I have heard too many people say about Arnold, Oh, he's kind of a liberal, actually, and nothing really bad will happen if he becomes governor.
Dammit, do *not* fall for this crap! He is in deep with the RW, thick as thieves. He's a big pal of Orrin Hatch, for God's sake, who's been greasing the skids for a possible future presidential run for their celluloid action hero. The Rethugs obviously have big plans for Arnold.
Democrats should be fighting for their lives on this. Arnold must not be allowed to sneak into office.
We're busy arguing about our favorite Democratic candidates for president, but please, first things first -- save California, and nip a BIG problem in the bud. Vote NO on the recall, YES for Bustamonte.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030929fa_factSTRONGMAN
by HENDRIK HERTZBERG
Arnold Schwarzenegger and California’s recall race.
The New Yorker/Issue of 2003-09-29
<snip>
On October 8, 1993—a day short of exactly ten years before the originally scheduled date of California’s recall election—one of Sylvester Stallone’s better movies opened wide at area theatres. In “Demolition Man,” Stallone played a Los Angeles cop, cryogenically frozen around the turn of the century as punishment for a bum rap, who is thawed out in the year 2032 to give chase to his similarly thawed-out criminal nemesis. He teams up with Sandra Bullock, a new-style nicey-nice police officer. As she is showing him around the L.A. of the future—where everything is tidy, corporate, and bland—he does a double take when she mentions the “Schwarzenegger Presidential Library.” Decades before, Bullock explains perkily, Arnold Schwarzenegger became so popular that the American people waived the technicalities and made him their maximum leader.
This was satire, not prognostication. Either way, though, it appears, at the moment, to be right on schedule.
The big technicality, of course, is a clause in Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution—the one that states, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.” On July 10th, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, quietly introduced what he hopes will become the twenty-eighth amendment:
A person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been for 20 years a citizen of the United States, and who is otherwise eligible to the Office of President, is not ineligible to that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States.
As it happens, Arnold Schwarzenegger (who, according to the Deseret News, Hatch’s home-town paper, is both a “pal” and a “fund-raising helper” of the Senator’s) became a citizen of the United States precisely twenty years ago. Hatch is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where constitutional amendments originate. His amendment stands a good chance of going to the states, thirty-eight of which would be needed for ratification. It would certainly pass in the states where Latino and other foreign-born citizens, now twelve million strong, are concentrated, and legislators elsewhere might support it as a gesture toward the “nation of immigrants” catechism of America’s civic religion. Even so, like any constitutional amendment, it’s a long shot. On the other hand, there are those who think that it doesn’t really matter—who think that Schwarzenegger, amendment or no amendment, will find a way. George Butler, the filmmaker-photographer who chronicled the big man’s rise to fame, told me recently with a chuckle, “If you think Arnold can be stopped by a few phrases on a piece of parchment, well, you just don’t know Arnold.”
<snip>
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