Arnold Agonistes

Gov. Schwarzenegger's political future may be over. But there's every reason to believe that as a cultural force, he'll be back.

In the richly absurd and immensely entertaining 1985 action flick Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an involuntarily unretired military man who eventually runs a ventilation pipe through the chest of his arch-nemesis. As the villain struggles briefly before collapsing into the big sleep, Arnold delivers one of his signature lines: "Let off some steam." Now it is Schwarzenegger's turn to be pinned up against the wall, twitching spasmodically as the life runs out of his political future. Indeed, to say that recent special-election results in California are a death blow to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's electoral aspirations is an understatement of, well, Schwarzeneggerian proportions. He campaigned heavily for a number of ballot initiatives he effectively authored: to rein in the political clout of public employee unions with "paycheck protection," to extend the time it takes for public school teachers to get tenure, to redistrict the Golden State's political units along semi-rational lines, and more. All of the Arnold-approved propositions not only lost but lost big. And with their defeat went any number of other things, first and foremost among them talk of amending the U.S. Constitution so that a naturalized citizen might run for president one day. His fans haven't left the man once known in bodybuilding circles as the Austrian Oak looking this anemic since they turned away in droves from his 1993 ultra-bomb, The Last Action Hero. To be sure, the recent defeats weren't exactly surprising. Schwarzenegger's poll numbers have been tanking for a long time. As recently as a year ago, his approval ratings were in the 70 percent range; just before this week's election, they were stuck in the mid-30s. It's even fair to say that slate of ballot initiatives represented an acknowledgement of pre-existing political failure. As the "Governator," Arnold had originally promised far more sweeping reforms than those embodied in this fall's crop of propositions. Californians recalled reviled Gov. Gray Davis in a special election because he had failed to provide anything resembling leadership during the state's electricity crisis in 2001 and because he had presided over the grotesque expansion of state spending that was completely out of control. Schwarzenegger, figuratively clutching a copy of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman's great small-government primer, Free To Choose, took office promising a fundamental restructuring of the state's finances. But once in office, he did not even seriously consider, much less enact, the cost-cutting and streamlining measures that his own California Performance Review board recommended. Polls taken shortly before Tuesday's special election showed 55 percent of Californians wouldn't back him for reelection next year—a figure that can only have grown since Tuesday's results came in. While there's always a chance for a reversal of fortune, whatever momentum for change might have existed when Arnold took office has been completely vaporized by two years of inaction and now a thorough repudiation at the polls. Yet it's wrong to equate the likely end of Arnold's political success with the end of his social significance. That's because Schwarzenegger's real contribution to American culture has been his uncanny ability to recreate himself again and again. In a real sense, it matters less that he is turning out to be a mediocre leader of the Union's most populous state and more that he got elected governor in the first place. While Americans have elected celebrities—George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, and Jesse Ventura to name a few—to high office before, none has so incarnated a key variation on the American Dream, the dream of continuous reinvention and betterment. Think of Arnold as a latter-day Ben Franklin. A runaway from colonial Boston who landed in Philadelphia without contacts or connections, Franklin rose from total obscurity to immense wealth and power. As important, he created a persona that D.H. Lawrence ambivalently derided as "the first dummy American." That is, Franklin, in his autobiography and elsewhere, laid out precepts for a national character that we all recognize as quintessentially American. Chief among them: In the New World, you can become whatever you want through a combination of hard work, ambition, systematic self-improvement, and entrepreneurial vision. Franklin's conception not only articulated a cultural identity for a world relatively free of the abiding class hierarchy of Europe, it also banished the tragic sensibility that one could not rise above one's origins, that one could not escape the past. Schwarzenegger has not only incarnated Franklin's "dummy American" in the best sense, he has reshaped and updated it, moving its residence from colonial Philadelphia to, appropriately enough, Hollywood, the land of dreams and reinvention. The distance that Arnold has traveled, from a tiny village in Austria, where he grew up as the low-born son of a policeman with Nazi connections, to a mansion in the Pacific Palisades, to the statehouse in Sacramento, cannot be measured in miles alone. At every stage of his career, he spun gold out of relative dross. Through a well-documented regimen of punishing work and forward-thinking, he became the Babe Ruth of bodybuilding, a sport several notches below professional wrestling in terms of respectability and mainstream acceptance. He parlayed that dubious distinction into a Hollywood career despite a German accent so pronounced it would have held him back even during the Silent Movie era. Again, through legendarily dedicated efforts, he overcame his limitations and, as important, learned to work within them, becoming for a time one of the world's biggest-grossing movie stars. Along the way, he forced, paid, and earned his entrance into worlds of privilege that he certainly was not born to. As Lawrence Leamer notes in his recent Schwarzenegger biography Fantastic, when Arnold made the decision to run for governor in 2003, he brought his ethic of hard work and self-improvement to campaigning, quickly coming up to speed after early missteps. Schwarzenegger's accomplishments, then, are borne not out of luck or circumstance, but something far more substantial and lasting. F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously—and incorrectly—observed that there are no second acts in American life. Arnold is already on his third act. And whether he runs for reelection in 2006 or retires from politics altogether, this much is certain: One way or another, he'll be back in our lives in a new and improved version. Indeed, he is reported to have signed on to do Terminator 4 and a sequel to True Lies, so we'll likley be seeing him again on the silver screen. But what will be far more interesting will be the new and unpredictable way in which he reinvents himself completely.