The money lines:
“Of course voters were upset, but national reporters didn’t dare to tread near what might be causing this troublesome discontent: skyrocketing spending, tripled car taxes, slipping bond ratings, overpaid public-employee unions. Once the movie star entered the race, all the spotlights and all the nit-picking scrutiny was directed at him.
It didn’t matter that the people felt very obviously that Gov. Gray Davis was an incompetent in need of sudden retirement. It didn’t matter that the Lieutenant Governor who aspired to replace him had ties to a bizarre group believing several southwestern states should be sawed off America and handed back to the Mexicans. It didn’t matter than Gov. Davis tried to save himself by signing a bill to award illegal aliens with state-sanctioned driver’s licenses, making it easier for homeland-security threats to move right into the mainstream of California and perhaps other states as well.
What mattered were mangled statements Arnold supposedly made in 1975 during the filming of his breakthrough documentary “Pumping Iron.” What mattered were wild claims about group sex at the gym that Arnold made in the pornographic magazine Oui in 1977. What mattered was an anonymous female, a former pro beach volleyball player, who claimed that Arnold touched her breast on a Santa Monica street in 1980. No longer were we being admonished by the press to move on. Now they were instructing the voters to back up.”
