In practice, the recall election, part of the larger crisis that has afflicted the US since 9/11, has had the effect of politicising the entire state in a strangely exhilarating way. Closer examination of some of the candidates suggests that though there's a high quotient of self-promotion and headline hogging, many are motivated by quite serious political indignation. Reva Renee Renz, for instance, a glamorous bar owner (Reva's) from Orange County, is typical of many candidates.
Renz, a self-styled small-businesswoman, had never taken any interest in politics before but found herself, in conversation with friends, so angry at Governor Davis's mendacity and incompetence that she decided to join the campaign. She had no difficulty in securing the 65 necessary signatures and now says the entry fee ($3,500), far from prohibitive, is the best money she's ever spent. Since declaring, her bar has been jammed with customers and she has been working 20 hours a day, swept along on a tide of participatory democracy that's put her on the cover of the LA Times. Renz concedes she will not win, but says she expects to participate in future Californian political activity.
Renz looks like a representative of all that seems most crazy about the recall election, but in practice she may be symbolic of its futuristic dimension, its on-line dynamic. A little-noticed but probably decisive aspect of this exotic campaign is that much of the vote-getting (and mudslinging) has been conducted on the web. In common with all the candidates, Renz has a website and is also an ardent blogger. 'A lot of my supporters say they will vote for me,' she says with a laugh, 'because I have great legs. I guess that's the kind of thing you have to put up with on the web.'
If 9/11, the Bush deficit, and the bursting of the dotcom bubble lie at the the root of the recall election, so also does the internet. Whatever the outcome of the recall vote, after its flirtation with the dark seductions of the web, the American democratic process will never be the same again.
Just as Howard Dean, the national Democrat presidential front-runner, has mobilised much of his support on the internet, so Arianna Huffington, improbably, has mobilised a huge fundraising effort in a grassroots internet campaign that, she says, has secured 'more donors than the other four top candidates combined'.
The internet has transformed more than political fundraising; it has also had a profound impact on the debate itself. For a better insight into the rewiring of American democracy, you must take the freeway to Venice Beach to the home of Mickey Kaus, shadowy author of that essential blog, the influential Kausfile.
An inveterate controversialist, Kaus lives the quasi-troglodyte existence of the net-head amid a surging sea of newspaper clippings and fast-food debris. Kaus's web-log is sponsored by Microsoft's online magazine Slate and provides an idiosyncratic running commentary on the vicissitudes of the election, a wild guide to the wilder shores of an already wild election. Less scurrilous than the Drudge report, with which Kaus collaborates informally, and forever hovering on the brink of libel, the Kausfile has become the indispensable source for the sharpest and most damaging tales from the campaign trail.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Blogger Kaus has been cutting his teeth on a succession of American media and political scandals: Trent Lott, Gerry Condit, Howell Raines and the New York Times. He likes to say, paraphrasing AJ Liebling, that he is 'better than anyone faster than he is, and faster than anyone better'. Blogging has had the effect of revving up an already hectic 24-hour news cycle to fever pitch, and Schwarzenegger's candidacy is the answer to the blogger's prayer. Kaus's scrutiny of the Terminator's campaign has provided the mainstream media with some of its best stories. Kaus says he sees his job as 'floating half-baked theories' and is based on appeals for off-the-record information like: 'XXX - if you are reading this, I've left my number on your work answering machine... Or you could email me... I would love to hear your side of Arnold's story.' It may sound trivial, but the vital importance of blogging is demonstrated by the story that dogged Schwarzenegger's first week on the campaign trail, his half-forgotten interview with the now defunct porn magazine Oui.
In 1977, when he was just the Austrian Oak, a prize bodybuilder, Schwarzenegger gave a vainglorious interview to Oui in which, when questioned about the homoeroticism of body-building, he replied, 'Men shouldn't feel like fags just because they have nice-looking bodies.' In the same piece, he also claimed to have smoked marijuana and participated in an orgy.
