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Gubernatorial goldrush: why the terminator is no gipper
Washington Monthly, Dec, 2003 by Jonathan Rowe
Next to being sued by Bill O'Reilly, one of the best things that could happen to the author of a political biography is for the story to play out again just as the book is going on sale. That's what happened to Lou Cannon regarding this new biography of a Hollywood actor who becomes Republican governor of California.
Cannon's good fortune is ours as well. Without the Davis recall, Governor Reagan would have been mainly of historical interest. Now, considering that Schwarzenegger has named Reagan as his model, it becomes a divining rod for what lies ahead.
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The book also is a pleasure. Cannon has covered Reagan since his first campaign for governor in 1966, and the result is biography that often approaches memoir. Cannon is present but not intrusive, a trickier task than one might think (vide Edmund Morris's Datch). He clearly likes Reagan; and it speaks to Cannon's fairness of mind that, seeing through his eyes, we come to like Reagan, too.
Yet Cannon is clear-eyed on Reagan's failings--his disengagement both mental and emotional, for example, and his tendency to be led by staff. Cannon does not hide his differences on policy either. These observations cut deep because he does not make them with relish--a lesson the writers of CBS' aborted and (according to reports) sophomoric biopic of Reagan apparently never learned. But probably the most interesting thing about Governor Reagan at this moment is the light it sheds on the character who looms offstage--Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The symmetry is indeed uncanny. Republican actor issues forth from the moneyed precincts of Southern California, promising to unshackle enterprise from the stifling grip of government, and sporting a perennial tan. Candidate is dismissed as a mere (and mediocre) actor who lacks experience for the job, yet defeats an unpopular Democrat beset by fiscal woes. Nationally, Democrats pick up vague seismic forebodings which they hope will go away.
But does Arnold's election really continue the nation's move to the right that Reagan helped to start? Not likely. Reagan congealed the Republican Party's rightward flank at a time when its Washington establishment tended toward the center. Now Schwarzenegger could do the opposite, and provide a counterweight to the party's new hardright tilt.
The strange part is, he could do this even as he follows the example of Governor Reagan that Lou Cannon has portrayed.
For all the similarities of story line, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger are very different. When Reagan was first elected, someone asked him how he would govern. "I don't know," Reagan replied, "I've never played a governor before." He was joking but also not joking, Cannon observes. Reagan was a true actor who found himself emotionally in the roles he inhabited. Offstage he was a kind man who tended to be inattentive to what was going on around him. "When advisor Martin Anderson, exiled from Reagan's entourage because of a staff purge that the candidate ignored, rejoined the Presidential campaign after a long absence," Cannon writes, "he sensed that Reagan was happy to have him back without quite knowing he had been away."
Cannon's Reagan was entirely capable of tuning out an Iran-Contra scandal. His son Michael said that he often was "completely oblivious" to others. Reagan's guardedness in life probably was connected to his extraordinary ability to nestle into the public mind--to be to people in general what he could not be to people in particular.
But Reagan was not the dummy that his critics assume. He was a shrewd politician with a strong internal compass and a fine ear for audience. Governor Reagan suggests that state government brought out the best in him, since it made him grapple with the concrete in a way that Washington did not. The results could be surprising. Early in his first term, for example, Reagan signed the largest tax increase in California history. The corporate tax rate doubled, and the top individual rate went from 7 to 11 percent, making it possible to balance the budget without cutting funds for schools. It also got rid of the unpleasantness three years before the next election.
Reagan also signed what was then the most liberal abortion bill in the country. (Nancy Reagan's father, a retired surgeon, favored such a loosening.) Determined to show he could govern, Reagan compromised with California's Democratic legislature, and got as good as he gave. That's part of Schwarzenegger's model.
So, too, is an environmental record that in retrospect is amazing. It was Ronald Reagan--yes, Ronald Reagan--who stopped a big highway project in the Sierras that would have cut the John Muir Trail in half. It was Ronald Reagan who stopped a major dam on the Eel River that would have wiped out a beautiful valley and an Indian settlement. "We've broken too many damn treaties," he said.
Reagan helped create the Redwood National Forest and added 145,000 acres to the state park system, along with two ocean preserves. How could this be the same politician who a decade later would sic James Watt on the nation's wilderness and prairies?
