Arnold Schwarzenegger has recently declared that he will not be running for governor of California.  I had no idea he was even being considered, or considering the post, until a friend of mine six weeks ago said, “Are you excited about Arnold being your governor”?  I just looked at him in horror. The Terminator governor of California?!! A second-rate movie star running my home state?  It couldn’t be true.  It couldn’t ever happen!  A cut-rate celebrity, while an active Republican fundraiser and supporter, asked to run one of the most populous states in the Union?  The eighth largest economy in the world entrusted to a gun slinging, child-bearing, reality bending, testosterone-filled mass of muscle?  Ridiculous, laughable, preposterous even!
Then I remembered, we already had a monkey-toting cowboy as our governor.  And the current governor of Minnesota is an ex-pro-wrestler.  As if California wasn’t already getting enough bad press with the energy crisis.  The GOP must have really been scraping the bottom of the barrel when they thought of him.  Arnold said that he wasn’t going to run because he wanted to devote more time to his family, specifically to spend more time with his kids, aged three to 11.  Instead, he is currently filming the sequel to True Lies, and has Terminator III lined up after that.  As if the world hadn’t already reached saturation point when it comes to bad Schwarzenegger movies.
The part I find the most absurd of this whole thing is the fact that his statement came the day before the National Enquirer ran a front page story about Schwarzenegger having extra-marital affairs.  The fact that his farcical movie career was not enough to keep him from running for a position where people would expect him to not only appear credible, but to also give speeches in an understandable version of the English language.
One of the reasons that he was considered to be a good choice, besides the fact that he is a “larger than life” personage, was the fact that, because he is an immigrant, he would better understand that needs of California’s majority minority population.  Of course, being born in Austria, he is necessarily more easily able to sympathize with an immigrant agricultural worker who can’t read nor write and doesn’t speak a lick of English.  I can just imagine Schwarzenegger saying “hasta la vista baby” at the end of one of his campaign speeches.  But we can always rest assured that at the end of the day he would have wanted exactly what any serious minded politician would, “to crush your enemies, to send them to heaven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”  Godspeed Arnold, we know you’ll be back.