A-Rod and Me

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: July 7, 2007

The 10-year-old girl waited in line two hours for the most gifted man in baseball, Alex Rodriguez, to sign the children’s book he had just written. When at last she got his autograph, my daughter hurried home and read every word — taking the lessons to heart.

It was called, “Hit a Grand Slam!” For a man now so reviled in many parts of the baseball world, his life story was sympathetic and sad, Dickensian with a Latin twist. A-Rod talked about throwing up on the school bus, getting dumped by the first girl he fell for and the father who walked out on them.

“Dad’s coming back, you’ll see,” he said to his sister, but Dad never came back. “I still can’t understand how a parent could abandon a family.”

By book’s end, he is rich beyond measure, the best young player in the game, and has a best friend for life, Derek Jeter. But A-Rod tells children that life is not about money or fame.

“It’s not all about the Benjamins,” he sums up. It’s about friendship, character, playing honorably. “If an injury suddenly ends my career tomorrow, I want people to like me for what I have inside.”

My daughter still has her A-Rod poster up in the now-empty bedroom, dating to his days as a Seattle Mariner. But nearly 10 years later, we are having trouble fitting A-Rod into the dissonant home we keep in our hearts for star athletes. Try as we might, it’s hard to separate the player on the plasma screen from the baseball card next to the kid’s pillow.

Tuesday is baseball’s All-Star Game, and the leading vote-getter from fans was Rodriguez, the Yankees’ third baseman. He’s having a year for the ages, setting an American League record for the most home runs in April, and leading all of baseball in homers. And in last night’s win, his home run tied him with Lou Gehrig and Fred McGriff on baseball’s career list.

But A-Rod’s character has never looked more haunted. Everyone knows politicians are scum and film stars are ditzy. As for athletes, well — children, in any case, still expect something more.

And as much as A-Rod now begs for his privacy, it’s his fault that we got involved with him. He invited us, and our kids, to like him for what he has inside. He asked us to look at him as a man, not a hitting machine.

At least Barry Bonds said people should not hold him up as a role model. Give him credit for that. But his advice is too late for all the 15-year-olds buying vitamin “supplements” to get ripped like Barry, the human asterisk.

In less than a decade, Rodriguez has gone from A-Rod to Pay-Rod to A-Fraud to Stray-Rod. Each dimension downward came with a story, a character twist, that may outlive the numbers.

As the Mariner who made the major leagues before his 19th birthday, he looked as if he had been created by Michelangelo. Coaching Little League, I told my kids to watch him move, to emulate his sweet swing, and to listen to what he said off the field.

A lasting image for Mariner fans was A-Rod with his arm around a crying Joey Cora after the amazing 1995 season ended just short of a World Series bid. It began to unravel when Pay-Rod emerged. He signed the richest contract in baseball, and left Seattle for — arrgghhh! — Texas. Turned out, it was about the Benjamins.

With the Yankees, all it took were a couple of Bush League plays — swatting a ball out of a pitcher’s mitt at first base, yelling at opposing infielders under a fly ball — for A-Fraud to surface.

More troubling was the breakdown of his friendship with Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop and designated Good Guy, and the strange episode with the stripper, captured in the tabloid headline, “Stray-Rod.” He’s married, of course, and is a father as well.

In that children’s book, he said having a friend like Jeter, was “more valuable than gold.” An athlete can survive crass acts. Ted Williams spit on Red Sox fans, several times, but more people remember that he left the game to serve as a fighter pilot.

I’ll leave it to A-Rod’s therapist, whom he credits with helping him immensely, to sort his demons. But please — no more children’s books, no more invitations to share the soul-ride.

Athletes build their legends for marketing purposes; it comes with collateral damage, on both sides.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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A National Gut-Check: Who Lives Better?

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: July 5, 2007

One of the memorable scenes in “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s latest cinematic provocation, comes from France, where he shows doctors in their little white cars making house calls — for free.

But it’s not just France. When we lived in Italy some time ago, a doctor came to our farmhouse rental on Easter Sunday morning to diagnose a stomach ailment. He charged nothing.

Let’s stipulate that Moore is a one-sided pamphleteer, with a bit of Mark Twain and Pat Robertson in his schtick. But like all propagandists, his job is not to find some objective truth, but to anger, challenge, ask hard questions.

With Independence Day just passed, a good nationalist shouldn’t be afraid to answer those questions. So, who lives better, us or them?

In Italy, this was a regular parlor game when friends came to visit. Inevitably, after a few days of taking in our new world — a village public school for the kids, neighbors who opened the doors of their ancient homes to us, a lengthy siesta every afternoon — our houseguests would side with the Italians. I would counter for the U.S.A., to keep the argument alive.

