Why Schwarzenegger won

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, October 9, 2003

A Black Day for Democracy
Schwarzenegger and the Failure of the Dems
By DAVID LINDORFF

The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of America's largest
state represents a kind of milestone in the decline of American
democracy. This is not "Reagan II, the Movie," as some have suggested--a
second actor being elected governor of the tinsel state. Reagan, for all
the criticism that he was "just an actor," in fact had paid his
political dues, leading the actors union and getting involved in a
variety of campaigns--for example against Medicare--before jumping into
electoral politics to run for governor. While he certainly relied on his
actor's charm to manufacture a persona, he had a conservative political
agenda and was fairly candid about it.

Schwarzenegger, in contrast, has no political background. He is a total
artifice, a creation of a group of Republican backers who care little or
nothing about his personal beliefs or ideology, and see him as a vehicle
for restoring Republican control in a state that has been becoming
increasingly Democratic.

What is incredible, and terribly demoralizing about this election is
that a majority of voters in a state holding a fifth of the U.S.
population bought the product. In a moment of nihilistic fury at the
corruption and cronyism of the Democratic Party apparatus and its
titular head, Gov. Gray Davis, they cast their votes along with the
state's Republicans for a man who stands for nothing but himself, who is
a long-time misogynist with a history of assaulting women, and who is in
thrall to business interests (who can be expected attempt to gut the
state's once model regulatory apparatus).

Make no mistake: the Democratic Party richly deserved this debacle.
California Democratic politicians have long taken their traditional
liberal, labor and minority base for granted. The ultimate Clintonians,
California's Democratic leadership bought into the neo-Liberal idea of
deregulation, bringing on the state's electricity crisis; they have
endorsed right-wing get-tough approaches to crime that have made the
state a leader in prison construction, and in the grotesque mass
incarceration of minorities, and most seriously they have surrendered to
the three-decades long Republican-led drive to limit property taxes (a
grossly favor-the-rich campaign), refusing to offer progressive
alternatives that would tax corporations and the rich to pay for
schools, roads and other essential local services. Little wonder then
that in a crisis, that progressive Democratic base not only failed to
turn out to defend an embattled Democratic politician, but in many cases
actually voted for his nemesis.

The sad thing is that they didn't have to do it.

There was an alternative, and I don't mean Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamonte,
who despite his Hispanic name and working class background was just
another cog in the Clintonian centrist Democratic Machine.

The alternative was Peter Camejo, the Green Party candidate--a genuine
progressive and, like Bustamonte, a Latino.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff10082003.html

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