There’s only one place in which it doesn’t matter how bizarre one’s profession or multiple drug-addiction records are, a place people from any race, size and condition can enter, where the most valued thing is show business and fame is capitalised to such an extent that humans talk about themselves in the third person. That place is not America. That place is not Celebrity Big Brother. That paradise is, in fact, the election campaign to become Governor of California.
During the 2003 campaign, Arnold Schwarzenegger was almost the sanest candidate. Well-known for having a chest perimeter almost bigger than the state he wanted to govern (154 centimetres) and acknowledged by the Guinness World Records Book as “The most perfectly developed man in the history of the world”, he debated and opted to the position against, for example, (an irony, since the tiny African American actor had become quite famous in countries such as Spain thanks to a show entitled, precisely, Arnold). Other wunderkind candidates were Larry Flint (erotic press tycoon, on a wheelchair after having survived an attempted murder and also diagnosed as bipolar), Mary Carey (a porno actress whose motto was “Californians prefer them blonde” and exchanged her services for votes) or (a comedian known mostly for destroying melons and watermelons on stage).
Swarzie was finally victorious in the battle against those Greek demigods. It was, among other things, thanks to the sentence that closed the last chapter of A Million Degrees of Separation. He finished his speeches with his legendary “I’ll be back”, so he didn’t only manage to become governor, but he was as of then known as Governator, a blending of governor and Terminator (A little parenthetical remark: the candidate to the Catalan elections for party “Junts pel sí”, Raül Romeva, debuted in the world of literature with his novel Sayonara Sushi, a probable reference to Terminator that only not many managed to spot).
Arnold’s political career had started way before, though. Let’s remember that he’d been a witness to Tejero’s coup, our very own Terminator with his three-cornered hat, but his true idol was someone else: Ronald Reagan. Also governor of California in his time, without a doubt an actor with the same wide palette of facial expressions as Arnold himself, he won the elections to the presidency of the United States in 1980, on the same year that Swarzenegger became a US citizen and was part of the campaign, first making calls and giving out flyers and afterwards raising funds for the Republican Party during that same year’s elections.
Although Ronald Reagan is not exactly known for any epic parts played in his movies, he is quite famous for having uttered sentences fit to appear in any James Cameron film: “When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat”. In fact, Reagan became history by starting from a very modest place. Remember than in the Back to the Future saga, doctor Emmet Brown, before the information provided by Mcfly about who’d inhabit the White House years later, he answers: “Ronald Reagan? Then who’s vice-president? Jerry Lewis?”. But he soon got used to things and would even end up giving the plane he used during the 1980 campaign the name Free Enterprise II. Not even in Con Air they would have dared such a thing!
Arnold has confessed in more than one occasion that since he became governor he’d always made himself the same question when faced with a problem. If Billy Wilder had a sign in his office saying “How would Lubitsch do it?”, he had another one with the legend: “How would Ronald Reagan do it?”.
Hero of heroes for Wall Street cocaine-fuelled capitalism, Reagan lived only two degrees of separation away from the worst hippy nightmare. He touched someone very close to Charles Manson, although who really did it was his daughter: Patti Reagan.