The Italians won on health, family and food. The United States was better on race and opportunity.

With health care, the anecdotal often carried the argument. One day, a tenant farmer named Sergio, our neighbor, woke with a terrible eye infection. He was full of pain, unable to see. Sergio got world-class care in Florence. After three days of attentive fussing in the hospital, he came home entirely well and without a bill.

Had he showed up at any American hospital — poor, no insurance — well, good luck. Especially in a place like Texas, where 30 percent of adults lack health insurance and what can pass for medical care is a get-in-line form of triage.

But even with insurance, Americans are stuck with what may be the worst of all systems: one that lets a handful of corporations make life-and-death decisions, with incentive to dump and deny.

Little wonder that the United States ranks 37th in effectiveness of health care. Italy ranks 2nd. This is a country that can’t form a government to last longer than the soccer season, and yet, they make our medical system look barbaric.

If our system doesn’t kill you — see the infant mortality and life expectancy rates, bringing up the rear — it can put you in the poorhouse. Medical catastrophes are the leading cause of bankruptcy, and most of those are people who have some insurance, clinging to the frayed edge of the middle class.

O.K., so what about leisure? Americans spend nearly a third of their disposable income on good times, baby. But we can’t relax. Sorry — no time. Lunch averages 31 minutes. And the U.S. ranks dead last among 21 of the world’s richest countries when it comes to guaranteed days off, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Most Americans don’t even use their allotted days of leisure. The Italians take 42 vacation days a year — No. 1 in the world. The average American takes 13.

A quarter of Americans receive no vacation at all. And it’s not like we don’t need it: one in three are chronically overworked. We even work 100 hours a year more than the Japanese.

President Bush has it figured out, with his month off at the ranch. But for a profile in clueless, Bush set the mark when he lauded as truly American some citizen who told him she had to work three jobs. Ain’t that something?

Ah, but what about taxes? Europeans pay more than we do, to fund that free health care. Take that, Euro-trash, while lying on the beach. And yet, our tax system is approaching Gilded Age disparity. Listen to Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world. Last year, he was taxed at 17 percent of his taxable income, he said last month. His receptionist paid nearly twice that, at 30 percent.

Where America shines is with our multiracial society and the easy access to opportunity. It was jarring to listen to otherwise thoughtful Tuscans denigrate Ethiopian immigrants or even their Sicilian countrymen.

By contrast, nothing made me prouder than telling Italians that I came from a place with an African-American mayor and a Chinese-American governor. Or that I grew up in a big Irish-American family with little money.

A patriot should not be afraid to have this debate, vigorously — after a nap.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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This Land Was My Land

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: June 23, 2007

MOUNT HOOD, Ore.

Most Americans don’t own a summer home on Cape Cod, or a McMansion in the Rockies, but they have this birthright: an area more than four times the size of France. If you’re a citizen, you own it — about 565 million acres.

The deed on a big part of this public land inheritance dates to a pair of Republican class warriors from a hundred years ago: President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the Forest Service.

Both were rich. Both were well-educated. Both were headstrong and quirky. Pinchot slept on a wooden pillow and had his valet wake him with ice water to the face. Teddy and G.P., as they were known, sometimes wrestled with each other, or swam naked in the Potomac.

In establishing the people’s estate, they fought Gilded Age titans — railroads, timber barons, mine owners — and their enablers in the Senate. And make no mistake: these acts may have been cast as the founding deeds of the environmental movement, but they were as much about class as conservation.

Pinchot had studied forestry in France, where a peasant couldn’t make a campfire without being subject to penalties. In England, he had seen how the lords of privilege had their way over the outdoors. In the United States, he and T.R. envisioned the ultimate expression of Progressive-era values: a place where a tired factory hand could be renewed — lord for a day.

“In the national forests, big money was not king,” wrote Pinchot. The Forest Service was beloved, he said, because “it stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government bureau had done before.”

A century later, I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.

In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line — the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.

Remember the scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when Jimmy Stewart’s character sees what would happen to Bedford Falls if the richest man in town took over? All those honky-tonks, strip joints and tenement dwellings in Pottersville?

If Roosevelt roamed the West today, he’d find some of the same thing in the land he entrusted to future presidents. The national wildlife system, started by T.R., has been emasculated. President Bush has systematically pared the budget to the point where, this year, more than 200 refuges could be without any staff at all.

The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees some of the finest open range, desert canyons and high-alpine valleys in the world, was told early on in the Bush years to make drilling for oil and gas their top priority. A demoralized staff has followed through, but many describe their jobs the way a cowboy talks about having to shoot his horse.

