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Jonez
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Arnold as Governor??
October 10, 2003 - 12:11 PM
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Arnold Schewarzenegger has just been named governor of one of the largest states in the US.
However, with California being known as the home of the stars, were his qualifications really taken into consideration, or was this just another pat he was cast in? Seeing as the percentage of Hollywood moguls is so drastic, did his friends just vote for him because they truly felt as thought he was well suited for the job, or because they were worried they wouldn’t be invited to his next big party?
I mean seriously, have we really seen any signs of his ability to be governor. Does he really have the potential that he so easily exudes? Or maybe this is just another thing in on his Hollywood TO-DO list?
Does he think that he’ll be taken seriously, or that people will be able to trust that he’ll pull this off? Being a Hollywood movie star, the majority of people expect him to do well. To be just as infallible as he was in all his Terminator movies.
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Justin Bukoski
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Ahnuldwood
October 10, 2003 - 10:11 AM
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Only in California can Arnie be governor, but I think it's ultimately a good thing for Californians.
Arnold is pretty wealthy, and he doesn't seem like a greedy person (he took a paycut filming T3 so they can film it in LA instead of Vancouver, despite that being a bad thing for Canada, it's a good thing for California). I doubt he is going to let personal ambitions become more important than California's well being, and luckily, like the presidency, A governor doesn't hold the weight of the entire state on his shoulders, they usually have competent staff members to do all the hard work.
Sadly, Arnold as governor is good for California, but it's probably bad for everyone else. Especially the Canadian Film Industry. But there isn't much those who don't live in California can do about it.
I also don't think that people are going to think he is infallible, this guy WAS in "Last Action Hero" and "Jingle All The Way".
Remember though, Arnold isn't the only republican actor elected into office before, remember Ronald Reagan?
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Jarra McGrath
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
October 10, 2003 - 11:00 AM
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------
A Black Day for Democracy
Schwarzenegger and the Failure of the Dems
By DAVID LINDORFF
The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of America's largest state represents a kind of milestone in the decline of American democracy. This is not "Reagan II, the Movie," as some have suggested--a second actor being elected governor of the tinsel state. Reagan, for all the criticism that he was "just an actor," in fact had paid his political dues, leading the actors union and getting involved in a variety of campaigns--for example against Medicare--before jumping into electoral politics to run for governor. While he certainly relied on his actor's charm to manufacture a persona, he had a conservative political agenda and was fairly candid about it.
Schwarzenegger, in contrast, has no political background. He is a total artifice, a creation of a group of Republican backers who care little or nothing about his personal beliefs or ideology, and see him as a vehicle for restoring Republican control in a state that has been becoming increasingly Democratic.
What is incredible, and terribly demoralizing about this election is that a majority of voters in a state holding a fifth of the U.S. population bought the product. In a moment of nihilistic fury at the corruption and cronyism of the Democratic Party apparatus and its titular head, Gov. Gray Davis, they cast their votes along with the state's Republicans for a man who stands for nothing but himself, who is a long-time misogynist with a history of assaulting women, and who is in thrall to business interests (who can be expected attempt to gut the state's once model regulatory apparatus).
Make no mistake: the Democratic Party richly deserved this debacle. California Democratic politicians have long taken their traditional liberal, labor and minority base for granted. The ultimate Clintonians, California's Democratic leadership bought into the neo-Liberal idea of deregulation, bringing on the state's electricity crisis; they have endorsed right-wing get-tough approaches to crime that have made the state a leader in prison construction, and in the grotesque mass incarceration of minorities, and most seriously they have surrendered to the three-decades long Republican-led drive to limit property taxes (a grossly favor-the-rich campaign), refusing to offer progressive alternatives that would tax corporations and the rich to pay for schools, roads and other essential local services. Little wonder then that in a crisis, that progressive Democratic base not only failed to turn out to defend an embattled Democratic politician, but in many cases actually voted for his nemesis.
The sad thing is that they didn't have to do it.
There was an alternative, and I don't mean Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamonte, who despite his Hispanic name and working class background was just another cog in the Clintonian centrist Democratic Machine.
The alternative was Peter Camejo, the Green Party candidate--a genuine progressive and, like Bustamonte, a Latino.
