The governors of America’s states intermittently meet for policy conferences and social events, and there is a chance that such a gathering in 2006 could feature a handshake between governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of California, and governor Kinky Friedman, of Texas. The latter, a popular country and western singer and author of comic novels, announced last Thursday that he will run as an independent against George W Bush’s successor in Texas, the Republican Rick Perry.
Friedman’s candidacy has so far had a jokey tone as he claims mainly to be attracted by the mansion — ”I need the closet space”. But, with a big dumb celluloid hunk running California, it is impossible to rule out the eventual swearing-in at the Houston statehouse of the author of such songs as Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed, and such books as Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned.
Friedman is the latest representative of an American trend known to detractors as anti-politics and to the more charitable (including me) as narrative politics. The former argue that voters are demonstrating their contempt for democracy by choosing jokes; the latter that, for an electorate increasingly shaped by the grammar of movies and television, the most attractive candidate will be the one whose bid most closely resembles a Hollywood pitch. This makes non-politicians attractive because their very improbability becomes their compelling storyline.
Although some trace the phenomenon to Ronald Reagan, the first film-star president had been a political creature throughout his career, anti- or narrative politics really began when the wrestler Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota and the star of The Terminator claimed California.
Friedman’s task, though, is harder than Schwarzenegger’s, for whom Reagan had already offered a model of big-screen leadership. Friedman, as a novelist, is subject to more depressing precedents, which suggest that it is difficult to translate literary celebrity into electability. (The traffic has been busier the other way; the novelists John Grisham and Ann Widdecombe were both once politicians.)
Upton Sinclair, the great early 20th-century novelist, ran for the New Jersey congress in 1906 and governor of California in 1926 and 1934, failing (though increasing his vote) each time, and facing in his final run an opposition that more or less invented negative campaigning. Norman Mailer failed to become mayor of New York, and Gore Vidal ended his family’s tradition of winning Senate seats. In the broader Americas, Friedman might also talk to Mario Vargas Llosa, a fellow author on the Faber & Faber fiction list, who failed in a bid to become president of Peru.
Sinclair, Mailer, Vidal and Llosa, though, omitted to have recording careers. The omens for a popular singer entering politics are more propitious: Sonny Bono became mayor of Palm Springs and was a congressman at the time he skied into a tree. So Friedman’s spin doctors probably want him on the stump singing Get Your Biscuits in the Oven rather than reading from the novels.
It’s only fair to note, however, that Schwarzenegger has proved to be a more serious leader than ever imagined by those who feared that the roof of the statehouse was falling in.
Friedman’s team will surely be studying closely the Schwarzenegger campaign in California, but they would also do well to keep a copy of a cutting from the west coast newspapers this week, which noted that Governor Terminator had authorised his first execution.
This was a sobering moment for both celebrity politicians and their electorates, reminding them that, no matter how much fun postmodern anti-politics candidates can be on the campaign trail and in the voting booth, the outcome eventually comes down to serious life-and-death decisions. Vain, lying and incompetent though conventional politicians have often proved to be, can a democracy be content that the fate of prisoners on death row should be in the hands of movie stars or country and western singers? — Â