IF you're a political junkie, Joe Mathews' book, "The People's Machine," will be catnip. If you're not a political junkie, beware: It could easily make you one.
Mathews, a Los Angeles Times reporter who has covered much of Arnold Schwarzenegger's intense three-year political career -- yes, it's been only three years -- believes that the governor, in his fusion of entertainment with politics and of conventional government with direct democracy, represents a new phenomenon in American public life.
Except for the labels Mathews uses -- "blockbuster democracy," "the people's machine" -- that's not altogether a new take. A lot of politicians -- Huey P. Long Jr., Fiorello H. LaGuardia, William Jennings Bryan -- put on good shows for "the people." In our history, a good deal of the nation's entertainment has come from politicians and preachers. The Romans offered the people bread and circuses.
Nor is Schwarzenegger the first California politician to use ballot measures as part of his political strategy. Republican Gov. Pete Wilson's reelection in 1994 owed a great deal to his embrace of hot-button crime and immigration initiatives. Jerry Brown, now the Democratic candidate for attorney general, is still trumpeting his authorship of the California Political Reform Act, which helped carry him to victory in the governor's race in 1974.
But Mathews is right that no one has built ballot measures -- both as instruments of policy and as threats -- into the very essence of governance. The three years have been a nonstop mall-to-mall campaign -- from recall (2003) to recovery bonds (2004) to political reform (2005) to infrastructure bonds, tougher penalties for sex crimes and reelection (2006). Although the governor's reform agenda famously crashed last year -- some of it before it even reached the ballot -- there's no sign that his essential approach will change.
As Schwarzenegger, who is as much a Republican maverick as he is a Republican moderate, said after his reform initiatives lost in November, there's always a new movie. The tough-guy act ("I call them girlie men") bombed, so now he's Mr. Nice Guy, as in the early days of his governorship. But blockbuster ballot-box democracy rolls on: politics as shtick. The irony here, as Mathews says, is that Schwarzenegger is trying "to harness California's century-old system of direct democracy to build precisely the thing it had been designed to counter: a political machine. Of course [this would be] run not on patronage but on stardust.... "
