Swimming Against the Current

Published: Jul 21, 2004 6:02 PM

By Arianna Huffington

Arnold Schwarzenegger's attack on the Democratic legislators as "girlie men" is a clear indication of his rising anger and frustration at the fact that Fabian Nunez, the 37-year-old Democratic leader of the Assembly, far from being what Arnold calls a "girlie man," has actually outsmarted the Terminator.

I talked to him this morning and it appears that he succeeded in restoring the worst cuts in Arnold's budget: he succeeded in restoring admissions to the thousands of high school students who would not have been able to attend UCs or CSUs if Arnold's budget had prevailed; he succeeded in restoring funding for the Healthy Families program for poor children; he succeeded in restoring in-home support services for people who are disabled; he succeeded in restoring funding for mothers who are moving from welfare to work; he succeeded in restoring funding for child care for many single working mothers. That must have been enough to give the Terminator a fit.

Arnold's governing has always been a masterfully produced masquerade, dependent on his abilities to seduce and charm and on the media's inability to move beyond being star struck and to scrutinize what he is actually doing.

It takes a lot of energy to swim against the prevailing current, so the vast majority of mainstream journalists head in the direction the assignment desk points them. That's why we see so many stories tracking the results of the latest polls. As a result, polling data become a self-fulfilling prophecy: reporters are often reluctant to take on politicians with robust job-approval ratings. We saw it in the heady early days leading up to the Iraq War, when the president's 77-percent rating acted like a flak jacket—a Kevlar statistic cloaking him in an aura of invincibility. And the same has been true of Arnold Schwarzenegger. But now, the mask is slipping, and it's the bully, not the seducer, speaking.