Mrs. Terminator's Revenge
Politics is such a foul business. Payoffs, paybacks. Look at the price the Republican governor of the Democratic state of California says he had to pay for endorsing George W. Bush at the Republican convention last month.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was batting cleanup as the final speaker at the Panetta Institute's lecture series in Seaside, Calif., on Monday evening. Leon Panetta, the Clinton White House chief of staff for whom the institute is named, asked Schwarzenegger in front of, oh, about 1,000 people what Schwarzenegger's wife, Maria Shriver, the California Kennedy, thought of his convention speech.
"Well," the governor said, "there was no sex for 14 days."
Man! And you thought Tom "The Hammer" DeLay was an enforcer!
"Everything," the governor added, with fine deadpan, "comes with side effects."
You don't have to raise your hands, but be honest: How many of you out there read this and thought to yourselves: Two weeks without sex? Is he serious? I'm supposed to feel sorry for him? I'd be happy to get that much action. (There are some folks whose spouses would wreak better revenge by hiding the remote control.)
But then again, the couple have been married for more than 17 years and the Journal of Sex Research notes that couples in their age group engage six or seven times a month. (A British study estimates it at once every two weeks, but that's the "No sex please, we're British" British.)
What was Arnold thinking? If you believe as I do that Schwarzenegger never blurts out anything impulsively, you have to wonder: Was he mocking his macho he-man image, playing the henpecked action hero? Did he go golfing earlier that day with Panetta and Clint Eastwood -- who was in the front row -- and test the line for laughs?
Or was he underscoring what he told the foreign press corps not long ago -- that he had learned his lesson about groping women (without confessing he'd ever done it in the first place)?
Maybe he was subliminally pleading for a marital truce. The convention's been over for, what, six weeks? On Monday night, Schwarzenegger was at pains to praise his wife's smarts. For a good conversation between a Republican and a brainy liberal, "I'd just take my wife out to dinner."
I called the governor's office to gauge just how much of this was serious, and for purposes of social science, was this fortnightly boycott a major interruption or a simple brownout, in electricity-supply terms?
