| Wednesday, September 24, 2003 |
20:20 - That didn't go as planned
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I heard a good portion of the California Recall Election debate on the way home; there was Huffington, McClintock, Bustamonte, that Green Party guy, and Ahnuld. The questions were prerecorded, but that doesn't mean the debate was boring.
Quite on the contrary-- it was a real free-for-all. Lots of personal attacks, lots of wild accusations, lots of numbers flung back and forth with little regard for their accuracy or timeliness. The moderator-- whose name I have to find out, as he wrangled these guys with the acerbic aplomb of a Clive Anderson-- was hard put to it to keep them on-topic, for instance to keep a question about how to raise state revenues from circling around into a slam on another candidate's sexual morality.
Impressions: The Green Party guy was completely nuts, as I pretty much suspected he would be. He thinks the fact that the US is the only industrialized nation in the world not to have socialized medicine is the greatest scandal ever, and made doubly so by the fact that illegal immigrants aren't covered equally with citizens. He was so caught up in his weepy, marshmallowy, sit-on-a-hillside-and-feed-the-bunnies-with-manna-from-heaven fantasyland that the other guys pretty much just ignored him, as well they should have.
Ariana Huffington was the most grating-- not because she managed one way or another to turn every single question into an attack on Schwartzenegger (which was admittedly rather easy to do), but because she was so self-righteous. She got to wear the mantle of put-upon-writer-struggling-in-this workaday-world as well as the I'm-smarter-than-everybody-else-here smugness and the big-corporations-are-evil public appeal and the please-think-of-the-children unsassailable attitude, the latter of which, when questioned, she got to turn into a barb at Arnold and "the way he treats women". Arnie retorted, "I think I have a role for you in Terminator 4," but just as he was about to say what it was, my engine died because I was right at the metering light on the on-ramp and I wasn't paying attention when I let out the clutch, and by the time I got the radio back on, the whole crowd was roaring and the moderator was saying "Hey, now, this isn't Comedy Central." Shoot.
But Arnold, now that it comes to him, was the biggest disappointment. He didn't come across as stupid, or even lacking in appropriate experience; he just didn't seem to be taking the whole thing seriously. It's mostly his doing that the debate was so chaotic-- he engaged in as much gleeful mud-slinging as Huffington did, and a lot funnier ("Yeah, you know all about tax shelters, don't you-- you had one last year that I could drive my Hummer through"). The only problem was, he seemed unprepared, and the mud he slung wasn't exactly of proper consistency (Huffington had a perfectly good explanation for that "tax shelter", which she told him about point-blank). He clearly had a lot of facts and figures memorized, but I think his was the crashiest of crash courses in California politics and finance, because the other candidates constantly picked apart his numbers, corrected him, and challenged him with posers that he answered only with cleverly worded platitudes. "Why should the richest 4% of Californians be taxed at a lower rate than the poorest?" asked the Green Guy. "I'm not even asking for a progressive tax-- just a flat one. Why won't you simply agree with me on this one little point?" And Arnold responded by muttering about how Mr. Green should move to Massachusetts. He seemed, more than anybody else, to have been working from a script, and he didn't acquit himself particularly well. I'd been getting the impression for a while that he wasn't taking the election seriously enough to be able to win; but now I'm afraid he's not looking like someone I want to vote for.
Bustamonte reminded me of nobody so much as Brian, the dog from Family Guy. Constantly rolling his eyes, sighing, muttering "Yeah..." and "Uhhnh" and "Well...." over other candidates' statements. I'd have found this annoying, except that the reason why he usually had to do such a thing was to correct some factual error of Schwartzenegger's. Arnie accused Bustamonte of hypocrisy in advocating spending on education but then cutting hundreds of millions from the state education budget in consort with Gray Davis; Cruz carefully, and with admirable restraint, pointed out that he had been the author of the bill to inrease such spending; he even had to reiterate it after Arnie harped on it in rebuttal with some ramble about his after-school programs, which it seemed he was clinging to with some desperation as his last bargaining card.
"I'm the only one here who has been in business! Nobody else here has had to meet payroll or pay for employees' health care!"
"Uh, Arnold, that's not tr--"
"You know what you politicians do all the time? You--"
"<sigh> No, Arnold. What do we do?"
"You invent all these causes, you come in for a photo-op, and then you leave and are never seen again. I sponsored after-school programs for inner-city youth..."
...And so on. I really felt for the man after a while; but then he joined the throng with his position that illegal immigrants should not only be given drivers' licenses, but full medical coverage, social benefits, legal protection-- all that rot. And Huffington, in her smarmy I-can't-be-beholden-to-special-interests role, took him to task for giving preferential treatment to Indian gaming and other groups who'd heavily supported him. So he's no angel. The guy seemed the most like someone hard at work down in the trenches; at least he seemed sincere about his commitment to the job. But that doesn't make me want to vote for him.
