Watching and Worrying
VIEWPOINT
by Sir Eldon Griffiths
Anything the Brits can do the Americans do later but better!
This disputatious proposition, which I’ve been toying with over a lifetime of comparing the country of my birth (and baptism in public policy) with the country of my adoption, (and rebirth as a commentator) leaps to the front of my mind as Arnold Schwarzenegger takes possession of one of the 10 most powerful elective offices in the United States. Consider:
The Brits all summer long have been agog with charges that Tony Blair led the UK into war with Iraq on the basis of “sexed up” intelligence about WMDs. Leading the charge was the BBC whose initial allegations, now discredited, morphed into a scandal about the Blair government’s “outing” one of the UK’s top secret weapons analysts, who responded by committing suicide.
Months later, President Bush is similarly accused of invading Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence. And CNN, like the BBC, led the charge on the authority of hearsay allegations that the White House outed the name of a CIA agent in revenge for her husband’s disputing U.S. and British claims that Iraq bought uranium from Africa.
These trans-Atlantic parallels extend a good deal further. Read or watch the mass media in both countries and you’ll see that sex plays bigger than security; eroticism outpolls Iraq.
Thus, the mess in Baghdad was upstaged in the London tabs by the memoirs of the late Princess Diana’s lover, an officer though hardly a gentleman of Her Majesty’s Grenadier Guards. Simultaneously in California, Iraq was pushed off the TV screens by stale revelations that candidate Schwarzenegger fondled and groped an assortment of come-hither wenches.
Both stories are hot stuff. But who can doubt that the eruption onto the stage of the Terminator as our new governor is now a far bigger story than that of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles?
First, because the fairy tale narrative of an Austrian kid with a Nazi father taking charge of America’s most important state by way of an East London gym and a raft of Hollywood movies is the stuff that dreams,or nightmares,are made of. Where else but America could anything like this happen?
Second, because what happens in California resonates far beyond the confines of the Golden State. It is not too much to say that what Schwarzenegger now achieves or fails to achieve, matters to the global economy.
That is why Japanese and Chinese are anxiously watching to see whether he has the courage to tackle California’s agricultural protectionism, which favors the mass production of, for example, uneconomic rice, and whether he will resist the temptation to slew California’s public purchasing towards the false economies of “buy American” or “buy Californian” (which kill off more new jobs than they create).
Europeans, meanwhile, are on tenterhooks to discover whether Arnie (as the European press is fond of calling Schwarzenegger) makes California more, or less, attractive to foreign investment. The Brits, who employ 120,000 Californians, are especially eager to learn whether his pledge to cut the car tax and reform workers’ comp can be accomplished without a return to the follies of “unitary tax” on international companies.
There is a bigger national reason why the rest of the world’s fascination with our extraordinary new chief executive matters to the U.S. Arnie can make a difference to the image of America abroad.
The Bush administration, badly shaken by the worldwide surge of hostility to its policies, is desperately trying to repair the damage done to U.S. overseas interests. Yet as its officials strive to win UN support for more troops in Iraq, and EU backing for American policies on Iran and North Korea, they encounter, again and again, a palpable decline in the once nearly universal affection that most foreigners instinctively felt for an America where freedom prospered, laws were just and opportunity knocked for immigrants prepared to work hard.
In this context, California fills a large part of the screen when foreigners look at America. Governor Arnie, for better or worse, commands global attention. So which is it to be? The international embarrassment of a California version of Jesse Ventura? Or Arnie as re-affirmation that America is still the “shining city on a hill” that Ronald Reagan described, ironically not long after he was forced to go back on a promise that his pledge against higher taxes was “set in concrete.” Reagan got away it when he said, “Listen to that noise,the sound of concrete breaking!”
Arnie says he won’t disappoint us, but I share Warren Buffett’s opinion: California can’t balance its books without cuts in public spending, such as on education, that its people would resist, or a hike in property taxes, despite Prop 13, that might lead to other recall proposals.
If Arnie flops as governor, the global image of America assuredly will go down with him. But if he succeeds, and stays in the office long enough to turn California around, the Terminator could become one of the much-needed regenerators of U.S. prestige abroad.
I am reminded of a challenge thrown out by Edmund Burke, the 18th century’s most pro-American member of the British parliament: “Save England by your exertions and Europe by your example.”
For England read California. For Europe read the U.S. of A. Go to it, Arnie. And God save America.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, lecturer, journalist and former member of the British House of Commons.
