All That's Missing Is the Popcorn

By Karen Tumulty and Terry Mccarthy

It's too bad there's not an Academy Award for head fakes. As Arnold Schwarzenegger prepared to step onto the Tonight Show stage last week, Jay Leno asked him how he was going to make the expected announcement that he was not going to run for Governor of California. Schwarzenegger murmured, "I am bowing out." And that's what everyone was expecting to hear. In fact, top adviser George Gorton stood at the edge of the set, holding the official statement that began, "I am not running for Governor..." When Gorton offered one last word of regret over the campaign that wasn't to be, the former Mr. Universe threw a muscular arm around his shoulder and said, "Let's go do it."

He did it, all right. A few moments into the show's afternoon taping, Schwarzenegger declared to a squealing studio audience, "I am going to run for Governor of the state of California." It took Gorton until after the commercial break to figure out that Schwarzenegger wasn't joking; the crumpled statement was still in Gorton's hand as stagehands ejected him from the studio for using his cell phone to begin alerting Schwarzenegger's other clueless advisers.

As a political debut, it was dazzling stagecraft. But even before Schwarzenegger was introduced into the equation with his rallying cry to "clean house in Sacramento," California's Oct. 7 vote on whether to kick Gray Davis out of the Governor's office was shaping up to be the most surreal spectacle since the 2000 Florida recount. Now it's must-see politics, a reality show for the cable news channels, in which the prize is a budget mess to clean up and 34 million ungovernable Californians to lead. As the final deadline for entering the race passed Saturday evening, Conan the Candidate was one of several dozen vying for that responsibility. Among the others on the ballot: socialite turned populist cable pundit Arianna Huffington, ex--baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth, pornographer Larry Flynt and porn star Mary Carey. Representing the et tu, Brute wing of Davis' party is his Lieutenant Governor, Cruz Bustamante.

The only prediction that seems safe to make at this point is that the recall election will get weirder. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, only 35% of registered voters say they would vote to keep Davis, which will be the first question on the ballot. At the same time, Californians will be asked who should replace him. In a field this jammed with candidates, the next Governor could conceivably be a candidate who is the choice of 5% or even less. It's entirely possible that 49% could vote to keep Davis as Governor--he needs more than 50% to defeat the recall--only to see him give up his office to someone who gets a far lower share in the subsequent balloting.

Schwarzenegger will not be the only candidate who has the resources, powerful backers and name identification to push out Davis. Or even the only one who speaks with an accent: Huffington, running as an Independent and a populist outsider, has hired advisers who helped wrestler Jesse Ventura win the Minnesota governorship in 1998. Businessman Bill Simon, the Republican nominee defeated by Davis last year, has claim to the conservative base that provides the Republicans with what little life they have in California. Ueberroth, though officially a Republican, will sell himself as a serious candidate with crossover appeal in a state where many voters still remember how he rescued the 1984 Olympics. And on the off chance that the entire exercise hasn't already made voters cynical enough, they can look forward to Democrats on the ballot making the case that Californians should vote no on throwing Davis out but yes on one of them replacing him.

President Bush is doing his best to stay out of the cross fire, and who can blame him? California, with its 55 electoral votes, has foiled him and his Administration's ambitions there before. In 2000 Bush made a dozen campaign swings there, only to get walloped by Al Gore, who hardly ever visited. Political strategist Karl Rove's perceived effort to sway last year's G.O.P. gubernatorial primary for the moderate former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan annoyed conservatives and left relations between the state party and the White House prickly after Simon won. So officials say not to expect much more involvement than Bush's comments last week that Schwarzenegger would make "a good Governor." Besides, given the choice between a wounded Democratic incumbent in the Governor's mansion in 2004 and a Republican who inherits a state hemorrhaging red ink, Bush strategists consider it a pretty close call.

