美国社会热点/名家漫画赏析W.D.White(美)

　　Fortunately for America's good humor①, a legal challenge to the special election in California has been beaten back. On 7 October, Californians will go to the polls as scheduled and decide whether to keep Governor Gray Davis in office or replace him with one of the over 130 candidates interested in his job. Most prominent among the would-be governors is muscle man and film star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has never held political office.

　　Schwarzenegger is the stronger of the two serious Republican candidates. The other is State Senator Tom McClintock, who represents the conservative core of the party in California, in contrast to the more centrist Schwarzenegger. So long as McClintock stays in the race, splitting the Republican vote, the Democrats have a good chance of retaining the governorship.

　　Schwarzenegger has been criticized for avoiding the debates in which the five or six main candidates to replace Davis square off against one another. This is the theme of Pat Oliphant's cartoon: Why is Arnold not participating? (Update: He did finally take part in a televised debate on Wednesday.) It is easy to imagine that muscle men lack brains, but Schwarzenegger is clearly no dummy. What Oliphant is suggesting is that Schwarzenegger is reluctant to reveal that he hasn't done much hard thinking about the many problems confronting California. The cartoonist seems to think that Arnold is ambitious but intellectually lazy.

　　Oliphant also plays up Austrian-born Schwarzenegger's German accent. Is it a drawback to have a foreign accent? Not necessarily. Throughout US history, numerous foreign-born politicians and policy intellectuals with overseas accents have had brilliant careers in public service. Some accents are commonly felt to be charming, particularly (light) French, Russian, Hungarian and Scandinavian ones. For an academic, certain accents can be useful. German-born Henry Kissinger, for instance, has been accused of nurturing his accent to advance his career at Harvard; his equally German-born brother lost all trace of his accent. A German tone suggests a link to Teutonic scholarship, still much respected, and to the great wave of Central European intellectuals who fled Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s.

　　Is a Chinese accent an advantage? Sorry...