Even in California, among the things it is not prudent for a US citizen seeking elected office to admit are: 1) homophobia, 2) familiarity with drugs and 3) group sex. A Kausfile reader with a long memory drew Kaus's attention to the Oui interview. After some hesitation, Kaus revealed the magazine interview's existence and tipped off another political blog - smokinggun.com - which reproduced the complete text of the Oui interview in all its eye-watering embarrassment.
Mickey Kaus likes to argue that it is the bloggers, not the mainstream media, who are fulfilling the fourth estate's historic duty to keep politicians honest, but now that the Oui interview was on the record, the press could have a field day. In the politically correct atmosphere of California, Schwarzenegger was forced to disown his reference to 'fags' and to issue a more and more humiliating sequence of denials, each of which seemed to inter his political ambitions ever deeper.
First, taking a plausible line, he said he had been young and hot-blooded, but when the mud continued to fly, he rashly said that he could not remember giving the interview. Now the questions were coming thick and fast, threatening every aspect of his carefully planned campaign.
So next, he blithely explained that was not what he meant at all. What he meant to say was that it was always his practice in press interviews to exaggerate a little. What people should understand was this: He Had Actually Made It Up.
Now, even a child who can barely scratch a cross on a ballot paper could have told him that homophobia, soft drugs and sex orgies are all very well, but what the American citizen who seeks a mandate from the voters should never ever do is admit to making up stories to the press.
The Kausfile's spark had started a forest fire and by now all the other bloggers (there are more than 30 following the recall election) had started to dig into the rich, steaming loam of Arnold's sexual past. In no time at all Boomshock.blogspot.com, among others, had unearthed Schwarzenegger's involvement with a variety of gay rights groups.
Next, the bloggers (followed by the press) focused their attention on the history of Schwarzenegger's relations with women. He likes to present himself as the devoted family man, but reporters had soon levered open several closetsful of women - Sue Moray, Brigitte Nielsen, Rachel Ticotin and Gigi Goyette - with whom Arnold had enjoyed intense liaisons. Suddenly the flap about the Oui magazine interview seemed beside the point. Did the electorate of California really want to cast its vote for a man who was making the late JFK look positively monkish?
Schwarzenegger's campaign could hardly have got off to a worse start. Now his Republican minders went Hollywood. The candidate would be kept away from awkward questions. He would not share TV-debate time with his co-stars, the other frontrunners McLintock, Bustamante, Huffington, et al. (This was wise: Cambridge-educated Arianna proved herself to be a lethal debater.) The candidate would talk to reporters only in stage-managed press conferences. Arnold, the star, would 'meet the voters', ie his fans, and deliver platitudinous pre-scripted five-minute homilies before fleeing to the safety of his trailer. It would be just like making a movie.
So, on the very day his rivals were up in San Francisco debating tedious campaign issues at interminable length on television, Arnold's campaign managers arranged for him to address a rally of students at the University of California. The message was clear. Arnold the frontrunner and friend of democracy was far more important than the geeks who were fretting about deficit finance with the political hacks in San Francisco. Arnold was meeting the voters (no matter that few students were registered to vote). Arnold would appeal over the heads of the weaselly commentators and get out his message direct to the people.
Actually, when it came, the message did indeed come over the heads of the press, in the form of a well-aimed egg, which splattered with gloopy exuberance on the lapels of the Terminator's Armani suit. As the anchor for LA's local news Channel 4 put it, 'Now the yolk's on him.' Hour after hour, in a seemingly endless cycle, local channels replayed the egging of Arnie from every imaginable angle, condemning the candidate to a kind of electoral hell that will have given Bustamante, Huffington and the rest a delightful haemorrhage of uncomplicated joy.
Some observers had commented unfavourably on the Terminator's decision not to go head to head with his opponents on television, but that was always a moot point. By contrast, the egging of Arnold was a real disaster. The candidate seemed trapped. He could not go on television because, without political experience or real knowledge of the issues, he would be eaten alive by wily political alligators like McClintock and Bustamante. And he could not campaign at large because the voters were chucking eggs. Worse, Arnold seemed uncomfortable with his scripted Republicanism. His best moments came when he could be himself. After the egg, for instance, he remarked, impromptu, 'That guy owes me some bacon.'