Why the huge wave of Democratic support for Schwarzenegger?
My guess is that these normally Democratic voters weren't really thinking. They were understandably angry at Gray Davis and the Democratic Party. That would explain the yes vote on the recall, and the failure to vote for Bustamonte, who is really just a better fed and less hirsute Davis. But if they had been thinking, they wouldn't have voted for Schwarzenegger, who will in the end do nothing to help the state's school system, which is beginning to rival Mississippi's, especially in urban districts, in terms of poor outcomes, and who is likely to continue with deregulation schemes while gutting environmental protections and undermining organized labor. No Arnold, who has admitted to admiring, if not the actions of, then at least the style of countryman Adolf Hitler, has managed to copy his mustachioed mentor, in portraying himself as a muscular leader (the Austrian word for that is Fuehrer). And millions of Californians--many of them registered Democrats according to exit polls-- apparently liked that.
Well, an awful lot of Germans also liked that one back in the election of 1932.
Of course, that's not to say Arnold is Adolf. He has said he despises everything Hitler did and stood for, and we have no reason not to believe him. California is not about to become a fascist outpost on the North American continent because of his election. (If fascism is to come to America, it will arrive in Washington, not California, and more likely in creeping form via actions of the Pentagon and the Justice and Homeland Security Departments than overtly via election.)
What is dismaying about this recall election is how many Californians were willing to vote for that empty muscle shirt with the carefully dyed and coifed hairstyle above, and the carefully scripted and equally empty slogans. (Equally dismaying is the poor showing by the Greens' Camejo. If there were ever a time for dissatisfied progressives to turn to a third party for a protest vote, this was it. For Camejo, who was articulate, campaigned aggressively, and who was able to get unprecedented state-wide attention in a heavily viewed televised five-way candidates' debate, to have still garnered less than 3 percent of the vote, means that hard-line third party advocates need to seriously reassess their strategy of shunning, and running against, the Democratic Party. For whatever reason, that strategy ain't working.)
Gen. Wesley Clark, the "muscle man" in the Democratic presidential primary campaign, has meanwhile offered an Arnold-like example of vacuity in announcing his candidacy with a speech that called for moving the country "forward, not backward," a line that somehow managed to evoke wild cheering from his audience.
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but apparently California voters, and American voters in general, love it. Schwarzenegger's big win in California--based as it was on such deliberate emptiness--is likely to reinforce this tendency in a national Democratic Party that for years, and especially since the election of William Jefferson Clinton, has consciously and carefully stood for nothing.
If the California electorate is in any way indicative of the state of the national electorate, the outlook for 2004, and for American democracy, is grim.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://soros.c.tep1.com/maabxA0aa1bChb36RnGb/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Other News" is a personal initiative seeking to provide information that should be in the media but is not, because of commercial criteria. It welcomes contributions from everybody. Work areas include information on global issues, north-sutrh relations, gobernability of globalization. The "Other News" motto is a phrase which appeared on the wall of Barcelona’s old Customs Office, at the beginning of 2003:”What walls utter, media keeps silent”. Roberto Savio
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Haseeb
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Celeb Power!!!
October 14, 2003 - 05:16 AM
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Following the story on the Media was very funny for me.
It was really un bearable to see the CA inhabitants vote fo Arnie and when later they were asked why did they votefor Arnie and what do they think is on Arnies agenda?
They all had nothing to say but this that we dont know.
It no doubt was his clebreity power that won him the governer seat;
Maybe the currently struggling democrats would be thinking on Madona as a Presidential Candidate , when Arnie can , Why cant Madona?
or they can use the RAMBO, who is nothing less then what the Terminato is.
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Jarra McGrath
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
October 17, 2003 - 10:03 AM
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031020-517766,00.html
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Pumping Irony
Despite the caricatures, Arnold may be the model of a new kind of politician
By ANDREW SULLIVAN
Monday, Oct. 20, 2003
Behind the celebrity factor, behind the recall circus, lies a tantalizing possibility. In his unique blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a genuinely new kind of politician, one that both parties have lamentably failed to provide in the past couple of decades. In our political wars, he's a synthesis. In our culture wars, he's a truce.
