For the past 18 months, Arnold Schwarzenegger's fellow Hollywood entertainers have maintained an informal code of silence about his high-profile performance as Governor of California.
But now, with his popularity ratings in freefall and protests rife against his budget-slashing policies, that silence has been broken by another of the movie
world's prominent political animals, Warren Beatty.
Beatty, a liberal Democrat who has flirted many times with the idea of running for office but has never taken the plunge, delivered some blistering criticism of his conservative fellow actor during a graduation address at the University of California in Berkeley.
"Can't we accept that devotion to the building of the body politic is more complex and a little more sensitive than devotion to body-building?" the 68-year-old actor-producer-director said in a speech as full of jokes and understatement as it was with direct body-blows.
He attacked Schwarzenegger as a reactionary, a bully - of labour and the little guy - and as a serial promise-breaker, a man who dresses himself up as a moderate but hides his conservative agenda behind a blizzard of photo ops, "fake events ... fake issues and fake crowds . . . It's become time to define a Schwarzenegger Republican: a Schwarzenegger Republican is a Bush Republican who says he's a Schwarzenegger Republican".
Beatty's speech has had an intriguing slow-burn effect since he delivered it last weekend and the two actors have sparred with each other ever since.
Schwarzenegger's staff dismissed Beatty as a "crackpot", prompting Beatty to tell the Los Angeles Times it wasn't "the most intelligent response for Arnold to have his people give". But in his speech at Berkeley, Beatty acknowledged Hollywood's reluctance to attack one of its own, and said he shared many of the same feelings himself.
"I've never enjoyed being publicly negative about actors in public office ... I've always had a real soft spot for actors even if they are right wing."
Schwarzenegger was different, Beatty said, because he had shown disrespect in his labelling of others: "Why not rise to the higher levels of that calling, rather than denigrate your fellow politicians, calling them 'stooges' and 'girly men' and 'losers'?"
The media would relish the prospect of a Schwarzenegger-Beatty match in the 2006 governor's election.
But Beatty made it clear he wasn't interested in actually standing..
- INDEPENDENT