Davis' chances of surviving weren't looking so great even before Schwarzenegger entered the race. With Californians blaming him for the epic budget problems that have brought a tripling of vehicle-license fees, a 30% hike in state college fees and cutbacks in health services, polls in recent weeks had shown that more than 50% of Californians would support his recall. Weeks ago, California's Democratic House members had privately decided among themselves that, as one put it, "Davis was gone, and this was getting dangerous for us." While Davis had been on the phone constantly consulting with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, hoping to keep her in his camp, she had quietly been talking to fellow members of the California House delegation and state officials about finding a backup candidate. Their first choice: Senator Dianne Feinstein, the most popular politician in the state. "If Dianne got in," a Democratic insider said, "he was dead."

Feinstein took a pass. But then, just hours later on Wednesday, Schwarzenegger didn't, and the fragile shell of solidarity that the Democrats had built around the embattled Governor collapsed. By the next day, two Democrats with proven statewide appeal--Lieutenant Governor Bustamante and insurance commissioner John Garamendi--added their names to the list of candidates on the second ballot who were offering themselves up to replace Davis. And so Davis was left facing members of his establishment and a simple yea or nay verdict on his future: the state supreme court last Thursday rejected the Governor's lawsuit to delay the election and allow his name to appear among the replacement candidates should he lose the recall.

All this left the Democratic field fractured, with no heavyweight to take on Schwarzenegger. Sensing a disaster, such influential figures as former Governor Jerry Brown and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown took to the cable news shows to suggest that Davis should step aside and beg Feinstein to run in his place. Meanwhile, panic-stricken union officials, who had pledged to stand with Davis, started putting out the word privately that he should not count on the $10 million in assistance he has asked from them.

But giving up now, says Davis' friend Mickey Kantor, who was Commerce Secretary during the Clinton Administration, "is not his personality. His personality would be to fight with his back against the wall." In which case, Davis' best hope is to refocus Californians on the first question on the ballot: whether it's right to spend more than $60 million to remove a Governor they elected less than a year ago who has not committed any malfeasance and whose major sin was hiding from them the seriousness of the problems ahead when he was running for re-election. On Monday, when Davis found himself in Chicago at an AFL-CIO convention with Bill Clinton, he privately sought the counsel of the master political survivor. As they talked for more than an hour at the Drake Hotel, Clinton (who has also been advising Feinstein) compared Davis' situation with his own during impeachment. The key, he told Davis, is to stay engaged and make sure voters see him every day on the job. Saturday's filing deadline found Davis signing environmental legislation at a health-care center in Santa Monica.

But with Schwarzenegger's entry into the race and the defection of fellow Democrats (although one of them, Garamendi, suddenly took himself out last Saturday), it will be more difficult for Davis to frame the debate on his terms. Attention for now has shifted to the second ballot question: if the Governor is thrown out, who should replace him? In some ways, this plays into one of Davis' few known political talents. He has always run best when he has an opponent to savage--and up until now, his only one in the recall election seemed to be Gray Davis.

Davis was sharpening his knives again for conservative Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who had spent $2.96 million to get the recall (and himself) on the ballot. But soon after Schwarzenegger got in the race, Issa bowed out, leaving Davis with an opponent who not only has star power but also will be far more difficult to paint as a tool of the right wing. In fact, it could be difficult to attach any labels at all to Schwarzenegger. What do you call an advocate of fiscal discipline who sponsored a successful 2002 ballot measure that requires spending more than $400 million on after-school programs?

The comparisons between Schwarzenegger and the last actor to be elected Governor of California are hard to resist. But by the time Ronald Reagan ran for office, he had spent a decade cultivating powerful backers and honing his ideas on the political-dinner circuit as a spokesman for smaller government and unfettered business. When then Governor Pat Brown dismissed Reagan as capable of doing nothing more than reading the scripts that had been written for him by hired speechwriters, the future President shrewdly changed the format of his appearances to question-and-answer sessions with his audiences. "Well, it worked like a charm," Reagan later recalled.

Assuming the media and the voters can get past making corny puns out of Schwarzenegger's film titles, he too will have to change his act to prove that he is a serious man with serious ideas for a serious time in California's history. "This isn't the movies," says Democratic political consultant David Axelrod. "No one is going to throw him a ray gun so he can blow up the deficit." But will a two-month campaign give anyone enough time to pin Schwarzenegger down on the issues that bedevil the state, from air quality to immigration, water rights to education? Schwarzenegger is promising detailed plans for how he will solve the state's myriad problems, but thus far his positions have been as vaporous as his witty one-liners (see following story).

