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Beatty, Bening Try to Crash the Gov.’s Party

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Times Staff Writers

In a celebrity standoff, actor Warren Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, tried to crash Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign rally at an airplane hangar here and were barred from going inside after a confrontation with the governor’s aides.

The appearance by the movie-star couple upstaged the beginning of the governor’s four-city campaign bus tour, as Beatty publicly argued with aides who refused to let him inside to watch the governor speak.

An outspoken opponent of the governor’s agenda, Beatty refused to leave when Schwarzenegger’s campaign team made it clear he was not welcome at the invitation-only event and accused Beatty of being a force for the political status quo.

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Beatty has appeared in a radio ad urging voters to defeat the governor’s four ballot measures, which are up for a vote Tuesday.

The clash began about an hour before Schwarzenegger’s arrival. Nurses, teachers and other opponents of the governor’s special election had planned to shadow him throughout the day on a bus of their own. Beatty and Bening were the celebrity demonstrators on board.

As the couple and their supporters approached the entrance, they were intercepted by Schwarzenegger aide Darrel Ng, who blocked their path. Standing with Beatty and Bening were officials from the teachers and nurses unions, among the governor’s most dogged opponents.

Ng, 27, asked if he could help. Beatty replied that they were there to hear the governor speak. Ng said he would have to check whether they were on the list of invited guests and ran off, while other aides huddled nervously nearby.

Ng returned a few minutes later and asked Beatty and Bening to spell their names. Checking a list, he told them that they were not on it. Todd Harris, another Schwarzenegger aide, came over.

“Here’s the problem,” Harris said. “If your people had shown a modicum of respect when you came to our events, if you hadn’t come with bullhorns and been screaming, I wouldn’t really have a problem with it.”

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Beatty promised to listen quietly, but Harris refused. “If that guarantee had been made a year ago, it would have been great,” Harris said, referring broadly to the governor’s opponents.

Security guards and Ng were letting only people with designated wristbands inside.

“Do we need a wristband to listen to our governor?” Bening asked. “He represents all of us.”

“We have to ask you to go back out,” Ng said.

“I know you have asked and I’ve turned you down,” Beatty said.

He finally agreed to remain outside the hangar and listen over loudspeakers.

Holding his wife’s hand, Beatty chuckled as various radio hosts and Republican speakers who preceded the governor onstage insulted his acting skills.

“ ‘Dick Tracy’ was a terrible movie,” said radio talk-show host Roger Hedgecock. “Just terrible.... That was celluloid abuse.”

When it was his turn to speak, the governor did not mention the spectacle, which had drawn the attention of TV cameras and even the hundreds of Schwarzenegger supporters who had turned out for the rally. Organizers closed the hangar at one point, making it more difficult for the crowd to see Beatty.

In an interview later aboard his campaign bus, Schwarzenegger said Beatty’s appearance posed no distraction. He has described Beatty, who has been active in Democratic causes and campaigns for years, as a friend.

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“I’ll let someone else be worried about that,” the governor said, sitting in a soft leather chair at the back of his bus, which was decorated with posters that read “Reform and Rebuild California.”

He added: “I don’t concentrate on any of that. I just concentrate on my message, to get my message out there.”

With several statewide polls showing his four measures trailing, Schwarzenegger hoped the bus tour would rally support in this late stage of the campaign. He addressed enthusiastic crowds of several hundred people here, in Anaheim and in Riverside. In Irwindale, he spoke to nearly 1,000 supporters.

“This is a very important election,” Schwarzenegger said at Pacific Transformer Inc. in Anaheim. “We can take the power back again. Take it away from the special interests. Take it away from the public employee unions. Take it away from the politicians. And give it back to the people of California.”

He was joined in Riverside by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whom the Schwarzenegger camp sees as someone with impeccable reformist credentials.

The senator said he was particularly interested in seeing voters approve Proposition 77, which would strip state legislators of the power to draw voting districts and give it instead to a panel of retired judges.

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“Everybody complains about the extremism in politics,” McCain said aboard Schwarzenegger’s bus. “You’re never going to change that if people have lifetime jobs in Congress and the Legislature.”

Though he hoped no one would muddy his message on the campaign’s final weekend, Schwarzenegger faced tenacious resistance from nurses, teachers and firefighters. They trailed him for much of the day aboard a bus they dubbed “The Truth Squad.”

Though the bus skipped Riverside, protesters who were dispatched there hoisted signs a block from where McCain and Schwarzenegger were speaking and blasted through loudspeakers the song “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”

After the faceoff in San Diego, the atmosphere aboard “The Truth Squad” was giddy. Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Assn., grabbed the microphone usually used by tour guides and excitedly recounted the confrontation with Schwarzenegger’s staff at the hangar.

“Their entire operation was off its game!” she said. “We are so much better than them at this. They did not know what to do with us.”

“I thought it was kind of fun,” Beatty said with a mischievous grin, taking the microphone from DeMoro. “In terms of what you call political street theater, I think we got our message across by being respectful. I think it was slightly disrespectful on their part to keep us standing out in the sun.... “

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