Schwarzenegger’s Risky Defense: He Stretched Truth

As potentially embarrassing statements from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s past have come to light, his campaign has developed an unusual standard defense: He made it up.

Confronted with Schwarzenegger’s own words on drug use, his early business practices, women and his immigration status, campaign aides -- and the candidate himself -- have disavowed many of the comments he has made during the last 30 years.

In doing so, they have said that Schwarzenegger either exaggerated or erred in dozens of interviews he gave to promote his career and even in his 1977 autobiography.

This week, Sean Walsh, a campaign spokesman, said that, “as an entertainer and promoter of his sports and films for decades, he has often stretched the envelope to grab attention and to promote activities he has been engaged in, to shock and grab the reader and the viewer.”

Schwarzenegger has acknowledged saying “a lot of outrageous things to get the headlines.”

Candidates for office often are forced to respond to revelations from their past. But Schwarzenegger’s argument that his promotional duties as a bodybuilder and actor required him to embellish is novel.

Schwarzenegger’s approach is notable for several reasons. The campaign’s defense seems to reflect a belief that the public accepts an old Hollywood maxim: Everybody lies.

At the same time, political strategists say that Schwarzenegger’s consistent showing in polls appears to challenge the assumption that admitting dishonesty is politically disastrous.

“I think this may be a precedent,” said Bill Carrick, a Democratic consultant who is not tied to a particular campaign in the recall. “The entertainment business is a business where everybody gets to have a new life or new lives all the time. We’re seeing the Hollywood model of public relations and the Hollywood model of crisis management applied to politics. I think you may see candidates deal with questions this way in the future.”

But Carrick and other political strategists also point to potential risks.

Some of the statements Schwarzenegger has disavowed are not that old. His prior career as a movie actor is only six weeks in the past; “Terminator 3” can still be found in a few theaters. And his appeal as a candidate is closely tied to his biography -- in particular his successes as an immigrant, a bodybuilder and an actor.

“There’s a higher percentage of P.T. Barnum hucksterism in him than we knew,” said Marty Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center, which studies the intersection of politics and entertainment. “And if someone is good at that sort of thing, have they forever renounced it when they enter the public arena?”

What’s more, Schwarzenegger’s political platform is based in no small part on voters’ trust.

Schwarzenegger won’t say what programs he might cut to resolve the state’s budget crisis; he has asked voters to wait until he is elected, and his auditors can study the budget, before he comes up with a plan. Similarly, he has responded that voters should trust him to protect education spending and the environment.

Schwarzenegger’s advisors frequently challenge reporters who ask questions about the candidate’s past statements, saying such queries attempt to put an unconventional candidate in a “conventional, political box.”

But they also emphasize that standards for truthfulness are different in entertainment and politics and insist that Schwarzenegger is adjusting to the distinction.

“When you’re promoting a movie, you say things you know are outrageous,” said spokesman Todd Harris. “As a candidate for office, the threshold is completely different, which is why you see him rising to meet that new standard.”

Schwarzenegger stated his views on salesmanship and truth-telling long before he became a candidate. In a 1985 Rolling Stone interview, he said he had staged a scene in the documentary “Pumping Iron” in which he appeared to smoke a joint.

“It was all designed, very thoroughly, to sell the idea of bodybuilding,” he said. “If you tell people that pumping up feels as good as sex, that you can eat all the cake you want, get stoned, have a good time and everybody will love you -- well, those are sell statements.”

He also has repeatedly said that he made up a story about skipping his father’s funeral because of a body-building competition. “I have to tell this story so people will understand how intense sports gets and how cold you have to be to be competitive,” he later explained.

In an interview with Esquire earlier this year to promote “Terminator 3,” Schwarzenegger said he looked at life as a stage.

“You have to be able to sit back and look at the whole thing as kind of like a big stage play,” he said. “That’s the way I always see my life. It’s a big play.... You’ve got to be able to step back, and then you can see the entire picture, then you can balance much better, you can play around with it much better.”

The campaign seems to have internalized this philosophy in dealing with a variety of stories from his past. When confronted with a 1977 interview in which Schwarzenegger described sex involving several body builders and one woman at a gym, the candidate first said he didn’t remember the specific interview. Then he said he had made the story up.

More recently, a 1981 Schwarzenegger appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson surfaced. Schwarzenegger, who had gone on the show to promote “Conan the Barbarian,” described a business scheme he said he had engaged in when he was working as a bricklayer after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake.

He and a bodybuilding friend would visit potential customers, he said, and while he was talking to them, the friend would go up on the roof and surreptitiously lean on chimneys to break them. The two would then get the contract to do the repairs.

When the story resurfaced, Rob Stutzman, a campaign spokesman, dismissed Schwarzenegger’s account as “shtick” -- a view borne out by friends who suggest the actor’s bricklaying business was more useful as a source of lore than a real concern.

Schwarzenegger’s campaign touts his experience as a bricklayer in a Spanish-language advertisement. “Arnold Schwarzenegger, like so many of us, came to this country with a dream. He began working in construction, laying bricks,” the advertisement says.

But until he became a permanent U.S. resident in 1974, Schwarzenegger was in the United States on visas that allowed him to work as an athlete -- a bodybuilder -- not a bricklayer. Asked this week by reporters from the San Jose Mercury News if Schwarzenegger’s bricklaying work violated his visa status, campaign officials defended his actions, but also said that at least some of the candidate’s previous accounts of his work experience had been exaggerated.

That marked the second time the campaign had denied some of Schwarzenegger’s autobiographical statements relating to his visa status.

Last week, Democrats criticized Schwarzenegger for saying in his 1977 autobiography that, when he first came to the United States in 1968, he took a “salary” from Joe Weider, a bodybuilding promoter. At the time, Schwarzenegger held a B-1 visa, which prohibits its holder from collecting a salary from an American company.

The legal point is a fine one. Schwarzenegger never ran afoul of immigration authorities, and Los Angeles immigration attorney Alan Diamante points out that B-1 visa holders can work and receive money for their expenses -- just not salaries.

But rather than basing their defense entirely on that argument, campaign officials also dismissed the autobiography, “Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder,” as another example of Schwarzenegger’s promotional efforts that can’t be taken at face value.

There are some parallels in political history for Schwarzenegger’s strategy, said Arnold Steinberg, a Republican strategist who does not work for a candidate in the recall election.

Lawyers-turned-candidates have had to disavow the views of past clients, and onetime political aides have distanced themselves from their bosses when they themselves run for office.

Actors have gotten the benefit of the doubt on issues before. When Nelson Rockefeller ran for president in 1964, his divorce was an issue; when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California two years later, his divorce never came up, in part “because Reagan was an actor, and it was a totally different standard,” Steinberg says.

“In a normal campaign, I think this approach might be dangerous ground,” Steinberg said. “But in this campaign, where you have a short election window and the media coverage is so surface, it’s an ingenious approach.”

GOP strategist Dan Schnur said he expects “voters are going to give him more of a pass than other candidates because intuitively they understand that this career switch puts different demands on him.”