AND ON THE SIXTH DAY, ARNOLD CREATED MAYHEM

All That's Missing Is the Popcorn: Come one, come all, to the greatest political show of the fall as Arnold Schwarzenegger vies for a chance to run California. Inside his stunning decision--and why it would be a mistake to write off his chances. (KAREN TUMULTY AND TERRY MCCARTHY, 8/10/03, TIME)

What no one knew in the days leading up to Schwarzenegger's announcement was precisely how the pieces were falling into place for the actor. He had started to doubt whether Riordan really had his heart in the race. And Feinstein's decision not to run removed from the field his most formidable opponent. (In the TIME/CNN poll, she edges out Schwarzenegger by 2 percentage points.) George Butler, a co-director of the Schwarzenegger film Pumping Iron, said that if Feinstein dropped out because she believed Schwarzenegger wasn't running, then she fell for the same tactic the bodybuilder used when he wanted to make his opponents believe he would stay out of the competition. "It looked to me like an old-time Arnold maneuver," Butler says. "What you're dealing with is one of the canniest operators who ever walked across the road in America."

But most important, advisers say, is the fact that Shriver's reluctance had softened. No one could understand better than a Kennedy the costs that politics could exact, so it made sense that she would come around slowly. The couple hasn't confided just how or when it happened. "What was widely publicized as her opposition to do this was wrong. She wasn't against it," says an adviser. "And she got to a place where she supported it." [...]

He has done things his own way on his own time. "One of his charms is that he sets everything he wants out on the table," says his friend Butler. But politics has a way of setting its own table. As Schwarzenegger was agonizing over whether to join the circus now or run a few years later as he had always planned, former Governor Wilson privately offered him a piece of advice he had got from Richard Nixon back in 1966, when Wilson was wrestling with a decision on entering a race. "Jesus, Pete," Nixon told him. "If you think you can win, you got to go now." For once, Schwarzenegger knew, the question wasn't whether to seize the moment--it was whether to let the moment seize him.

Somehow, it seems like divine justice that the hand of Nixon steer a CA governor's race. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 11, 2003 11:45 AM