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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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September 25, 2003

Is there more to Arnold's Indian bashing?

I have been having a running, private e-mail debate with a non-partisan, non-aligned reader about Arnold’s ads attacking the Indian casino contributions. My correspondent, for whom I have high regard, suggests that the commercials fit a pattern for the Wilson team: they ran against Latinos in 1994 with Proposition 187, against blacks in 1995 (for Wilson’s short-lived presidential campaign) via affirmative action, and now the Indians, under cover of the political reform issue.

My first reaction to this charge was that it was nonsense. From everything I have heard (and not from the Schwarzenegger camp) polls show that the Indians are generally held in high esteem in California, that Californians want them to do well and support their right to run gambiling operations, and attacking them over their casinos is actually a risky strategy. While there might be a strain of anti-gambling sentiment in the electorate, there is no latent anti-Native American sentiment to tap. Besides that, the gaming tribes asked for it: they are the biggest spending interest group in California, they have been throwing their weight around in the Capitol, and they have spent millions of dollars to support Schwarzenegger’s two main opponents: Democrat Cruz Bustamante and Republican Tom McClintock. Schwarzenegger was making special interest influence a theme of his campaign before the Indians even got involved, and in a sense they walked right into his strategy.

But there is that pattern, and in fact it goes back further than my friend suggests. In 1990 Wilson surprised the political world by endorsing term limits, which were in part code for terminating Willie Brown, then the flamboyant, black speaker of the California Assembly. In 1992, in the mid-term elections, the Wilson operation ran against welfare mothers with a ballot measure that would have slashed their benefits. What to make of this, and how do the Indians fit in?

I think it might have more to do with the fact that Wilson and now Schwarzenegger have tried to perform uncomfortable balancing acts at the center of the political spectrum and toward the left of the Republican Party. It is difficult to energize your base when your key issues are children and education and the environment and other such squishy things. There are not too many angry white males beating down doors for the Hydrogen Highway. And even though Schwarzenegger shouldn't have any problem with the macho vote, he does have a problem with true believers in the party who need some raw meat to chew on.

Enter the Indians -- a perfect symbol of special interest influence running amok in Sacramento. My instincts tell me they are the scapegoat du jour not so much because they are an ethnic group but because they are the most convenient target through which the Wilson/Schwarzenegger team can rile up the Republican base, and they fit into Schwarzenegger's "Son of Hiram Johnson" campaign theme. But I am willing to entertain alternative explanations, especially from people who have hard data or intelligence to support the ethnic-based theory. Please let me know if you do.