Arnold Schwarzenegger

A name to be reckoned with

Of course, it would only be fitting that Schwarzenegger throw his Loden Huete into what history will likely call "That Electoral Orgy of Whackjobs and Maniacs". But unlike some of the other quasi-candidates like Gary Coleman and Gallagher, "Ah-nold" has had his eye on political office for a significant period of time.

Born in 1947 in Austria, Arnold was the son of Gustav and Aurelia Schwarzenegger. Gustav was.... well, here we run into a problem. Gustav was a commandant in what most people usually call "The Nazis". But aside from the fact that Arnold could probably track us down and beat the living shit out of us (even in his 60's), it's not exactly clear how much of a "Nazi" Gustav really was. As most people scurrying up the tree to escape Unpleasant Truth will point out, you really couldn't be working in any authoritative capacity in Germany in the 1940's and not be affiliated with the Nazis. Whether Gustav considered his job an opportunity for some world-class oppression or a paycheck to pay for his two boys Arnold and Meinhard is lost to time.

At 15, Arnold was disenchanted by soccer and describes a sense of "power" when looking at bodybuilders, a vision that inspired him to begin weight training. By all accounts (and Jesus Christ, look at him) he took on this task of self-improvement with zeal and consistency, winning awards as "Junior Mister Europe" (which required he go AWOL from his army post to compete) and the non-junior "Mr. Europe." These awards started coming into his resume while he was still in his teens.

It was during this formative period that Schwarzenegger began to discover the joys of sex. As he recounts in his 1983 autobiography Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, the teenager's love-'em-and-leave-'em attitude received the enthusiastic approval of his father (although not his mother):

I used to feel that women were here for one reason. Sex was simply another kind of exercise, another body function. I was convinced a girl and I couldn't communicate on equal footing because she wouldn't understand what I was doing. I didn't have time to take one girl out regularly and go through a normal high-school romance with all its phone calls and notes and squabbles. That took too much time. I needed to be in the gym. For me it was a simple matter of picking them up at the lake, and then never seeing them again.

[...]

Eventually there was a split between my parents about me. My mother obviously knew what was going on with me and the girls my friends lined up. She never came out and said anything directly, but she let me know she was concerned. Things were different between me and my father. He assumed that when I was eighteen, I would just go into the Army and they would straighten me out. He accepted some of the things my mother condemned. He felt it was perfectly all right to make out with all the girls I could. In fact, he was proud I was dating the fast girls. He bragged about them to his friends. "Jesus Christ, you should see some of the women my son's coming up with." He was showing off, of course. But still, our whole relationship had changed because I'd established myself by winning a few trophies and now had some girls. He was particularly excited about the girls. And he liked the idea that I didn't get involved. "That's right, Arnold," he'd say, as though he'd had endless experience, "never be fooled by them." That continued to be an avenue of communication between us for a couple of years. In fact, the few nights I took girls home when I was on leave from the Army, my father was always very pleasant and would bring out a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses.

His name first shows up on the pop culture radar with his title of "Mr. Universe" at the age of 20. Considered one of the world's top bodybuilders, he soon found himself appearing in a number of films and documentaries related to the gentle art of holding big things aloft.

Calling himself "Arnold Strong", he started to get small parts in Hollywood films, including Stay Hungry and The Villain. If we were feeling particularly ungenerous, we might mention his first starring role in the weightsploitation flick Hercules in New York (also released as Hercules Goes Bananas). In most of his film appearances, he used his significantly stunning physique to project a sense of menace or childlike innocence brought forth to a hulk-like rage.

And "film appearances" are the key words here, because if there's one thing that everyone agrees on, it's that Arnold has issues with the language of English. His distinctive pronunciation of lines in his movies and his general penchant for short catchphrases has been a great route to stardom, but it does not mean that listening to him speak for a sustained period of time is quite as entertaining. Luckily for Arnold, he has had a number of film directors who have had the talent to work with this issue. As a result, his breakthrough hit as a strong, mostly silent robot in The Terminator (1984) and his just-on-the-cusp-of-success Conan films (1982 and 1984) relied on an extreme lack of dialogue. In the case of Terminator, thespian Schwarzenegger speaks a mere 17 lines of dialogue (sixteen different phrases, one twice) and imitates the voice of two other actors. The rest of the film relies on the skill of the director and the ability of the other actors to skitter around Arnold's considerable presence. For extra fun, be sure that when you rent and listen to his early movies, you get the dubbed versions, where it wasn't considered box office candy to let Arnie speak with his regular voice.

