Lights ... Camera ... Election!

AMAGANSETT, N.Y. —  As soon as Arnold Schwarzenegger entered the California recall election, pundits declared it a milestone in America. With the Terminator running, they said, politics and entertainment had consummated their decades-long flirtation. Schwarzenegger is no over-the-hill actor like former California politicos George Murphy and Ronald Reagan, both of whom had long toiled in the Republican vineyards after their movie careers declined. He is still a box-office draw who seems to have cast the election as a referendum on his movie persona, not his politics. In doing so, he has tangled politics and entertainment into one big knot, promising, in effect, that what you see on the screen is what you’ll get in Sacramento.

That the recall election merges politics and entertainment seems an inescapable conclusion, especially when one considers candidates like former child star Gary Coleman and TV gadfly Arianna Huffington also vying for the governor’s office in a campaign more Lollapalooza than Lincoln-Douglas. But if inescapable, it is also dead wrong. Rather than melding politics and entertainment, the election is the latest and quite possibly most momentous chapter in a continuing battle between the two. What it poses is a stark choice between the functions each traditionally serves and the values each represents -- not politics and entertainment but politics or entertainment.

After half a century of politics cozying up to entertainment, it is understandable why even seasoned political observers can’t easily distinguish the two. Politicians and their operatives long ago discovered that they could deploy techniques of showmanship in campaigning, and even governance, and achieve many of the same effects that entertainment achieves -- most important, satisfying the audience.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a polished orator with a rhetorical flair that made him a great radio performer. John F. Kennedy had a glamorous movie-star aura that prompted novelist Norman Mailer to predict that “America’s politics would now be also America’s favorite movie,” meaning, in part, that people would henceforth follow the president the way they followed their favorite actors. Reagan was a professional performer who once quipped that he couldn’t fathom how anyone could essay the office of the presidency without being an actor. When pundits talk about the convergence of show business and politics, this is generally what they mean: how the trappings of show business have penetrated the political process -- everything from staging photo ops to doing guest spots on television talk shows to rehearsing one-liners for debates.

Although these are essentially cosmetic touches, they have had a tremendous effect on our politics. Candidates are now often held to entertainment standards of performance and are roundly criticized when they don’t meet them. At the same time, the political press has increasingly come to resemble the entertainment press, focusing more on a candidate’s style than on his substance and sounding more like film reviewers than political analysts. Finally and most significantly, the emphasis on show has gradually converted the public from an electorate into an audience that demands of its politicians the sorts of things it gets from its entertainers -- blandishments rather than tough choices.

So it is a bit hypocritical that, after years of treating elections like soap operas and after weeks of treating the recall like a cosmic joke, the media seem to have suddenly decided that enough is enough. They have demanded that Schwarzenegger take stands, be more specific in his policy proposals -- that he behave like a politician rather than a persona, pressing him to hold a news conference last week at which he announced his economic policy, even though his TV ads, running simultaneously, were still floating empty platitudes. If the polls are accurate, the public, slapped into a state of guilt, responded with its own questions about whether, when it came to Arnold, there was any “there” there.

But what the media missed in their new sobriety is that show biz isn’t just politics lite -- the cosmetics without the content. Entertainment and politics are really antagonists. Politics is a process, and in a democracy it is typically a messy one. In a nation as large and diverse as the United States -- as in a state as large and diverse as California -- the political process is entrusted with mediating among numerous, often diametrically opposed interests and arriving at some conclusion. It is necessarily about compromise, negotiation, bargaining, glossing. It lurches rather than glides, and it seldom satisfies anyone entirely. It is the art of the possible.

Though it can be a dynamic process and an occasionally entertaining one -- think of the nail-biting suspense over whether an important piece of legislation will pass -- usually it is unwieldy, chaotic, inefficient and boring. Sometimes, as Californians have recently experienced, the process doesn’t work well, especially when one side determines there is political advantage in failure. When it does work, it relies on provisional victories for all interests and on the goodwill of many, not on the skills of any one individual.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be farther from entertainment, particularly the sorts of entertainments in which Schwarzenegger has starred. Whereas democratic politics are slow and cumbersome, entertainment is fast and sleek. Whereas democratic politics inch toward resolution, entertainment arrives with one fell stroke at movie’s end. Whereas democratic politics mediate, entertainment compels. Our movies -- Schwarzenegger’s movies -- are not about someone finding middle ground. Our most popular movies are about someone who smashes and slashes his way to victory, usually single-handedly. In fact, one reason our action movies provide such a powerful, vicarious rush is precisely because they are a fantastic antidote to reality, including political reality. Entertainment is the art of the impossible.

It is no wonder that given the choice, most people would prefer the satisfactions of entertainment to the inefficiencies of politics. Who wouldn’t opt for an Ubermensch who promises to right all wrongs through the strength of his sweet sword?

In an entertainment context, this is catharsis, and most moviegoers love it. In a political context, it historically has had fascist undertones with disastrous consequences. It was Benito Mussolini, after all, who said he would make the trains run on time. It was Adolf Hitler who promised to purge society of its malcontents. This is always the appeal of a despot. He takes politics and turns it into a movie. He takes political leadership and turns it into movie heroics. In short, he takes politics and destroys it.

One of the grand ironies of America is that although its citizens boast of democracy and seek to export it, most recently to Iraq, in practice they are eternally frustrated by it and occasionally even attempt unwittingly to subvert it. One needn’t hold brief for Gov. Gray Davis to say his real sin wasn’t driving California to a record revenue gap (virtually every state is running a deficit even without a dot-com bust) or failing to promptly deal with the electricity crisis (California was the victim of energy traders gaming the system). His real sin was that he was poorly cast in the role of governor -- too pallid, too dull, too uninspiring, too unmovie-like. He is practically a poster child for public impatience and government impotence, which turns the recall into a giant audition not to recast policy but to recast the main role. Davis is the “Gigli” of politics.

In most states, politicians are more or less sidekicks rather than leading men, and the vicissitudes of the democratic process are tolerated. Turning politics into show business is never a realistic option. But the idea that politics can be usurped by entertainment has a very special resonance in California, the home of entertainment. It is an environment that practically invites one to confuse image with reality and to choose movie bromides over tough political horse-trading. Which is, of course, where Schwarzenegger comes in.

Schwarzenegger certainly isn’t a fascist by any measure, even when he promises, as he did on the day he announced, to “clean house,” whatever that means. (It is still the voters’ prerogative to clean out the Legislature, not the governor’s.) Far from being a fuming demagogue, he is, seemingly, an amiable, moderate, self-deprecating fellow who means well.

But in a race for which he has none of the traditional qualifications, Schwarzenegger is betting that the public, tired of politics, will want a movie instead, and that bravado will carry the day when the only things the other candidates can offer are position papers and promises. While giving lip service to policy, he understands far better than political journalists who are trying to force him into an acceptable mold that, regardless of what actually happens if he is elected, this isn’t a choice between one set of policies and another or one ideology and another or even one personality and another. This is a choice between politics, with its untidiness and frustrations, and the powerful escapism of an action blockbuster.