The big surprise, though, was Tom McClintock. He impressed the hell out of me. He was the most concise, well-spoken, restrained, and effective speaker on the whole panel-- and what's more, he seemed alone in the group in having his head screwed on straight and California's priorities in order. When the question of health care and drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants came up, McClintock was the only one to give the debate its real name: allowing illegal immigrants special treatment. "Illegal immigration is the act of cutting in line," he said. While Green Man and Bustamonte and Huffington had spent a lyrical five minutes each crooning about how illegal immigrants are our biggest source of Cheap Labor (there's that term again), picking our vegetables and building our skyscrapers and digging our ditches and getting the least pay-- McClintock was the only one to point out that illegal immigration undermines the very process of legal immigration that's what makes this state so great. (Green Man had whimpered about how immigration was a human problem, not a legal one, and the very term illegal was unfair and barbaric when one thinks how every one of us, were we in the shoes of one of the Noble Ancient Inhabitants of This Continent and living in another country, would cross the border to get a better life For Our Children.) Huffington had smirkingly berated Arnold for opposing the drivers' licenses for illegals (sorry, undocumented immigrants) while he himself-- horror, shock!-- was an immigrant! But even Arnold didn't point out the crucial distinction: Arnold had come to this country legally. Arnold had followed the rules. Arnold had made the sacrifices that entitled a person to benefit from our State services-- whereas illegal immigrants are sneaking over the border and cheating the system that so many others are following so dutifully. But McClintock was the only one up there willing to stand up for our immigration laws (some of the most lenient in the world, already) and the virtues they exist to uphold. Arnie had only been able to ramble about how giving licenses to illegals presented a "security risk" because it didn't involve a background check. C'mon, Arnie. As a legal immigrant yourself, couldn't you have pointed out the ethical distinction between rewarding a person for working hard within the system, and rewarding a person for finding a way around it? ...McClintock was also the only one to stand up in favor of Prop. 54, which will prohibit the government from collecting any racial data on citizens. The Democrats and the Green Guy all said this was terrible-- how can we know we have a colorblind society if we don't collect information on everybody's skin color?-- and Arnie just rambled about how "equality is good"; only McClintock matter-of-factly stated that the only way we'll get a colorblind society is by stepping back and forcing ourselves to stop obsessing over race-- to become one "race", an American race, unified and equal under the law.
I'm afraid Arnie is cruising to lose my vote; he has his heart in the right place, and I think he could probably do well in the job as long as he put together a top-drawer team of advisers, because they'd sift the data for him and he would make the right decisions. But McClintock alone among the candidates showed himself not only to be principled and dedicated and intelligent, but also clear-sighted and able to do his own data-sifting. I still think it might be good for California to have someone like Arnie shake things up a bit, again, provided he has a crack team of handlers making sure he knows what his cards really and factually look like; I think he's a very smart guy, with a lot of things going for him. He just doesn't do too well when the spotlight's on him, which is really weird. My only worry is that he'd treat the governorship-- not like the WWF, but like Comedy Central, as Clive the Moderator said.
McClintock, I'm not sure if I trust him yet. I'll have to do a little more research to see whether his principles are tempered by humanity, or whether he's the kind of guy you've got to watch out for because he thinks he knows what's best for you. But he's scored big with me tonight.
UPDATE: Dammit, I can't compete with LGF's Dar ul Harb:
Next on Fox!
Celebrity catfight! Arianna Huffington tries to claw her way up from the bottom of the pile, but barely scratches the semi-synthetic skin of Governator Ahnold. Ahnold remains focused on protecting the "programs for the children."
Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante anchors the opposite end of the dais from the Governator, exuding the powerfully subdued condescension field loaned to him by the Al Gore 2000 campaign, but it proves unable to radiate far enough to fully absorb Ahnold's charisma.
The Green Party's Peter Camejo, product of an unlikely fusion of genetic material obtained by space aliens from former New York mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Guliani, attempted to appeal to those Californians from "every planet on the Earth" --a highly sought-after group of voters still undecided about the recall, according to former Gov. Gray Davis.
State Sen. Tom McClintock stayed on his conservative message, and out of the Governator's line of fire, by an innovative strategy of answering the questions, which had been provided to the candidates in advance. This proved attractive to voters confused by the helleno-germanic crosstalk, and thankful for the clarity of McClintock's American English diction (even if he did bloody well curse in British during his answer about Sacramento's relationship to municipalities).
Can Governator Ahnold overcome the loss of conservative Republicans to McClintock, and go on to beat Bustamante, tackle the special interests in Sacramento, the state budget deficit, and the state's decaying infrastructure, while at the same time funding health care and afterschool programs for the children?
Or will Gov. Davis' parting words be "Et tu, Cruz?"
UPDATE: Or Frank J, either, though that should surprise nobody. Best line: "Arianna Huffington died as she lived: extremely off topic."
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