From these relatively humble beginnings, Schwarzenegger's star continued to climb to breathtaking heights, and he became one of Hollywood's most bankable leading actors. Along the way, he also recieved a bit of a reputation as someone that was very easy to piss off if your media product presented him in a less than stellar light. While the Rotten Library isn't concerned about losing that big interview with the Mogul of Muscle, many others wavered in reporting non-positive stories. Report something bad about Arnie, and you'd have a similar amount of difficulty getting his smiling face on your cover and an actual, in-person interview with him. As a result, Arnold has more than the usual "scuttlebutt" surrounding him, either out of spite on the part of reporters, or because it's all true. We won't go into those sorts of rumors here; we hate wearing ties in court.

It hasn't always been about stardom, movies and press blackouts, of course... since the 1970's, Arnie had fallen in love with and consistently dated reporter Maria Shriver, finally marrying her in 1986. This made him a Kennedy-in-Law, since Maria was the daughter of Eunice Kennedy, sister of Kennedys Robert and John. The match was considered pretty bizzare, since Maria was a member of one of the classic Democrat families, and Arnie a staunch Republican, but who are we to judge. At the Wedding.... oh, damn, there we are with the Nazis again.

See, Arnold invited Kurt Waldheim to the wedding, who had been a friend of Gustav's (Arnold's father, remember?), and who also happened to be a Nazi. No beating around the bush here; the man was a war criminal, and in fact was banned the year after Schwarzenegger's wedding from entering the United States. Waldheim was unable to attend the wedding, but instead did the right thing and sent along a sculpture of the newlyweds, depicting Arnold hoisting Maria on his shoulders, him dressed in lederhosen and she in a dirndl skirt and laced-up blouse. This spectacularly taste-variant gift inspired Arnold to raise a glass to Waldheim in his absence and propose a toast to him. His support for Waldheim has not diminished with time.

With this whole Nazi thing lying on him like an ugly golf shirt, Schwarzenegger has taken a number of steps in the ensuing years to make up for it in the eyes of those who would not be fond of Nazis. He has donated millions to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and has, in his words, "begun learning Hebrew". The Wiesenthal Center thinks the world of him now and has given him awards for his generosity.

Anyway, speaking of sudden and unwarranted rises to power.... Arnold started visiting the White House as something other than a highly noticed movie star when he signed on as chairman of the President's Council of Physical Fitness in the 1990 Bush White House. This august body, which had been first chaired by Richard M. Nixon in 1956, turned out to be a nice way for Arnie to spend an awful lot of time in the corridors of power. Between urging America's astoundingly fat children to do the occasional push-up, he must have smelled those plants in the Rose Garden a bit too much, because here and there in the press were mentions by him about interest in politics.

A 1990 profile in U.S. News and World Report noted Arnold's intensity as Locker Room Czar, and predicted that he would someday run for office. After noting a longstanding desire for political clout ("My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it."), the article quotes the actor as saying:

"People need somebody to watch over them. . . . Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave."

And hey, if Clint Eastwood can run Carmel, Sonny Bono can run Palm Springs and become a Congressman, and Ronald Reagan can do... whatever the hell he did, who's to say some Austrian with world-class biceps couldn't become Governor, and maybe even President? Oh, that's right, the Constitution.

There's no constitutional law against foreign-born nationals becoming Governor of California, of course, but there is certainly one against them becoming President of the United States. Article II, Section 1: "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; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States." This presents a problem for any presidential aspirations for Arnold.

But don't worry! Our fine lawmakers have made the occasional stab to remove this limitation out from under us.

In July of 2003, Senator Orrin Hatch introduced a proposed amendment to the constitution to allow anyone foreign born and a resident for twenty years to be eligible for the office of President. Hatch and Schwarzenegger are old friends, and it is widely held that this amendment was a favor, should the governorship turn out to be a potential stepping stone as it was for the previous actor.

Interestingly enough, Congressman Barney Frank introduced similar legislation in 2000 to remove the natural-born requirement from the presidental rules as well, citing the lack of opportunity given to people who have joined the country and shown throughout their lives to be fine citizens. And even more interesting are the following words between Representative Frank and one of the witnesses during the Judiciary Committee meeting in which the bill was killed, which we'll leave you thinking about:

Mr. MCDONALD:

All right. I could give what I consider the definitive argument against the proposed amendment in two words: Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I have been allotted 5 minutes, so I will take the 5. I will explain the reference, if it does not follow.

our next President

[Later in the testimony...]
Mr. FRANK:	Thank you. First, I would ask, Professor McDonald, I assume the reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger was to hold out the terrible prospect that he might get elected President.
Mr. MCDONALD:	Yes.
Mr. FRANK:	I think what I find is that that shows -- the assumption is that there is no great discretion on the part of the public.
Mr. MCDONALD:	They have elected a number of actors before to high office.
Mr. FRANK:	Yes, they have, and I think they did a reasonable job, given their values. And I think that I am glad you brought it up, because it seems to me what we have here is, in the guise of a defense of the American citizens, a denigration of them; the notion that they somehow cannot be trusted to make these decisions.

timeline