Arnold Fesses Up and People Are Mad -- at the Messenger

Reports of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sexual mistreatment and humiliation of women drew outrage here Thursday on the campaign trail.

Outrage at the Los Angeles Times, not at Arnold.

I would have thought that at a gathering of conservatives, who rightly vilified President Bill Clinton for his raunchy scandal and nationally televised lies, there’d at least be some finger-wagging at Arnold.

Not a chance with the Teflon Terminator.

In San Diego, one Arnold supporter after another bashed The Times, and the beating continued at a second appearance in Costa Mesa, where hundreds of Arnold supporters roundly booed the mere mention of the paper.

Hey, I’m no dope. If people are out to kill the messenger, I’m smart enough to turn my ID badge around. Maybe I should see if the Orange County Register is hiring.

“The L.A. Times is known as a disreputable newspaper,” one woman told me in San Diego. Several others said they doubted the report and they were certain it was timed to derail Arnold’s California Comeback Express, a cross-state victory ride.

Actually the report was held until it could be exhaustively researched and triple verified, but why do I even bother with an explanation?

I asked the woman if she listened to a lot of talk radio.

Yes, she said.

The Apocalypse is no longer growing near, my friends. It’s here.

In San Diego, a woman named Doris Beers handed out signs saying “Remarkable Women Join Schwarzenegger.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Beers said of the allegations. She said Arnold’s misbehavior happened a long time ago. (Actually, the latest incident reported was in 2000.) Besides, she said, Clinton’s scandal took place while he was in office. True, but Clinton also had a willing participant, unlike Arnold.

“It’s women who grope Arnold,” Beers insisted, rather than vice versa.

Arnold’s chief mouthpiece denied the allegations, too, which made him look like a stooge when Arnold later contradicted him. But even Arnold had it both ways, which has quickly become a specialty of his. Remember when he first described his earlier sexcapades as intentionally outrageous behavior -- and then said he made it all up for the publicity?

Schwarzenegger took the stage in San Diego and painted himself as the victim, complaining that the press had “begun the tearing down.” He warned that “a lot of what you see in those stories is not true.”

But then he said, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” and fessed up.

It was a beautiful piece of work.

Yeah, I may be a creep, he was saying, but my accusers are bigger creeps.

Go Arnold!

Another reporter asked me if I knew why Arnold would confess just five days before the election, and I think I do.

It’s a way of coming clean while simultaneously unifying support by tossing grenades at the evil Fourth Estate. And more important, it keeps the focus off the bigger story, which is that Arnold hasn’t begun to explain how he’s going to fix the problems in Sacramento.

By the way, this is no big deal, but I think the CHP should know that Arnold’s six-bus California Comeback Express did 80 mph from San Diego to the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa.

I was barely able to keep up in my Nissan Sentra.

But it was worth the sprint, because what happened in Costa Mesa was a perfect metaphor for a candidate who made his gazillions in show business.

After the warmup acts did their honest best to establish that everyone in the audience of several hundred people hated the car tax, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, Gov. Gray Davis and the Los Angeles Times, Schwarzenegger arrived in his “Running Man” bus and took the stage amid roars of approval. His speech, if you could call it that, was roughly the length of a movie trailer.

After the usual vow to terminate terminate terminate because of the culture of spend spend spend followed by tax tax tax, Arnold started in on Davis’ tripling of the car tax. Naturally, he never points out that the car tax increase was structured by former Gov. Pete Wilson, because then he’d have to point out that Wilson is his political tutor.

Arnold then gave his calculation of what the increase would be for several cars: a Honda goes from $83 to $256, for instance, and a Dodge Caravan from $136 to $420.

He didn’t say what the increase would be on a Hummer.

And then, lest anyone forget that there’s no business like show business, Arnold pointed to where some “friends” from Hollywood had parked a white Oldsmobile under a wrecking ball that dangled from a crane. Spray painted on the car was “Davis Car Tax.”

The ball fell.

The car exploded.

The crowd roared.

I don’t think anything can stop him now. Not Davis, not Cruz, and not the cries of bullied women.

Arnold smiled and waved goodbye, and the California Comeback Express rolled on.

Sacramento or bust.

*

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.