WITH ALL DUE respect to the governor-elect of California, his election must be the occasion for a broader reflection on what Americans have come to want from leaders. That Arnold Schwarzenegger was exposed in the last days of the recall election campaign as crude, to say the least, in his attitudes toward women seemed in the end to be no surprise to California voters -- and no offense either.

After all, he had built his film career on a celebration of sadism and cruelty. His off-screen character, as laid bare by the Los Angeles Times, meshes perfectly with the misogynist robots he has chosen to play in movie after movie. Having turned the dream life and video game addiction of young boys into a new genre of cinema, he has now brought it openly into politics.

Voters were exhorted to "let Arnold be Arnold," and they did. But in doing so, California has turned itself into Adventure-land. It is as if a thawed-out Walt Disney returned to sic a cartoon super-hero on the State House in Sacramento -- and on the national ethos. Whatever Schwarzenegger's political rhetoric, his star power depends on his status as an icon of fantasy violence. Guns are the curse of this nation, and Washington's attachment to puerile war-making is the curse of the world. Schwarzenegger's promoting of cosmic dualism in which the forces of good and the forces of evil have nothing in common but the license to kill reinforces the worst aspect of George W. Bush's permanent adolescence -- and just at the worst time.

The Republican Party meanwhile, embracing Schwarzenegger as a tribune of its future, has advanced its ever more ferocious purpose of turning America into the largest gated community on the planet. "I will be the peoples' governor," Schwarzenegger says, vowing to serve ". . . not for special interests but for everybody." Yet one of his top priorities, emphatically repeated, is the rescinding of recent California legislation making it possible for undocumented workers to receive drivers' licenses. This is a law that the state Legislature already passed, and that ill-fated Gray Davis signed only last month. And now it is to be written off the books?

Are the people who care for children of the affluent, work in yards of the movie stars, accept the menial labor no one else will do -- all the while harvesting much of the produce on which the nation feeds -- not part of "everybody?" A driver's license was once a kind of privilege, but in the "homeland" of security, where the demand for official identification has become ubiquitous, the picture ID is increasingly necessary for basic functioning -- to live as much as to drive. That is why, no doubt, the political establishment of California acknowledged the universal necessity of this uniquely sanctioned identification. The legislation was a humane response to the difficult circumstances of the undocumented workers, but it was also a realistic acknowledgement of their importance to whole sectors of California's economy. A compassionate law, and a step away from official hypocrisy that exploits such workers while pretending they don't exist.

Now Schwarzenegger, having shamelessly emphasized the drivers' license issue to get elected, cannot wait to say in that pointed Spanish of his "Hasta la vista," language the people he has in mind, mostly, will understand.

That the governor-elect is himself an immigrant who has admirably taken full advantage of this nation's traditional openness to newcomers, including hardscrabble arrivals who work hard to regularize their situations after entrance, doubles the outrage of such contempt.

But what triples the outrage of this particular politician's poor-punishing strategy, given the family ties of which he has made good use, is the memory of Robert Kennedy with Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farmer Workers. Kennedy was a passionate advocate for migrant workers, many of whom were "undocumented." He opposed the large farm owners' use of trucked-in Mexican workers as strike breakers, but he was otherwise overwhelmingly in favor of such disenfranchised men and women as they moved through the complex thickets of arrival, work, tentative legitimation, toward full legal acceptance. Kennedy would have understood that achieving "documentation" is but one step in a time-honored American tradition.

Acknowledging the back-breaking labor, and the quest for justice, of people like those Schwarzenegger would return to the limbo of official negation, Kennedy told the migrants, "You are winning a special kind of American citizenship. No one is doing it for you -- you are winning it for yourselves. And, therefore, no one can take it away."

In an election that was, in its time, as shocking as last week's, California embraced such leadership. What a Never-Never Land that seems today. Robert Kennedy, who knew nothing of "Hasta la vista!" was never more himself than when raising his fist and saying, "Viva la Causa!"

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

###