In Colorado, the bureau just gave the green light to industrial development on the aspen-forested high mountain paradise called the Roan Plateau. In typical fashion, the administration made a charade of listening to the public about what to do with the land. More than 75,000 people wrote them — 98 percent opposed to drilling.

For most of the Bush years, the Interior Department was nominally run by a Stepford secretary, Gale Norton, while industry insiders like J. Steven Griles — the former coal lobbyist who pled guilty this year to obstruction of justice — ran the department.

Same in the Forest Service, where an ex-timber industry insider, Mark Rey, guides administration policy.

They don’t take care of these lands because they see them as one thing: a cash-out. Thus, in Bush’s budget proposal this year, he guts the Forest Service budget yet again, while floating the idea of selling thousands of acres to the highest bidder. The administration says it wants more money for national parks. But the parks are $10 billion behind on needed repairs; the proposal is a pittance.

Roosevelt had his place on Oyster Bay. Pinchot had a family estate in Pennsylvania. Bush has the ranch in Crawford. Only one of them has never been able to see beyond the front porch.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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Republicans Losing the West

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: June 21, 2007

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.

He was loud, he was blustery and he was clear: our country is being overrun by Mexicans. To back his bark, he wrote, “Whatever It Takes,” as subtle as a cactus poke. He had money, and he had the power of office, a 12-year incumbency.

In the end, J. D. Hayworth, a Republican, was kicked out of his Congressional seat here last year. In the glossy white suburbs of Phoenix, immigrant-bashing backfired.

Farther south, in a district that is ground zero in the border wars — the seared-over patch of Arizona desert where the Minutemen patrol, more Mayberry than Concord — another Republican took an even harsher stance. The anti-immigration extremist, Randy Graf, was crushed.

For Republicans in Arizona, the result was a net loss of two Congressional seats.

Americans are genuinely conflicted and troubled about porous borders and the 12 million or more illegal immigrants in our midst. But to hear politicians who have been scorched by the blowhard fringe tell it, they’re facing a tidal wave of opposition to a consensus change in the status quo.

Last week, Senator Trent Lott, the Republican whip, blamed talk radio for the possibly fatal collapse of the immigration reform bill.

“Talk radio is running America,” he told The Times. “We have to deal with that problem.”

Just a few years out of probation for praising the Old Confederacy vision of a Paleolithic senator, Mr. Lott knows what it’s like to be burned by free speech friction. But he is wrong to confuse the medium with the electorate.

The front lines of this problem are in the fast-growing states of the American West. And the closer you get to the border, the more voters back politicians who are looking for middle ground — and punish those who follow the rant-for-ratings route.

In just the last six years, Arizona’s population grew by 20 percent, Nevada’s by 25 percent, Colorado’s by 10 percent and New Mexico’s by 7.5 percent. These four states may be the biggest battleground in next year’s presidential race, with 29 electoral votes — more than Florida or Ohio.

Hispanics make up 28 percent of Arizona, 24 percent of Nevada, 20 percent of Colorado and 43 percent of New Mexico. The rap is that they don’t vote. Not yet, at least. But they’re the fastest-growing part of the electorate.

Still, on the air it’s open war against the browning of America — tinged with slurs that disrespect all Hispanics. Consider Hayworth, who gives helium a bad name. Ousted from his seat, he now uses the megaphone of a Phoenix talk station to promote his solution: all undocumented immigrants would be given 120 days to leave the country — or face a massive, forceful roundup and deportation.

Right. And this would be done, no doubt, by the same people who couldn’t stop a single tuberculosis carrier from entering the country.

The syndicated talker Neal Boortz chuckles at the human collision along an advanced border fence. “I don’t care if Mexicans pile up against that fence like tumbleweeds in the Santa Ana winds,” he said on Monday. And two hosts of something called the “Patriot Radio News Hour” here mocked the Hispanic Games, held last weekend in Phoenix. They suggested “jumping the fence” and “leaving the scene of an accident” as competitive events for Latino athletes. Ha-ha.

Democrats are laughing all the way to a new Western majority. In 2004, they picked up a Senate and a Congressional seat in Colorado, with two Hispanic brothers in cowboy hats. And they did it with counties where an NPR liberal is hard to find.

“Arizona is in play like never before,” said David Waid, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. “And the Republicans are literally handing it to us.”

Some Republicans know this. Nationwide, Hispanic support for Republican candidates dropped 10 points from 2004 to 2006 — to about 30 percent of the vote. Yes, this state’s two Republican senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, favor the comprehensive immigration bill. And yes, President Bush is the bill’s chief proponent.

But pragmatism is being drowned out by the bullies with electronic bullhorns, who’ve got their party leaders running scared.

