Every so often in life you have to go out on a limb. So here goes: Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be the next governor of California. What's more, his loss will represent an important moment in a shift in American politics that has been in gestation for some time now -- toward a politics in which voters make decisions more on the basis of their cultural affinities than in response to a candidate's charisma or fame.
The media have already decided Schwarzenegger is close to a shoo-in. The Time magazine poll -- in which he led Gov. Gray Davis by 19 points and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante by 10 -- was widely perceived as showing his strength. In fact, it showed exactly the opposite. Schwarzenegger is probably among the two dozen most famous people in the world. A lieutenant governor is a lieutenant governor; he can drive himself to the video store and stare at the shelves for 45 minutes without a soul noticing. Usually a political candidate who is already famous and enters a race starts out polling high and has nowhere to go but down once he starts sounding more like a politician and less like a movie star. That Arnold led Bustamante just 25-to-15 should be very worrisome for Schwarzenegger partisans.
And in the week he's been a candidate, Schwarzenegger's numbers sure haven't gone up. His first round of morning talk-show appearances was judged pretty awful. More recently, as the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday, there's been enough grumpiness in the Arnold camp that a fairly major shake-up has already taken place, with people like George Gorton, Schwarzenegger's chief adviser over the last couple of years, relegated to the second tier. When campaigns do that, leaks to the press from the disgruntled faction are the inevitable byproduct. And once a campaign gets a reputation as disorganized or divided, that becomes the scent the media decide to track, and the reputation becomes a difficult one to shake.
Arnold's new close advisers come from the camp of former Gov. Pete Wilson. As associations go, this isn't a great one in today's California: Wilson is mostly remembered for the Proposition 187 ballot initiative that sought to slice state aid to illegal immigrants. It's true that Prop. 187 passed by a large margin. But that's precisely why it could now be a problem for Arnold: The people who came out on the short end of that vote (and Schwarzenegger voted for it) are the ones who are still angry about it. Anger, of course, is a better motivator than joy. A Latino candidate ought to be able to do something with that.
Another thing a Latino candidate ought to be able to use: The Oct. 7 recall ballot will feature yet another proposition, this one called Prop. 54, that seeks to ban state and local government agencies from collecting racial data, even for use in compiling health-care statistics and the like. This is the handiwork of Ward Connerly, the black, anti-affirmative action University of California regent who spearheaded the anti-affirmative action Prop. 209. Prop. 54 may well pass; those kinds of things usually do. But mere passage can be a deceptive way to look at a situation like this. If Prop. 54 makes it through, it will be with the backing of voters of many different ideological stripes -- Schwarzenegger supporters, Davis supporters or backers of the two leading conservative candidates -- for whom Prop. 54 was not a motivator but an afterthought. For many opponents, however, Prop. 54 will be a motivator. Those are Bustamante voters, so Prop. 54 can simultaneously win and still drive up Bustamante's turnout.
And finally, there's those two conservatives. Failed gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon and state Sen. Tom McClintock both vow to run all-out races. Republicans win in California, as Wilson did, by essentially acting like moderates but sending just enough signals to mollify the voters on the hard right. Schwarzenegger, by all appearances, already has the right against, or at least very suspicious of, him. He's going to have to make choices in the next seven weeks on a whole range of social issues. Those choices will upset either moderates or right-wingers. It's unlikely he'll be able to satisfy both, which is one of the costs of having to fill in a tabula rasa in such a short time period.
A few years ago Arnold's fame and stature could have more than likely overcome these deficiencies. But something has been changing in American politics in recent years. A series of corrosively divisive events have made Americans choose sides to a degree that has no recent precedent in American politics. The Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election and the debate over the Iraq War have been the main events. But larger cultural developments and controversies, from same-sex marriage to whether one believes Martha Stewart and her $248,000 windfall are really worth a prosecutor's time, have created an America in which engaged citizens are defending their cultural and ideological turf and are increasingly distrustful of the people and institutions that don't share their mores. It's a climate, in other words, in which great fame or a winning personality is less likely to trump people's deeper concerns about the state of the culture and the direction the country is heading.
Which brings us to 2004. It's often been observed that the Democratic field is personality challenged. I wouldn't disagree. But I think the upcoming presidential election might be the least personality-driven election in generations. It's more important now, in a country as divided as this one is, that candidates represent a set of values. An other-than-flashy Cruz Bustamante, and even a boring Democratic presidential candidate, can come out ahead if they do that vigorously and intelligently.
Michael Tomasky will become executive editor of the Prospect in September. His columns appear on Wednesdays at TAP Online.
