A POLITICALLY PRESCIENT LOOK FORWARD FROM 1999
by Erik Jay
NEWS STORY: Ventura to Schwarzenegger: Don't Run
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - Gov. Jesse Ventura has urged his friend, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, not to run for governor of California. "My advice to Arnold, as a friend, is 'Continue with your movie career, Arnold, don't get involved in it. It won't be worth it to you,'" Ventura said Sunday on "Meet the Press." Ventura added that Schwarzenegger is a brilliant and self-made man "who could be good at anything he desires to do." "But again, my personal advice to him as his friend, I would tell him not to do it," Ventura said. Schwarzenegger said during an interview in the November issue of Talk magazine that he had thought "many times" about running for office. [10/04/99]
COMMENTARY: "ARNOLD AND WARREN"
First Warren Beatty, now Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's not that I have a reflexive opposition to actors in politics; as I used to tell my dad, I
loved the way Ronald Reagan acted as president, and I loved a lot of what he said, even a few things he did. The problem was, he was more rhetoric than action, Nicaragua and the Berlin Wall notwithstanding. At the end of the day, though, the Departments of Energy and Education are still right where Reagan left them, sucking up money and choking initiative and creativity. Except they have bigger budgets now.
Anyway, actors in politics? No big deal anymore, after Reagan, Fred Grandy, Sonny Bono, Governor Ventura. What's great about the current pair, Arnold on the right and Warren on the left, is that we have in their respective public personae some first-rate political shorthand, bold broad strokes of bumpersticker ideology writ large, projected on the shimmering and endless silver screen of multimediamerica. (Arnold! Warren! Minimize the syllables!)
Arnold can't be president for two reasons: (1) he was born in Austria and (2) it's just too darn silly to contemplate. A mayor or governor, though — that's believable. He calls himself a "compassionate conservative" in the mold of George W. Bush, which probably puts him in the "Weekly Standard" neo-conservative/national-greatness camp. Arnold's an intelligent guy, so he knows to capitalize on his screen persona and not act too smart. No quoting Hayek or Friedman; in fact, Jefferson's a stretch. But an affable, upstanding, polite guy who can kick just about anybody's butt is an attractive candidate. Okay, so on this side of the aisle in the celebrity straw-vote virtual primary, we have a kinder, gentler Conan to protect us, establish law and order, hammer a few bad guys and then come together with one and all to watch the sun go down upon his wrath. Now that polls!
Then there's Warren. He's no more qualified than Arnold to be president, but he has an acceptable location on his birth certificate. Now, Warren's no dummy — he reads and everything — but has been dumped on in the press since announcing his possible interest in presidential politics. "Zany" they call him; the professional campaign gurus add "loose cannon" and "wild man" and the like. Warren seems to like the big symbolic acts and the flippant showiness of candidates for, say, homecoming queen or elections commissioner at a seriously left-wing private school. He doesn't seem all the way, well, grown up. Listening to Mr. Beatty for more than about a minute leaves no doubt that there are still members of the Youth International Party in our midst. Yippee for Warren!
Let's assume, obviously just for the sake of argument, that Warren doesn't make too good of a showing in this installment of the White House Follies. Well, he could aim whatever momentum he builds up in the presidential derby right at Sacramento and the Governorship of California, up for grabs again in 2002. The forces of we-know-best paternalistic liberalism could proudly hold Warren up for voter approval: Here he is, the cerebral but sensitive guy who went barefoot in the park with Jane Fonda, helped paint Moscow red as a sympatico "journalist" and tried to make the U.S. Senate safe for self-obsessed manic depressives in a movie whose name was as much like "Bulls**t" as its message. Warren doesn't just feel your pain; he caused a lot of it. Now it's his duty to help you through it by helping to staff the therapeutic state: A vote for Warren is a vote for personal healing.
Now if Arnold ran for guv, too, that would be some match-up. Like many cookie-cutter conservatives — media-sanitized generic patriots, Big Tent compromisers, nationalistic nerds, and action hero lovers —the new self-labeled compassionate kind like Arnold mean well and are decent folks for the most part, good to have as family and neighbors and friends. But not as elected officials in positions of power.
As both a Christian and a libertarian, I have maybe twice as many reasons as one or the other not to trust humans to wield power wisely, and therefore I resist its concentration in fewer and less accountable hands. I wouldn't even want great power in the hands of the best constitutionalist, libertarian people I know; I wouldn't want it for myself. Lord Acton coined the famous saying about power's corrupting influence, and there was no hint that he or his philosophical allies were exempt from its proposed law of human behavior. He wrote simply: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." He didn't add "except people like me will at least do the right things with it."
Okay. So Warren's too wiggy for me, and wants to stress egalité at the expense of liberté as long as he can still hang with his chosen fraternité; Arnold, God bless him, is still somewhat of a political cypher, but judging by what he's said and who he's hung around with and all, he doesn't appear to offer anything politically novel or daring. There's one on each side of the supposed two-party aisle, but both are dishing up more of the same establishmentarian thinking ("I've made my peace with Leviathan") that reflects both bedrock American beliefs and modern American mutations of them: “Sure, I'm an individual — and I'm with this group of folks right over here.”
Hey, I'm an individual, too!
But I'm not with either of these guys.
