--not about winning, anyway--but they seemed to be enjoying themselves. The media were having a ball; the voters, to all appearances, were engaged. Then, boom. Electio interrupta.

What does it all mean, politically speaking? Who knows? If the ruling (in which the word "chad" appears eighteen times, and which makes sly use of the Supreme Court's logic in Bush v. Gore) stands, it will supposedly help Davis, because there will be more time for him to make his case, which is more nuanced than the case for throwing him out, and hurt Schwarzenegger, because there will be more time for him to make a mistake, and maybe hurt Bustamante, too, because the more voters learn about him the less they seem to like him. But if the ruling stands and the recall is rescheduled for March 2nd, the date of the Presidential primary, that will supposedly help Bustamante as well as Davis, because the Democrats' lively Presidential contest will draw their voters to the polls. But if the ruling is overturned by the United States Supreme Court, that will supposedly help the Democrats, too, because it will stoke their anger with memories of 2000. But if the ruling is overturned by the Ninth Circuit itself (a more likely outcome, according to some), it will help the Republicans, because they have already been energized by rage.

No matter whom any of this craziness is good for or bad for, the decision discombobulated everybody. No one had the slightest idea what to do. So everybody just kept running straight ahead at top speed, like Looney Tunes characters who've just gone off a cliff. Their feet are churning furiously, but the vertigo is something fierce. In such a situation, might it not be an advantage to be a master of special effects?

On October 8, 1993--a day short of exactly ten years before the originally scheduled date of California's recall election--one of Sylvester Stallone's better movies opened wide at area theatres. In "Demolition Man," Stallone played a Los Angeles cop, cryogenically frozen around the turn of the century as punishment for a bum rap, who is thawed out in the year 2032 to give chase to his similarly thawed-out criminal nemesis. He teams up with Sandra Bullock, a new-style nicey-nice police officer. As she is showing him around the L.A. of the future--where everything is tidy, corporate, and bland--he does a double take when she mentions the "Schwarzenegger Presidential Library." Decades before, Bullock explains perkily, Arnold Schwarzenegger became so popular that the American people waived the technicalities and made him their maximum leader.

This was satire, not prognostication. Either way, though, it appears, at the moment, to be right on schedule. The big technicality, of course, is a clause in Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution--the one that states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President." On July 10th, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, quietly ...