Arnold Schwarzenegger

Since Arnold Schwarzenegger entered the race for governor last week, people have been trying to gauge his positions on issues facing the state.

The Austrian-born movie action hero has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans for not offering specific policies. On morning TV news shows Friday, Schwarzenegger at times appeared to dodge questions.

A review of interviews with Schwarzenegger over the last decade show that he has staked clear positions on some issues but managed to avoid taking stands on others. The review also finds that some of the stands the media has long attributed to him are not as clear as they seem.

His ability to deflect tough questions shone when Talk magazine interviewer Max Vadukul asked him if he and his wife, Maria Shriver, scion of the Democratic Kennedy dynasty, talked politics at home.

“Not since I’ve been sleeping in the garage,” he quipped, nipping the interviewer’s attempt to shift gears.

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Drug Use and Smoking

In interviews, Schwarzenegger has revealed more about his own drug use than what he thinks about the debate over decriminalizing pot or the high percentage of drug cases bogging down the courts.

The subject that made presidential candidate Bill Clinton squirm is already out of the way for Schwarzenegger.

“What it is, is what it is,” he told Talk magazine in a 1999 interview. “I inhaled, exhaled, everything.”

He has also admitted taking steroids as part of his bodybuilding regime, though he has not said how often he used the drugs.

“You’d do it for three months, once a year before contests,” he said. “If you take 15 milligrams of let’s say, anabolic steroids for three months, it’s one thing. But if you take 200 milligrams a day for a whole year, that’s something else.”

Schwarzenegger said his drug use ended in the early 1970s, when information became available about the harmful effects of steroids.

He said he still enjoys a cigar. His criticism of New York City’s ban on smoking in public places illustrates what one commentator has called Schwarzenegger’s pragmatic libertarian tendencies.

“I would have some restaurants that are smoking restaurants and some nonsmoking, so there is a choice,” he told the New York Post. “Now there is no choice, so I think it’s a little overboard.”

Social Programs

As an avowed devotee of economist Milton Friedman, Schwarzenegger presents himself as a fiscal conservative.

“I am more comfortable with an Adam Smith philosophy than with Keynesian theory,” he told the Financial Times of London.

“I still believe in lower taxes -- and the power of the free market,” the Sacramento Bee reported him as saying.

“I still believe in controlling government spending. If it’s a bad program, let’s get rid of it,” Schwarzenegger said.

At the same time, Schwarzenegger extols the work of government and suggests he sees a need for far greater spending.

“We want to make sure that our children have the books, that they have their place in the classroom,” he said on CNN last week. “ ... We want to make sure the mothers have affordable day care. We want to make sure the older folks have their care that they need. That everything has to be provided for the people.”

Schwarzenegger has promised a detailed plan of how he would make that happen.

But for the present, all he has said is that he would bring business back to California because business would increase tax revenue and, “when you have more revenue, you can have more programs that I think are very important.”

Abortion and Gay Marriage

Appearing on Fox TV’s “The O’Reilly Factor” in May 2001, Schwarzenegger made a strong defense of abortion rights.

“I disagree with George Bush about that,” he said. “I’m for choice. The women should have the choice. The women should decide what they want to do with their bodies. I’m all for that.”

With Schwarzenegger in the race, his campaign co-chairman, Pete Wilson, offered a more nuanced position in a Fox News report with Brit Hume on Friday.

“He probably feels, much as I do, he’s not pro-abortion,” Wilson said. “He’s pro-choice. And there’s a real difference.”

He has also been outspoken on gay rights.

“I have no sexual standards in my head that say ‘this is good’ or ‘this is bad,’ ” he told Cosmopolitan in a frequently quoted interview. “ ‘Homosexual’ -- that only means to me that he enjoys sex with a man and I enjoy sex with a woman. It’s all legitimate to me.”

Schwarzenegger has acknowledged that his views on social mores diverge from mainstream Republican values.

He said he hopes to lead his party in a more tolerant direction.

“You’re going to lose until you become a party of inclusion, that you love the foreigner that comes in with no money as much as a gay person, as a lesbian person, as anyone else -- someone that is uneducated, someone who’s from the inner city,” he told Talk magazine.

Gun Control, Media Violence

Schwarzenegger has been quoted numerous times as saying he favors sensible gun control, but he has never defined what he means by sensible. His most expansive comment comes from a frequently cited interview on a Berkeley-based youth radio station last year.

“I don’t run around every day with a gun in my hand,” he reportedly said. “So I want kids to understand the difference; one is make-believe, like we do in the movies. But in reality I’m for gun control. I’m a peace-loving guy.”

Though on-the-record comments are sparse, the perception of his support for gun control goes back to the early 1990s and was so well established that even California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) thought of him as a possible ally when actor Charlton Heston testified against her bill to ban assault weapons in 1994.

“Someone told me we could have gotten Arnold Schwarzenegger because he supports gun control,” Feinstein was quoted as saying in a 1994 article in the San Francisco Examiner.

Schwarzenegger has been much more talkative about violence in the media, which he says has gone overboard. A little restraint is in order, he told The Times in a 2000 interview, just before the action film “The 6th Day” premiered.

“We could say to all those marketing people, ‘Look, we know that if you sell an R-rated movie to 12-year-olds, they will want to go and see it. But is it really good in the end for our country to let them in?’ ” he said. “Or should we come up with a system where we really don’t let any kids in, whether they’re with a parent or not? Because to me, that’s bogus.... “

Schwarzenegger professed to have experienced a personal transformation.

“At the age of 30, you run around, you say, ‘I want to do the biggest blow-ups, the biggest shooting. I want to have the biggest body count and all those things,’ ” he said. “But then when you get to be over 50 and you have a family, you see that you should broaden out and do other things.”

Times researcher Robin Mayper contributed to this report.