It’s Popcorn Politics, and a Movie-Dazed Public Eats It Up

And now, here he is -- the man whose words steer the ship of this Golden State of ours, the governor of California ... William Wisher!

Stop! Cut! Who?

Down, boys. Arnold Schwarzenegger is still governor. But some of his bring-down-the-house zingers, exported from Hollywood to Sacramento, were written for him by Wisher and director James Cameron, who together crafted the scripts for “Terminator” 1 and 2.

Statecraft by screenplay: “Hasta la vista, baby.” “Terminate them.” “I’ll be back.” And now “girlie men,” lifted from an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch and slapped onto the California Legislature like a bumper sticker. (I tried to find out which “SNL” wit concocted “girlie men,” but it seems lost in the mists of the 1980s.)

If Wisher got residuals every time Schwarzenegger threatened to “terminate” some budget proposal or the legislator proposing it, he could outsource writer’s block, should he ever have any.

I asked Wisher how he liked being the “shadow governor,” and he just laughed. He likes Schwarzenegger, likes what he’s doing in Sacramento, and the movie-script vocabulary “is how people know him.... He takes that language with him.” What worked for Schwarzenegger in films, Wisher said, “works for him in politics. He’s got heavy lifting to do, and if borrowing the language of films is going to help him out, I think it’s a smart thing to do.”

Time was, politicians cribbed from one another, or at least from foreigners or dead guys. Now they lift lines that screenwriters crafted for movie characters.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” (Alfred A. Cohn for “The Jazz Singer,” the first “talkie,” which is why it was originally “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”)

Ronald Reagan: “Go ahead, make my day.” (Harry Julian, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner for “Dirty Harry.”)

George Bush I: “Read my lips.” (Authorship disputed -- either another Eastwood film or speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Also the title of a 2002 French film, so let’s not go there.)

John Kerry, about George W. Bush, and Bush, about Iraqi insurgents: “Bring it on.” (Not a sound bite, but the title of a movie about dueling cheerleaders and a good description of the way we’ve abandoned government by process for government by pep rally.)

The GOP stews about Hollywood being in Democrats’ pockets -- the red carpet/red states gap, Warren and Annette, George Clooney, and Sarah Jessica Parker vs. Tom Selleck, Bo Derek, Dennis Miller and Bruce Willis. But has it struck anyone else that most actors who actually become politicians become Republican politicians? If the GOP says its new guy looks like he came straight out of Central Casting, he probably did.

Schwarzenegger, Reagan, Eastwood, Fred Thompson, Fred Grandy, Alan Autry, Sonny Bono and Bob Dornan, who flew copilot in TV’s “Twelve O’Clock High.” (Dornan obviously didn’t buy the philosophy of his uncle, actor Jack Haley, who remarked that “stars should keep their mouths shut on subjects on which they’re not qualified to speak. The fact that they’re good actors doesn’t necessarily mean they know anything at all about politics.” And this is the guy who sang “If I Only Had a Brain.”)

Not only are they all Republicans, they’re mostly action actors. Autry, Fresno’s mayor, even played pro football before taking roles that ran to Southern cop and nutty National Guardsman. Granted, Sonny Bono was more the Andy Devine-sidekick type, and Grandy, the purser on “The Love Boat,” wasn’t packing anything more powerful than a rum and Coke. But the rest had screen personalities that voters longed to see morphed into political manly men.

I can hardly name any Democratic actor-politicians: U.S. Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, cast as an ageless goddess in her one film and cast as the “pink lady” by opponent Richard Nixon (pink meaning communistic); Sheila Kuehl, the state senator who played the gal-pal in the “Dobie Gillis” series; and poor Ralph Waite, who lost a congressional seat to Bono’s widow.

No doubt Waite lost partly because he played a nice guy: Pa Walton. Pa could turn a lathe and fix a truck and lend a neighbor a hand, but what good is that when he wouldn’t know which end of a tommy gun is which? Is a man whose catchphrase was “ ‘night, John-Boy” the kind of man we want running this country?

Schwarzenegger is smart enough to use his punch lines for public mocking, then make nice out of microphone range. But USC’s Steve Ross, who writes about politics and Hollywood, says “his stardom, rather than his ideology, has driven his political persona,” and “while calling the Legislature ‘girlie men’ is a great sound bite, it will do nothing to further his ambitions.”

Actors in politics say they want us to forget they’re actors -- so why do they keep talking like actors? Because we eat it up. We tell pollsters that we hate all that nasty partisanship, then we take the bully-bait of invective and laugh and cheer and yawp for more, as if this was just one more Hollywood blockbuster. And maybe it will be. Coming soon, to a voting booth near you: “Revenge of the Girlie Men.”

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.