In fact, the dilemma facing the Schwarzenegger campaign derived from the different strategies demanded by those two questions on the recall ballot, viz 1) should the governor be recalled, and, if so, 2) who should take his place? To secure a winning answer to the first question, Schwarzenegger had to mobilise an essentially Republican anti-Democrat coalition, hammering away at an anti-tax message while not alienating Californian voters who see fiscal solutions as unavoidable. To win the second, because the Republicans are in a clear minority within the state of California, he had to pose convincingly as an independent-minded governor-in-waiting, and to translate his formidable fan-base into a Schwarzenegger bandwagon, ie he had to be himself.
But the real Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is pro-choice on abortion and tolerant towards gay marriage, is a very peculiar kind of Republican as the term might be understood by, say, George Bush. Arnold's minders were faced with a dilemma. Should they let the star flounder in a role for which he is ill cast, but at least make the movie called for by the Republican party script? Or should they let their star improvise his lines in a road movie of his own devising and hope they could miraculously stitch it all together in the cutting room?
By the end of the first week of nonstop campaigning, his team seemed to have decided that the second scenario was the only one that might fly. A campaign rally in the centre of Riverside, on the southwestern outskirts of greater LA, showing Schwarzenegger at his most charming, was selected to audience-test the revised scenario.
In the week since his appearance at Sacramento, Arnold's candidacy has come on dramatically. Then, he was in shirt sleeves. Now, he's informally smart in sports jacket and open shirt, standing at a safe distance from the crowd in front of well-drilled placard-waving supporters.
Schwarzenegger delivers a snappy stump speech, then submits to a choreographed photo-op routine geared to the needs of the cameras in which his movie-star smile does most of the talking.
The crowd is the usual mixture of confused and curious celebrity-seekers. Jack Stanfield, a 747 pilot from Kentucky, is here with his wife. They're both Republicans and refer to the Californians as 'the Granola People' (fruits, nuts and flakes). Like many Americans, the pilot is amused by California's recall election, remembers Ronald Reagan as 'no dummy' and sees Schwarzenegger as primarily an actor. 'But here has to be a better candidate for governor,' he says.
Laurie Courria, a disillusioned Democrat and a government employee, joins in the discussion. 'I'm ashamed to say I voted for Gray Davis,' she says, but, like many, hasn't made up her mind to vote for the Terminator, or even to vote Davis out of office. 'Maybe Arnold'll be a better governor than actor - he's just not that good an actor.' She sighs. 'I've really no idea what to do.' Across the square, some hairy Democrats chant angrily under a homemade placard 'Hasta La Vista Nazi'.
When the speech and the photo-ops are over, the crowd surges after the candidate, who eventually retreats to the nearby Mission Hotel, a popular honeymoon retreat for Hollywood stars in the 30s, to hold a press conference. Here, for the first time, the press glimpses a more authentic Schwarzenegger. He handles the reporters with a new confidence, conceding mistakes, admitting that there are some issues in which he has yet to formulate a position, and expressing an apparently sincere appetite for the governorship.
Later, now quite relaxed, and almost human, he said he was enjoying shooting this, his latest movie on the road. 'You know, what I found boring was sitting on a movie set after 25 years. Now I'm excited again. I just love it. I love getting up in the morning. It's new. It's different. It's challenging. It's risky, which is of course what I love. My wife said to me, "I haven't seen you this excited in a long time."' The polls, of course, are utterly at odds (some show Bustamante edging ahead, and no one seems to know what the governor's fate will be) but there's only one poll that matters: if the voters of California are allowed to go to the polls and hang their chads on 7 October, the world will find out if the star has translated that excitement into votes. For the moment, Arnie's Big Adventure is in what movie people call 'development hell'. As 0ne Davis supporter said after the legal battle over the election was referred back to the US Supreme Court, 'All we see is Terminate-terminate-hasta la vista. He needs a new script.'
That's showbiz, folks!