In some ways, the culture wars in this country for the past couple of decades have been about the 1970s. The sexual and cultural revolution of that decade symbolizes for one side all that has gone wrong with America, and for the other, much that has gone right. We have lurched back and forth in reaction to this — with the multiculti left on one side and the religious right on the other, and the rest of us uncomfortably in between, longing for some kind of synthesis, some way out and forward.
Arnold taps into this. He is, after all, the ultimate creature of the 1970s. If you don't believe me, go rent Pumping Iron, the extraordinary documentary of Schwarzenegger's rise in the nascent bodybuilding culture of the time. He took a minor and largely derided sport and made it a world-wide sensation. And he extolled its pleasures and reveled in its vanity. He said he used to compare a good workout in the gym with an orgasm — and on Oprah! You can see frames of him smoking what looks like a big fat joint after a contest win. You can view Mapplethorpe-like photographs of him in the nude. You can see his complete ease in the bohemian subculture of Muscle Beach.
And then in the 1980s and 1990s, his movies created almost a parody of the Rambo-esque Reaganite action figure. Schwarzenegger took the genre, amped up its testosterone and then finished it off with a huge and merry dollop of irony. He was one of the first major movie stars who winked at the audience, understanding that they too were intelligent enough to see through the pyrotechnics and absurd dialogue to be amused by the pure entertainment of the spectacle. In his first two careers, Arnold deeply understood both the bohemian and conservative aspects of the popular culture of which he was a part. He immersed himself in them and helped bring them together.
Do you know of any other politician like that? One of Arnold's predecessors as Governor, Ronald Reagan, was a child of the popular culture. But he belonged to an earlier generation; he never made fun of himself as a movie star (that was left to others). And in office, his occasional appeal to movie references--"Go ahead, make my day"--was uneasily balanced by a moral Puritanism that helped cement a post-Dixie South into his coalition. Clinton tried to make himself look hip. But he always seemed suppliant to Hollywood, as if he were trying to be cool by association, never quite escaping the nerd from Arkansas within. Arnold, in contrast, is a complete creature of the pop culture, aware of its internal contradictions and happy to play with them.
The fact that he is a Republican makes his former bohemianism all the more salient. If such a pleasure-loving person were a Democrat, the Republican right would attack him with the venom they reserved for Clinton. Indeed, some Republican scolds like Alan Keyes chastised Schwarzenegger last week for being on the "evil side" in the culture wars. But when left-wing feminists tried the right's anti-Clinton tactics on Arnold — making much of the last-minute flurry of accusations of sexual misconduct — they sounded bitter and not a little hypocritical. In their scolding of the big-grinned Arnold, they seemed as uptight as the far right and were rejected by the post-Clinton electorate. So Arnold snuck through the left-right paradigm with the dexterity of a well-honed deltoid flex.
Schwarzenegger represents a cultural politics that is missing in America: culturally liberal on issues like sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, fiscally conservative on taxes and spending, and hawkish on foreign policy. He is neither the interest-group drone of Democratic establishment nor the dour scold of the Republican base. He's the kind of guy who watches the same movies we do, who's both larger than life yet in touch with the cultural air we all breathe. He's an immigrant who doesn't alienate any region of the country, and a conservative who, one suspects, has a gay friend or two and isn't freaked out about it. That kind of complicated but real candidate has been my dream for most of my adult life. He may, of course, not turn out to be an effective Governor. But by being Governor at all, he has changed our political culture for good. And made the possibility of less-polarized politics a little bit larger than it used to be.
From the Oct. 20, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
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amy
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
October 20, 2003 - 04:07 AM
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I'm convinced that Russell Crowe is set to become the next President. Have you seen the trailer from his new movuie, "Masters and Leaders: something something"? It's like he CHOSE the role with election campaigns in mind. "Ah, yes, it's me, Lucky Jack the Sea Captain, leading ships through storms and wars, inspiring young boys everywhere."
UGH.
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Rob
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
October 22, 2003 - 03:26 AM
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Its too bad he made it in
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Rotimi Alagbe
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The Last Action Governor of Carlifonia
December 12, 2003 - 09:41 AM
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Hm...Well what do you know Arnie is now Gov. I wonder why he did venture into politics in the first place. It came as a shock to me, now I know anything is possible. I may be the next after Arnie who knows?
