Huffington Calls Schwarzenegger GOP Insider

TV commentator and columnist Arianna Huffington is calling on veterans of Jesse Ventura’s independent campaign for governor of Minnesota to help her recast Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Republican insider, while claiming for herself the outsider role in the California gubernatorial recall.

“If we can, it will be another Shock II,” a replay of the Ventura upset, said Dean Barkley, Huffington’s campaign manager and the chairman of Ventura’s successful 1998 run.

“That will leave Arnold free to go make ‘Terminator IV,’ ” added Bill Hillsman, Ventura’s former advertising chief.

“I just can’t see why voters would elect another product of the two-party system that created the problem,” Barkley said. “A Republican cannot fix the problem. It’s going to take an outsider with courage.”

“I think Arianna is that person, and we need to convince voters that’s true,” he added. “We’re going to battle Arnold for that independent voting bloc.”

The team met its first test Thursday with the revelation that Huffington -- who has said the recall is being spearheaded by “an embittered cult of right-wing radicals who have overdosed on tax-cut Kool-Aid” -- had paid no state income tax in the last two years and less than $800 in federal taxes.

At a news conference in Beverly Hills, she said that her writing and research expenses were greater than her earnings during that period, and that she had paid $150,000 in property and payroll taxes.

“I think the media made a bigger deal out of it than they should have,” Barkley said. “She’s a small-business woman and didn’t do as well as she would have liked to.”

“I don’t think it’s anything terminal,” he said, “but it was a distraction that we definitely didn’t need.”

Van Jones, Huffington’s Northern California campaign director, said he considered the revelation “irrelevant.”

“In any given year, her expenses rise and fall. Whatever Arianna pays in taxes would be a drop in the bucket to the deficit compared to the corporate loopholes she’s talking about,” he said.

A bigger challenge to Huffington’s insurgency strategy is Schwarzenegger’s ability to command media coverage, her team believes.

The Huffington campaign said it would rely heavily on the Internet, which analysts say is likely to reach the people who might vote for her, including those who did not turn out in the November gubernatorial election.

“The Internet is to the progressive left what talk radio is to the conservative right,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of California’s independent Field Poll. “For somebody like Huffington, that’s a natural, because that’s the constituency she’s after.”

Still, although “everyone likes to point to Minnesota and Jesse Ventura coming out of nowhere and winning the governorship, there’s a major structural difference,” he added.

Voters In Minnesota could register the day of the election, but in California they must register by Sept. 22 for the Oct. 7 election. “In California, you can’t just seize the moment and show up at the polls.”

That leaves little time to waste.

Bivouacked in her Brentwood mansion, Huffington and a war room of operatives sat around a dining room table Sunday for their first full face-to-face staff meeting.

Campaign co-director Barkley sweated in the heat.

A rumpled Hillsman arrived from LAX, set down his bags, and scrutinized a reporter.

“Nice to meet you,” he growled, “so far.”

“The next couple of days is going to be wall-to-wall Arnold,” warned the campaign’s chief strategist, Bill Zimmerman, who led the successful effort behind Proposition 36, which mandates treatment instead of incarceration for nonviolent California drug offenders, and helped direct the 1984 presidential campaign of Gary Hart.

In every issue Schwarzenegger carefully sidesteps, Huffington, 53, sees an opportunity.

“Speaking out against special interests is not a sound bite I picked up on the way to my announcement speech,” Huffington said, in a reference to the actor. “I have a body of work.”

“I don’t know how you can be against special interests and endorse the Bush economic policies, which I assume he will,” she said.

How to eliminate the deficit? Close corporate tax loopholes. Amend Proposition 13 to allow commercial property taxes to rise to full market value. Use the revenue to bolster public schools and hospitals and deliver more affordable housing. Put nonviolent drug offenders into rehabilitation, not jails. Support clean energy. “Protect the most vulnerable among us,” she said.

Readers of Huffington’s twice-weekly columns and best-selling books are already familiar with these stands, but she would also like the major candidates to engage in televised debates.

Huffington -- a past president of the Cambridge University debating society in England -- said several major campaigns have already agreed, but “Arnold won’t say.”

“Debates helped Ventura a lot,” Hillsman said, adding: “In the Ventura campaign, we had to recognize something and tap into that vein. It’s not hidden here. People are mad. Really mad.”

How much the gloves will come off between the two candidates remains to be seen.

Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, along with Huffington, are part of the serial-socializing Westside crowd known to some as the Armani National Guard.

Some time before he announced his candidacy, Schwarzenegger attended a Huffington gathering on the public education crisis where he remarked in a reporter’s presence that “the public schools suck.”

Schwarzenegger and Huffington have also discussed how best to protect their children’s privacy during their campaigns.

“Arnold called me the day after he announced. He said, ‘I have nothing but respect for you,’ ” Huffington said. “We’re friends, and that’s how the campaign will be.”

But in a statement released Thursday, Huffington turned up the heat, saying that if “Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to paint himself as ‘the people’s governor’ ... then what was he doing cozying up to the likes of Kenny Boy Lay, Mr. Special Interest himself?”

The truth is, Huffington said, “Arnold is a Bush Republican through and through.”

Huffington says she will not run the campaign with her own assets or “fat cat” donations, but will finance the race with contributions raised partly by solicitations on her www.ariannaforgov.com Web site. Her campaign said she had raised $100,000 as of Tuesday.

Huffington said she made her about-face from being a “compassionate conservative” when she realized that the private sector was not willing or able to solve social problems.

“I really understand where Arnold is politically, because I was there 10 years ago,” she said. “I really believed the private sector would solve social problems.”

Her more liberal views became widely known partly through her so-called “Shadow Conventions,” held near each of the 2000 presidential conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

The forums provided an alternative arena in which to criticize such things as the role of big money in politics and to question drug laws that puta greater number of minorities behind bars.

Huffington said her decision to run crystallized while she was on vacation in Ireland with former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, and became final when she learned that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein would not get into the race.

Brown applauded Huffington’s decision in a Salon.com column.

“With Arnold as a foil for Arianna, I see no downside in her giving the race a whirl as an independent candidate,” she said.

She described Huffington as an “ecologically hip anti-SUV campaigner” and “folk heroine of radical political Web sites.”