The Little Brown Reader: California's Hot Ticket

August 17, 2003

California's Hot Ticket

This is a pretty good tongue-in-cheek look at the recall playing field.

California's Hot Ticket (washingtonpost.com)

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2003; Page C01

BURBANK, Calif., Aug. 6

The special effect known as Arnold Schwarzenegger has just told Jay Leno (which is the same as telling America, nowadays) that he's decided to accept the starring role in yet another way over budget movie with "Recall" in the title, rocketing into the race to become governor of California in the statewide vote to decide the fate of current Gov. Gray Davis.

"When I moved to California in 1968 it was the greatest state in the greatest nation in the world," the actor said, during the taping of the "Tonight" show at NBC Studios here. "Now it is totally the opposite. The atmosphere is disastrous. There is total disconnect of the people in California. [They] are working hard, paying taxes, raising families, and politicians are not doing their jobs. They're fiddling, fumbling and failing. . . .

"And this is why I'm going to run for governor of the state of California."

At which point, the studio audience screamed and their heads exploded, spattering blood everywhere. (Okay, okay. Maybe they'll add that part, with CGI, in the movie version.)

Greetings from schizzy California, where the Leno show now functions as a public forum, a royal veranda, the conduit by which the famously political can officially speak to loyal subjects about nearly issueless panic politics and (by some weird extension of the sunshine and celebrity vibe) speak to that small piece of California in the rest of the national psyche.

...

The recall is frequently compared to some neat, new, vaguely obnoxious summertime reality show, only this time it stars everybody, all 35 million or so Californians, and it's not as tightly edited.

There are characters you dislike. (The namby-pamby governor. The conniving car-alarm magnate. The poliguru pundit. The former mayor.) There are characters you root for, sometimes just because you like the flukiness of their ambition. (The pornographer. The Terminator. The punk rocker. The bounty hunter. The former Republican congressman who is known mostly for coming out of the closet late in life.) There are characters who are going to get voted off so fast. Mostly there are just lots and lots of characters.

Saturday is the deadline for gubernatorial wannabes to file as candidates. Although several hundred people had picked up paperwork and said they intended to run, it's still not clear how many will actually make deadline and get on the ballot. Some people actually sense giddiness at a safe distance; they want to see as many candidates as possible, a ballot that rambles on into chaos.

It's all endlessly watchable and so very, embarrassingly California.
...

Full story

Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 20%

Posted by Lance Brown at August 17, 2003 08:31 PM | TrackBack

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