Unwelcome light from Buffett’s star

In 1926, as playwright Sean O’Casey was preparing “The Plough and the Stars” for its premiere at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, he offered actress Ria Mooney this advice on how to play the role of Rosie Redmond, the prostitute:

“Be clever and let who will be good.”

Classical theater training may be among the several things lacking in Republican gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s background, but the essence of O’Casey’s admonition animates his campaign’s approach to the media. Take, for example, this week’s surprise announcement and the bombshell interview that followed. Both maintained the Arnold campaign’s monopoly of the media spotlight, yet neither directly involved the candidate himself.

The stunner of the week -- and you can bet there’ll be one of those every week between now and election day -- was the appointment of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who along with former Secretary of State and Bechtel Corp. Chairman George P. Shultz will co-chair Schwarzenegger’s “Economic Recovery Council.”

It’s hard to know whether to treat this as campaigning or casting. Buffett, after all, is to Wall Street what Schwarzenegger is to action films -- a superstar. Not one American in 100,000 can tell you what “value investing” is (hint: It’s the strategy that made Buffett the world’s second-richest man), but anyone who’s ever lingered over CNBC while running the channels can assure you he’s a genius.

Add to that the Sage of Omaha’s reputation as a regular backer of Democratic candidates and causes, and you have an amplification of that soft, warm bipartisan light that Schwarzenegger’s handlers obviously believe illuminates their man’s good side.

Then came Friday’s bombshell: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Joseph T. Hallinan, Buffett “strongly suggested” that California’s “property taxes need to be higher.” He pointed out that while he pays annual taxes of $14,401 on his primary residence, an Omaha home worth about $500,000, he pays just $2,264 in property taxes on his Laguna Beach vacation house, which is valued at $4 million or eight times as much as his primary residence. In this year of state fiscal crisis, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman pointed out to the Journal, his Nebraska property taxes rose $1,920, while the levy on his California beach house went up just $23 because of a Proposition 13-imposed limit.

“You can draw certain conclusions from that,” Buffett said. “In effect, it makes no sense.”

Something else that made no sense, he said, was Sacramento’s reliance on capital gains taxes generated by the late bull market. “In effect,” he told Hallinan, “they set their financial planning based on a financial bubble.... You have got to get [the budget] in balance -- and get it in real balance. And it is not in balance now and they have to do whatever is necessary on spending or taxes to get it in balance.”

Now, there’s advice from the Heartland, about as plain spoken as an Omaha address would suggest -- to dig itself out of its fiscal swamp, California will have to cut spending and raise taxes, probably including property taxes.

So what does the recipient of this sage counsel make of it?

That’s hard to say, because the candidate comes from Hollywood, where wishful thinking is the coin of the realm. “The proposals and courses [Schwarzenegger] chooses will be his own,” said Sean Walsh, his campaign spokesman.

But if Arnold has any courses or choices, he’s not talking -- at least not to American journalists. The only print interview he’s done so far was conducted by an Austrian journalist. That fact is that if Schwarzenegger’s pecs were as ill-defined as his stand on this and other critical issues, he’d still be mucking out stalls on some Alpine farm.

“We’re dealing with a Teflon candidate. Schwarzenegger just seems to get a pass on everything,” said Republican strategist and pollster Arnold Steinberg, who in 1978 was one of the campaign advisors who convinced Evelle Younger to break with the rest of the state establishment and endorse Proposition 13, a decision that carried him to victory in the GOP’s gubernatorial primary.

“If I were running one of his Republican opponents’ campaigns, I would hold a press conference in front of his Brentwood house and demand that he repudiate Buffett’s advice,” Steinberg said. “If he didn’t, I’d also point out that he was the star speaker at the dinner held this year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Proposition 13’s passage.”

Whether Schwarzenegger ever will have to respond to such points will depend on whether his campaign can continue to generate hour after hour of essentially insubstantial television coverage, while avoiding contact with print journalists.

Martin Kaplan, who directs the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, has studied local television’s coverage of state politics through the past two election cycles. “Over the past 10 days,” he said, “there certainly has been more coverage of this race than in either of the last two gubernatorial elections taken together. The sheer quantity of the coverage shows that the stations are available to do this journalism, when they have something sensational. Unfortunately, the nature of the coverage basically has been, ‘Wow! Arnold is running.’

“Some substantial questions are beginning to be raised, but they’re all in print,” Kaplan said. “The broadcast media is content with the spectacle of it all. They’re covering this recall the same way they would a freeway chase.”

But if television were to join print journalists in pressing Schwarzenegger to publicly engage the issues, even he would benefit, according to Kaplan. “Proposition 13 is the third rail of California politics and being willing to talk about it provides Arnold a real chance to be what he says he wants to be, a leader who doesn’t believe in business as usual. If he embraces Buffett’s iconoclasm, he will make good on what people now are hopefully projecting onto him. Buffett, in fact, is a real leader, which is what Arnold is supposed to be.

“Buffett’s comments Friday are either a nightmare for Arnold to deal with or a chance to grab the real brass ring of leadership.”