Schwarzenegger's political organization is still very much a work in progress, built largely from the team that surrounded former Governor Pete Wilson. Some might question that choice, given that the Republican Party in California has yet to get itself back on the rails after Wilson's disastrous anti-immigration effort. But who Schwarzenegger surrounds himself with may not matter. The way in which the actor made his announcement suggests he's not a candidate who will heed his advisers--or even tell them what he plans to do.

It might be easier to know what to expect from Schwarzenegger if anyone knew just how he ended up where he is. If the rest of the world was surprised by his announcement on Leno's show, imagine how Richard Riordan felt. He and Schwarzenegger are friends and close political allies. Not two weeks before, sources close to Riordan say, Schwarzenegger had faxed to Riordan's Malibu beach house a four-or five-page speech that the actor was planning to make two days later. It said Schwarzenegger had decided not to run for family reasons and that he was endorsing Riordan. At that point, Riordan had asked him to hold off for a while, to give Riordan time to put together a political organization. As late as the Sunday before the date with Leno, Schwarzenegger, his wife Maria Shriver and their children spent five hours with the Riordans in Malibu without Schwarzenegger once letting on that he might be reconsidering the race. And the day Schwarzenegger announced, Riordan had spent three hours at lunch with California Congressman David Dreier, mapping out his own race. Riordan backed out as gracefully as possible under the circumstances, but not everyone believed it when he said he was "relieved" that his friend Schwarzenegger had decided to run after all.

What no one knew in the days leading up to Schwarzenegger's announcement was precisely how the pieces were falling into place for the actor. He had started to doubt whether Riordan really had his heart in the race. And Feinstein's decision not to run removed from the field his most formidable opponent. (In the TIME/CNN poll, she edges out Schwarzenegger by 2 percentage points.) George Butler, a co-director of the Schwarzenegger film Pumping Iron, said that if Feinstein dropped out because she believed Schwarzenegger wasn't running, then she fell for the same tactic the bodybuilder used when he wanted to make his opponents believe he would stay out of the competition. "It looked to me like an old-time Arnold maneuver," Butler says. "What you're dealing with is one of the canniest operators who ever walked across the road in America."

But most important, advisers say, is the fact that Shriver's reluctance had softened. No one could understand better than a Kennedy the costs that politics could exact, so it made sense that she would come around slowly. The couple hasn't confided just how or when it happened. "What was widely publicized as her opposition to do this was wrong. She wasn't against it," says an adviser. "And she got to a place where she supported it."

Schwarzenegger shouldn't expect to see many of the other Kennedys stumping for him. "I like and respect Arnold," said Shriver's uncle Teddy Kennedy. But the Massachusetts Senator added, "I'm a Democrat, and I don't support the recall effort." But Schwarzenegger has never tied his fortunes, political or otherwise, to those of his famous in-laws. When Shriver threw an outdoor party at their house for Teddy and her cousin Caroline Kennedy during the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Schwarzenegger mingled for half an hour or so and then retreated inside. "That was not his crowd or his comfort zone," recalls one guest. "He views himself as much larger than the Kennedys in many ways."

He has done things his own way on his own time. "One of his charms is that he sets everything he wants out on the table," says his friend Butler. But politics has a way of setting its own table. As Schwarzenegger was agonizing over whether to join the circus now or run a few years later as he had always planned, former Governor Wilson privately offered him a piece of advice he had got from Richard Nixon back in 1966, when Wilson was wrestling with a decision on entering a race. "Jesus, Pete," Nixon told him. "If you think you can win, you got to go now." For once, Schwarzenegger knew, the question wasn't whether to seize the moment--it was whether to let the moment seize him. --With reporting by Sean Scully/Los Angeles, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson, Michael Duffy, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington

With reporting by Sean Scully/Los Angeles, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson, Michael Duffy, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington