By Steve Sailer
09/14/2003
[Probably due to one of those Internet worms that are going around, this email from mysteriously appeared in my inbox. It’s even more relevant now that Arnold Schwarzenegger failed to muscle Tom McClintock out of the California gubernatorial race at the GOP state convention this weekend. — Steve Sailer]
Loved you in Terminator 3. You looked massive in your nude scene. (Eat your heart out, Vin Diesel, my man Arnold’s still got it!)
Sorry I couldn’t be there for you. But I guess that Mostow kid did okay sitting in my chair: $150 mil domestic, and $260 mil overseas. Not T2’s numbers, but …
I've been meaning to tell you, the most emotionally powerful moment in T3 for me was when you heaved that blonde Terminatrix headfirst through the urinal.
Made me think about three or four of my exes!
But enough about me and my alimony payments. Let’s talk about you and your plan to pull a Grace Kelly and kick yourself upstairs before the wrinkles kick in.
Great idea, but I do have to mention one thing. I don’t know if you've ever been to Sacramento, but my people tell me it’s nothing like Monaco.
Now, Arnie, we've been friends since T1, what, 20 years ago? You know I won’t lead you wrong. It’s me, Jimmy. I told you you'd look great in a tuxedo in True Lies. I told you that nobody'd think you were gay for wearing black leather in T1.
I want you to win this thing — even though I would pick up another $50 million check for rights to the Terminator characters if you dropped out and did T4 instead. (But, hey, we've both got enough money where we don’t ever have to work again. Come to think of it, I've barely done a lick of work for six years now…)
Anyway, I thought I'd give you a man-to-man talk on this governor’s race. I don’t know much about politics, but I do know a few things about the public.
Forget that. You're Arnold Schwarzenegger. You can get more free publicity than God.
But you've got to get in there and mix it up. People want to see you stand strong for something.
It’s like when that creep Kenneth Turan dumped on Titanic. So what if he’s the critic for the LA Times? He’s one guy. Hundreds of millions of teenaged girls liked it just fine. Unlike him, they even paid for their tickets.
One point eight billion dollars later, I think I earned the last laugh.
The media is saying you suffer a gender gap, just like they said with Reagan. No surprise. We've always known that there are even more guys who want to be you than there are girls who want to have your baby (and there were always plenty of those, as I recall).
This is a problem only if guys' votes don’t count as much the girls' votes do. I’m just a truck driver from Canada, so maybe I don’t understand the intricacies of the U.S. Constitution as well as the L.A. Times does. But I think everybody’s vote still counts equally. You can win if you have the guys.
Same with minority votes versus white votes. You're only supposed to talk about how much you want minority votes. But white votes still count too. Whites still cast a lot more votes than minorities in California — a three to one ratio in 2002. You can win if you have the whites.
Look how the Republicans won the 2002 national elections — they got a lot of rednecks who don’t normally vote all worked up about the War of Terror. You gotta get those kinds of folks to the polls.
But you have to lay the groundwork for that last week right now. The absentee ballots have gone out. I’m getting a little worried.
You know, I hate to say this, but if I needed somebody to play a Republican governor and Bonnie Timmermann sent this McClintock guy over with his executive-looking silver temples and that way he seems to know what he’s talking about when he’s discussing the budget, I'd say, "Yeah, audiences will buy this guy as a governor."
Not to say you don’t look like a leader — you're my choice to play King of the World — but there’s something about this McClintock…
Maybe you can get Karl Rove to make McClintock take a dive. Remind the Bushies that there’s that thing in the Constitution about how you can’t run for the White House, but that a Governor McClintock would automatically be heavyweight Presidential Timber come 2008, when they want Jeb to continue the dynasty.
You ever meet Dick Nixon? I guess he liked my Rambo script, because he was real friendly once backstage at the Today show. He told me his secret was to run to the right in the Republican primaries, and back to the center in the general election.
But this election’s different. The big issue that will make the Right forgive all the pesky ones like abortion and gay rights, and win you the de facto Republican primary, is also the issue that will win over the rest of the electorate.
You and I both did a fair amount of blue-collar work in California back in the Seventies. I drove trucks and buses and worked in a machine shop; you had that chimney repair scam. It was tough work, but the pay wasn’t bad and houses were cheap back then.
Nowadays, when I talk to some guy driving a big earthmover or running a drill press (you know me, I still have to check out every mighty machine I see), unless he’s in the union, his pay stinks. No way can he buy a house out here.
I ask him why he’s not making much more than I made in 1975, and he always tells me the same thing: "Too many illegals, and too many of them working off the books."
The people telling me this include a lot of Mexican-American guys, at least the ones who can vote. Maybe they're trying to get their sisters and moms in to the U.S. legally, although that takes years. Still, at least the legal system puts them in the driver’s seat in choosing which relatives will come. But meanwhile, some third cousin sneaks in and shows up on their doorstep, demanding to sleep on their couch for a couple of years.
All these guys are mad that no-one will even talk about this. They see articles like this one in the LA Times "Candidates Skirt Immigration Issue" [by Teresa Watanabe, September 8, 2003] gloating over how this "divisive" issue isn’t allowed to be debated anymore. And they aren’t happy.
I’m not surprised when the paper ran a later article admitting that 16 percent of likely voters told the Times poll that immigration was the biggest issue in the election. ["Polls Suggest More Partisan Campaigning," by Mark Z. Barabak, September 13 2003].
Now, lots of times these guys don’t get around to voting. They don’t like politicians. And, let’s face it, some of these guys don’t run their private lives on Palm Pilots, if you know what I mean. Maybe on Election Day they stop off at a buddy’s house on the way home from work and get high, or maybe they're bummed because their old lady walked out on them, and they forget all about voting.
But this year, they're fired up. Davis wants to triple their car registration tax, and that hurts. These driver’s licenses for illegals that Davis and Bustamante just signed for seem like nuts to them. It just sends a message to Mexico: "C'mon up and drive my wages down some more!"
Lots of their friends have moved to Nevada and Utah and are telling them they're doomed if they stay in California. But they don’t want to move — they love this state.
They're looking for a leader.
I know you're worried about getting called a racist, what with your Dad and all. But the point is that Davis and Bustamante were the ones who injected race and immigration into the election. Bustamante all of a sudden has turned himself from the Agribusiness Defender into the Chicano Avenger. And this MEChA BS!
I’m an immigrant like you, so I can say that running against illegal immigration is a no-brainer.
Remember Sonny Bono? Little guy, never pumped iron in his life, but he got himself elected to Congress. He had this shtick: In debates, the moderator would say something like, "Mr. Bono now has three minutes to talk about illegal immigration. He'd stand up, say, " What’s to talk about? It’s illegal," and sit down.
People loved it. Hell, his widow’s still in Congress.
In fact, who better to run against illegal immigration than America’s most famous immigrant?
Hey, Arnie, I love ya and give my best to Maria,
JC
[Steve Sailer is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]
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