For a muscle-bound bodybuilder-turned-Sacramento-bound body-groper, Arnold Schwarzenegger -- Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger -- is one smart fellow ... smart enough to have outwitted all the journalists who provided coverage of the recall campaign.
From the moment he announced his candidacy on "The Tonight Show," Schwarzenegger controlled the tenor and the agenda of the campaign.
He used his celebrity and the access it provided to circumvent the traditional political media and talk directly to the voters.
He dodged, ignored or provided only vaguely generalized answers to most reporters' questions on the issues facing voters and talked only about what he wanted to talk about.
He dominated the coverage, in print and on television, every week of the campaign, whether he was ahead or behind in the polls and both before and after The Times published allegations that he'd groped more than a dozen women.
The Predator-as-groper stories just demonstrated anew the age-old Hollywood adage that any news is good news -- that as long as you spell someone's name right, any coverage helps.
Schwarzenegger's domination of the coverage was as predictable as it was inevitable. He's a movie star, a political novelty, a larger-than-life figure; he was running, in effect, against a governor who's smaller than life, a career politician so resolutely unpopular that he might have lost a race against Osama bin Laden.
Schwarzenegger's other foes were a lieutenant governor who has all the charisma of a bowl of oatmeal and an assortment of freaks and fringe candidates.
Still, the extent of Schwarzenegger's domination of the media was staggering.
The covers of Time and Newsweek. One-on-one interviews with Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Larry King. Appearances on Oprah Winfrey's national TV show and Howard Stern's national radio show.
Between Schwarzenegger's announcement and election day, his name appeared in far more stories published in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and New York Times than did the names of any of the other candidates to replace Gov. Gray Davis, according to a study by researchers working under Bruce Fuller, co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education, a think tank at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.
