MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT
I'm disappointed but not surprised that Republican partisans like Hugh Hewitt and wannabe partisans like Andrew Sullivan--both of whom I respect--have rushed to defend Arnold Schwarzenegger, mostly by attacking the L.A. Times. The LAT is undoubtedly biased against Arnold and Republicans. That doesn't mean its stories are untrue.
Arnold's whole persona is of a bigger-than-life figure who gets his own way, likes an audience, and makes jokes at other people's expense--the sort of guy who'd grab a woman's breast in public and laugh at her discomfort. (Probably not the type of man who'd attack a woman in private, however. The audience is key.) And Hollywood is not a place of refined manners. It's not exactly surprising that a lot of women say he bullied and fondled them, nor that these women don't want their names in print, lest they offend a well-connected superstar.
Age and fatherhood may have improved him. People do change, and I assume Arnold wouldn't approve of a man similarly grabbing and intimidating his daughters. But the stories are creepy, the general pattern is believable, and that pattern suggests that Arnold is, or was, a person of bad character.
That doesn't mean he shouldn't be governor, given the circumstances and alternatives. Good character is desirable in a governor, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. I don't countenance poisoning one's enemies at dinner, but Machiavelli had a point. The essential public virtues are different from the essential private ones. And which public virtues matter depends a great deal on the political system. I wouldn't want a man of Arnold's private character to wield power in a illiberal system.
Roger Simon, who understands California well, has several good posts on the subject. An excerpt:
I will be voting for Arnold tomorrow, but with a heavy heart. The recent disclosures of the way he treated women are deeply repellent, even if only some of them are true and even if they were disclosed in a reprehensible manner. I can only hope and assume that we will see nothing of this kind of activity if he is elected. But if we do, I will do everything I can to support his immediate recall or worse....
I am stuck with Arnold. He's about as imperfect as you can get, except for one thing in his favor--he hasn't spent his life as a politician. Perhaps when he gets to Sacramento he will remember why he was sent there and apply an intelligent amateur's common sense (and a little of his movie charisma) to moving the State of California in a postive direction. I also hope he will abjure party politics and stick with the kind of pragmatism for which many of us voters would be electing him.
And from another of Roger's posts:
I will go one step further with what those conservative minds (and I chose that adjective deliberately) at the LA Times don't get. The very things that they are publicizing in Arnold are the very things the public loves about him--not that he was a groper or mistreated women--but that he is AWAKE. Unlike the others competing against him (Davis, Bustamante, McClintock), he is a vibrant personality that interests and attracts people. The LA Times is the opposite of that--a paper that is so gray it out grays the "gray lady" NY Times by miles. In the city that gave the world Hollywood, these folks don't realize how much the public craves theatre. If they had, they might have known the best way to defeat Schwarzenegger was quietly, reducing a larger than life figure to the humdrum world of the state politician, peppering him with obscure questions of budget and tax law, not by sliming him with outtakes from the Enquirer.