The audience cheered. They roared, in fact. You’d think it was for a movie star or something.
The guy they were cheering for was shouting “GO CHARGERS, GO!!†in the heart of San Diego Chargers country. The location was what had been the team’s home before 25,000 shell-shocked people took it over for nearly a week, taking refuge from a massive natural disaster.
The politician who elicited heart-felt cheers had, of course, been an actor before becoming California’s governor. But he had become something even more than both as he stood there that Sunday after hideous fires had decimated many parts of San Diego County and incinerated some 1200 structures. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in Qualcomm Stadium during a Chargers football game to honor the firefighters. Just one day earlier, the 41-year-old stadium had been emptied of some 20,000 fire evacuees — some of them leaving to live in hotels, or elsewhere, because they were without homes. The game was a victory celebration of sorts.
The worst of the big fires were waning, and it seemed that Schwarzenegger was back in the good graces of the bulk of California voters. From cynical reporters to the man and woman on the street, the man some call “Ahnold†received high marks for his management style during the disaster that caused the largest evacuations in state history.
President George Bush’s high-concept imagery moment came after 9/11 when he picked up the bullhorn in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Much of that image would later dissipate in the partisan polarization wars that followed. But it was an image-making moment.
Schwarzenegger had earlier tried political polarization, got burned and pulled back. Arnold was back to the kind of politics for which a broad coalition of Californians elected him four years ago, when they angrily kicked out the hapless Governor Gray Davis in a recall election. He had come full circle.
Schwarzenegger never really had his bullhorn moment. But it could be argued that he has had his bullhorn phase — his handling of the California wildfires.
He became the role model of a governor on-the-move, a Consoler-in-Chief, a go-between clamoring for help for his state’s residents from federal officials. His poll numbers had been on the rise, but the tragedy of the fires seemed to restore Arnold to the man who came to office seeming to be a different kind of governor.
Schwarzenegger hit just the right note and received praise in newspapers and from the man and woman on the street. For instance, Bill Whalen, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, said:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.