She wows an audience in San Francisco with her campaign pitch for her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, “10 Things You Should Know About Arnold,” before deftly fielding questions about whether she thinks the press has been fair to him (no) to whether, as a Democrat, she favors the California recall (yes).
But when someone asks “What kind of First Lady would you be?” Shriver is–momentarily–at a loss for words. “I have no clue,” she says, before quickly adding with a touch of Schwarzeneggerian bravado. “But I’m sure I’d be awesome!” She hasn’t given too much thought to becoming the wife of a governor, says Shriver, because “I’m going back to my job the day this is over.”
So much for mincing words. In any normal campaign, that sort of spousal defiance might get a candidate in trouble. But as Schwarzenegger continues to lag in the polls with women voters–despite a recent appearance on “Oprah”– the blunt-spoken Shriver has become “our best weapon,” says one campaign adviser. After taking a leave from her job as an NBC News correspondent and trying to lay low during Schwarzenegger’s shaky first weeks on the campaign trail, while she was getting the couple’s four children settled into their schools, Shriver is now on the offensive. With less than two weeks until the Oct. 7 vote, she spends her children’s school hours racing around the state, from fund-raisers to voter-registration rallies and meetings with women business owners, who, she says, are her husband’s natural constituents. “Arnold is the only person in this race who has met his own payroll, paid his own workers’ comp[ensation insurance], signed the front of a check” she told an audience of professional women at San Francisco’s tony Commonwealth Club yesterday. “He’s a self-made man.” The transformation from reluctant spouse to chief barnstormer surprises no one who knows Shriver well. “At some point, her competitive juices started to flow,” says Roberta Hollander, a CBS News producer who is one of Shriver’s closest friends. “It’s not like she hasn’t been campaigning since she was a fetus. She just never thought she’d be a political wife. That’s the weirdness.” Shriver has shed some of her reluctance to talk about her famous family, telling audiences about campaigning as a child in the presidential campaigns of her uncles, JKF and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as her father, Sargent Shriver, who was George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, not to mention various cousins, as well as her brother Mark, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year in Maryland. “I was very well aware of what a campaign entailed, and that’s why I didn’t want him to run,” Shriver says. “So when Arnold was thinking about this, I told him, ‘here’s how it’s gonna go’.”
Shriver pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing her colleagues in the media for what she says is an “obsession that won’t go away” with Schwarzenegger’s raunchy statements in a 1970s interview with Oui magazine, as well as recurring rumors about his sex life. “You have people doing all this old stuff and then no one wants to talk about the substance of his speeches or his policies.” Shriver told NEWSWEEK after her San Francisco appearance. And she can sound like any candidate’s wife when it comes to dissecting media coverage of her husband. “Last weekend, he rolls out the most detailed environmental plan of any candidate,” says Shriver. “And then when you read the papers, it’s all about the Hummer.” She is referring to reports mentioning Schwarzenegger’s well-known affiliation with the Hummer, the giant SUV reviled by environmentalists for its low gas mileage and high carbon emissions. Schwarzenegger says he is having one of his Hummers converted to run on clean hydrogen fuel. Asked at the Commonwealth Club how many Hummers the couple owns, Shriver responded, “I know where you’re going here. I don’t drive a Hummer.”
Despite her frustrations, Shriver claims that she is enjoying the experience–and says that she is also encouraging her children to help in their father’s campaign. She has been showing her 5-year-old son Christopher how to pass out leaflets, just as she did at his age. If Arnold should lose, Shriver tells the San Francisco audience, “It’s totally cool with me. I get Arnold back full time and so do the children. But California loses his passion and his energy. It means people couldn’t see beyond the labels, the accent.”
Can Shriver bring enough women into Arnold’s column before the ballot? An unscientific survey of the San Francisco audience suggests it’s a tall order. Ellen Day, a laid-off executive from Charles Schwab, says she is still “on the fence about the recall” and that even after hearing Shriver speak, she wasn’t yet persuaded whether to vote for Schwarzenegger. “But the fact that he is with such a strong, intelligent woman gave me a much better picture of him.” Carol Grainger, a Democrat, says she has no intention of voting to recall Gov. Gray Davis. But, like many confused California voters, she says she’s shopping for a replacement candidate “just in case” the recall succeeds. After hearing Shriver, Grainger says she still isn’t persuaded to vote for Schwarzenegger, either, “but if he were elected, I wouldn’t feel as bad as I might have felt if I hadn’t heard her say those impressive things.”
Shriver says she doesn’t blame women who have never met her husband for their ambivalence. “Their exposure has been very one-dimensional,” she told NEWSWEEK. “Once people see Arnold and hear him they have a totally different impression.” Nearly all of the audience members interviewed by NEWSWEEK say they will be glued to tonight’s candidate debate in Sacramento before they make up their minds about their vote. Tonight’s debate is the only one Schwarzenegger has agreed to appear at, and his performance is considered crucial if he is to break out of a virtual tie with Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, a Democrat. Shriver, meanwhile, says she plans to campaign “as best I can” for the next two weeks and then let the chips fall where they may. She’s going back to her old job, no matter what. “I’m not sure Gray Davis would want to do an interview with me, but that’s probably the only problem.” With that, Shriver is whisked away by campaign aides. She has to get home in time to carpool.
