Pathological Peas in a Pod

By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet. Posted February 16, 2005.

Like most everyone in and around Hollywood, I spent part of this past weekend devouring DisneyWar, James Stewart's 572-page vivisection of Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Throughout the chilling read, I couldn't shake the feeling that Eisner reminded me of someone.

The answer came when I got to the epilogue. "Eisner's most glaring defect," writes Stewart, is "his dishonesty." Stewart goes on to describe Eisner's "tendency to distort, embellish or forget the truth" until he becomes incapable of distinguishing reality from his own fabrications.

That's when it hit me: Eisner is the Disneyland doppelganger of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's all right there: the unremitting duplicity; the penchant for saying one thing, then doing another; the gift for irrational invective; the way both men forge personal bonds with others, then turn around and stab them in the back – often just hours later.

Mouseketeer Mike and the Governator are pathological peas in a pod. 

DisneyWar is a laundry list of Eisner's lies and deceptions. We get chapter and verse on his infamous two-faced handling of best friend Michael Ovitz, protégé Jeffrey Katzenberg, and heir apparent Robert Iger – as well as the dishonesty-drenched disintegration of his relationships with the Weinstein brothers at Miramax and Steve Jobs at Pixar.

There is the same sad, monotonous predictability to Arnold's serial betrayals. Except that Arnold's victims have fewer resources with which to fight back. In the last few months alone, Schwarzenegger has reneged on well-publicized commitments made to educators, environmentalists, public servants – and voters.

He promised teachers and students last spring that if they agreed not to fight his plan to withhold $2 billion owed to them, he would never again dip into money earmarked for schools to balance his budget. "Trust me," he said. "Over my dead body," he guaranteed. But at a time when a recent Rand Corporation study reports that California ranks near the bottom nationally in both school funding and student performance, Schwarzenegger's new budget gives schools $2.8 billion less than they are owed. He promised environmental groups that he would not support Prop. 64, a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored initiative that prevents citizens from using the courts to protect consumers and the environment. The California League of Conservation Voters plaintively called his promise "a commitment he personally gave to environmentalists." Then he turned around and endorsed Prop. 64, which, with his considerable weight behind it, passed.

He promised State Sen. Gil Cedillo that he would back a revised bill to allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses. Based on this pledge, Cedillo agreed to help repeal his own law. After the two came to their agreement, Cedillo asked Schwarzenegger if they should put their deal in writing. "He shook my hand," remembers Cedillo, "he looked me in the eye and said, 'No. I give you my word. I keep it.'" Of course he didn't. And he doesn't.

He promised police officers, firefighters and labor leaders he wouldn't overhaul the state's pension system if they went along with his 2004 budget proposals. They did – and now the governor is betraying them by pushing to privatize California's pension plans and replace them with individual 401 (k)-style private accounts. This is a move right out of the Bush "Let's Privatize Social Security" playbook.

He promised voters that if they passed his balanced-budget initiative, he would "tear up the credit card and throw it away." They did – but his new budget calls for $6 billion in new borrowing. As California Treasurer Phil Angelides sums it up: "The new debts and deferrals would bring the state's total credit card balance to $31 billion, a 68 percent increase since the governor took office."

And that's just the tip of the Matterhorn-sized iceberg. Indeed, there have been so many fresh deceptions it's easy to forget Arnold's old ones: his campaign pledge not to accept contributions from special interests (he has since raised over $28 million, the vast majority of it from all the usual special interest suspects); his claim that his first act as governor would be an exhaustive audit that would uncover "billions of dollars" in waste (those billions in waste proved as elusive as Saddam's WMDs); his oft-repeated vow that he would become "the Collectinator," bringing back much needed federal funds from Washington (instead, things are moving in the opposite direction; the president's new budget will cost the state hundreds of millions more in lost funding). And then there were his PR-driven promises to convert one of his Hummers to hydrogen power and to hire a "well-respected investigative firm" to look into whether he was a serial groper (both promises no sooner made than abandoned).

Find more Arianna at Ariannaonline.com.

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