Читать книгу California Fights Back - Peter Schrag - Страница 10

THE PARADIGMATIC TURNAROUND MOMENT, ironically, came in 2005 under the Republican who sometimes called himself “the governator.” There was no way to predict at the time that a dozen years later Arnold Schwarzenegger would taunt Trump as sharply as he taunted Democrats in his first years as California’s governor. But his political conversion came long before, and represents a little-recognized watershed event.

With one major exception—that unlike Trump, Schwarzenegger (almost literally) had made himself, without help from his father’s millions—Schwarzenegger in many ways was very much like Trump. A bodybuilder and movie actor, he was a narcissistic show business celebrity who had never held public office before; a misogynist with a trail of sexual harassment and groping accusations behind him (he later grudgingly apologized for his behavior on those “rowdy movie sets”); and a man who, in that pretweet era, had a mouth sometimes as much out of control as Trump’s would be a dozen years later: In his first years in Sacramento, he called the Democrats “girlie men.” He referred to the state attorney general, the treasurer, and state superintendent of schools, all Democrats who opposed his measures, as the “Three Stooges.” He labeled public-sector workers, members of powerful unions—nurses, cops, firefighters, teachers—“special interests.” He echoed Grover Norquist, the nation’s most vociferous anti-taxer: “We don’t want to feed the monster (of public spending),” he told the editorial board of the Sacramento Bee. “We want to feed the private sector and starve the public sector.” He drove his gas-guzzling Hummer in defiance of all the environmentalists’ calls for conservation. He loudly proclaimed his intention to “blow up the boxes” of the government bureaucracy and “clean house.”

Unlike Trump, he began his first term with high public approval ratings, but in less than two years they sank from nearly 70 percent to 40 percent. And as things turned sour, he took a cue from his predecessor Pete Wilson’s immigrant bashing just a decade before. He called for closing the border and endorsed the work of the minuteman group of vigilantes who were patrolling it.