But before we start condemming our beloved "Terminator" we should give him a chance to prove himself. Lets say 6 months. Lets watch him and see if he is uo to the task. I bet Arnie knows quite well that there are so many eyes on him out there wating for him to fail, are you one of them?
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Oke Rotimi
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
January 22, 2004 - 02:11 AM
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I believe very strongly in Arnold and i know he will surperise every doubting thomas that he is capable of leading the state to greater heights.
Just give him time and let him prove himself,i am sure he will not fail.
Oke Rotimi
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Luke Lieberman
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
January 22, 2004 - 03:37 AM
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Don't knock it - I live in california - Arnold's doing a pretty solid job. His first action was to lighten the loads on the prisons by pardoning small time offenders like pot possestion - we are in a budget crisis and this is a good idea -
He has had a few other innovative ideas and not yet raied taxes to cover the problem.
Anyway - I know it seems funny - but the guy has made himself 800 million dollars in personal assets - much of it through buz investment - he's a bright guy.
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Oke Rotimi
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
January 27, 2004 - 09:02 AM
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hello,
I still believe Anorld will surpise doubting thomases....
watch out for him!
Oke Rotimi
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Alejandro Hernández
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
March 24, 2004 - 10:58 AM
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And not just for the Canadian film industry, Justin... the political position of this immigrant -legal of course-, Arnie, denied the chance to hundreds of illegal immigrants in the California State to have even a bank account...
Terminator seems to want to exterminate illegal immigrants as if they were parasites...
As someone said before, a political does not work alone, but with a lot of people... supposedly experts. One point to analyze here is that Terminator has, apparently, the last word about every decision.
But more further, who is behind Arnold? just as who is behind attitudes and acts of George Bush?
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Jose Menacho Galiano
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
March 24, 2004 - 11:22 AM
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I like Arnold's movies and some personal projects with dissabilities people too. I am not see Arnold as a "Terminator" I mean he is someone who came to USA as any other inmmigrant and had the chance for success. Since his exit into their bodybuilding career to Hollywood works... I recognize on him the value and preseverance of their personality. As a big star he also showed to audience as a sensible man in some charity activities and into their movie career as a versatile actor from Action to Comedy Movies. Into politics, in spite of the fact he is a charismatic Republican one of their biggest faults is the treat he gave to inmmigrants in California. As we knew he was also an inmmigrant, but with more opportunities than others by his european origin (Austrian) On the other side, other inmmigrants and AMERICANS as Mexicans or Latin Americans have less chances to regularize their legal situation... In spite of the fact Mexicans were the owners of California and the income of million of dollars inmmigrants generated in USA the result is totally injusted... So Herr. Schwarzenegger thinks on an equitative treat in the case of inmmigration ( I not mean allow the illegality as a rule, but regulate It with equity ) please take a look in your own roots and allowed us to think you are that bright man you are on movies and in real world. 
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Jose Menacho Galiano
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
March 25, 2004 - 11:02 AM
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Thanks for your words Sandro. I think this is only the thruth, nowadays nobody remember that any country increase their productivity with the help of inmigrants also... For example: Did somebody remember how many people from Europe came to Latin America as inmmigrants after the Second World War? Million of Europeans from Italy, Germany, France, England, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, etc., stablished from Mexico to the Patagonian region of Argentina... When the stability and economy of Europe was falled... Yeah and Latin Americans received these inmmigrants as human people no as second class people...
I hope Arnold could change their point of view about inmmigration in order to make some smart reforms at California. He have the power, the responsability and sensibility.
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Alejandro Hernández
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Re: Arnold as Governor??
March 25, 2004 - 12:53 PM
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Ey, Jose (Latin), hello... I read your opinion about Arnold, and it seems to me very interesting, above all your point about the great amount that Latin American workers originate in California... in fact, California is one of the greatest local economies of the United States. And you are right, we cannot judge to Arnold only by his last acts, and not taking into account his good surpluses, nevertheless... I believe that the life is concrete, real, and at this moment Arnold has not acted thinking about the majorities, but in favor of the minorities...
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