“If they get their way and the bill dies, so too may Republican electoral prospects for the foreseeable future,” wrote Clint Bolick, a conservative scholar, in The Arizona Republic this week.

Remember that prediction on Election Day 2008.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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Where the Goods Are Odd

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: June 14, 2007

This time of year, Alaska is paradise. King Salmon hustle up to the front porch of Anchorage. Softball games unfold in the buttery glow of the midnight sun. And the woods are full of mega fauna in frisky pursuit.

But amid the lovely, longest days of the year, the political world — controlled and corrupted by age and oil — is unraveling. The farce in the far north involves two national politicians who are used to getting their way, and a lobby that treats legislators like houseboys.

Let’s start with the Senator for Life, Ted Stevens, 83, the longest-serving Republican in the upper chamber. You know him, perhaps, only because he described the Internet last year as a “series of tubes” that can get backed up for days. This, while discussing legislation involving that dad-gummed series of tubes.

Uncle Ted is to Alaska what Huey Long was to Louisiana, and tributes range from the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport to the hundreds of projects built with “Ted Stevens money” as your tax dollars are called in Alaska. One of Uncle Ted’s best friends, Bill J. Allen, former chief executive of an oil services company, pleaded guilty last month to bribery and other charges in a scandal that has rocked Alaska and produced four indictments of state politicians. It looks like there’s more to come, soon.

If you live in Alaska, you pay no state taxes, and get a check every year in shared oil royalties. What keeps the gravy train going is oil. But as the decay in Saudi Arabia demonstrates, oil corrupts. And absolute oil corrupts absolutely. “There are two things we worry about here in Alaska: Life after oil, and life after Uncle Ted,” said Ivan Moore, an independent pollster.

Last week, Senator Stevens said the F.B.I. had asked him to preserve some of his records. He also said his son Ben, the former state Senate president, was under investigation. The probe is linked to bribes and other services paid by the oil services company, VECO. The F.B.I. has not said if the elder Stevens is a target.

Ted Stevens used to be a respected independent voice in the Senate. But his obsession with opening the Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, and his nearly 40 years in the Senate, have left him an embittered, tired old politician with a host of grudges.

Then there’s the Congressman for Life, Representative Don Young, 74. You know him from the Bridge to Nowhere, his effort to direct more than $200 million to build a span nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge from Ketchikan to an island with less than 100 people.

As chairman of the committee that bundled all pet projects into a single transportation bill last year, Young had this to say about the legislative process: “I stuffed it like a turkey.”

He said he was proud to be one of the biggest pigs at the trough — he used the word “oinker” — because the power to control $300 billion only comes around once in a lifetime. But as it turned out, the pipe dream really was a bridge to somewhere: the back door. Many Republicans say it cost them control of the House in the 2006 election.

Last week, David D. Kirkpatrick wrote in The Times about one of Young’s other earmarks — $10 million to a Florida district whose congressman had never requested it. But a Florida real estate developer who stood to gain a huge windfall with the new road was very interested in the project. So much so that he helped to raise $40,000 for the sole congressman from Alaska.

Asked about the earmark, Young made an obscene gesture, which was in character, given that he once expressed himself similarly with a group of wide-eyed schoolchildren in Fairbanks.

The good news for Republicans is that the most popular fresh face is one of theirs — Gov. Sarah Palin, who looks like Tina Fey of “Saturday Night Live” fame. A marathon runner and commercial fisherwoman — whose kids are named Track, Bristol, Willow and Piper — Governor Palin knocked out an encrusted incumbent in the primary last year. She supports a new ethics bill designed to bring light to the long winter of Alaska politics.

Maybe the women should have been given a chance earlier. With more men than women, Alaska has always been the kind of place where the odds are good, as the saying goes, but the goods are odd. Especially with age and power.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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The Boy in the Coffin

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: June 9, 2007

SEATTLE

Two years ago I drove to the town where I grew up to bury a boy I knew well enough to love but not enough to help. He was 17, my nephew, dead from a shotgun blast to the head fired by an acquaintance. They said it was an accident. My family had asked me to do a eulogy.

As we got closer to Spokane, I tried to imagine what I could say to my sister and her husband to ease the pain of losing their only son. Maybe something about the randomness of death, about remembering a young man and his charisma, a glow of life that would outlast this awful day.

The afternoon was warm and sunlit, which made it all the more incongruous filing into the church. There was an enormous crowd, mostly teenagers, including some of the reckless boys that my nephew had been hanging out with of late.

I strode to the front, my thoughts still a muddle, walking toward an open casket. When I looked inside and saw him — eyes closed, cheeks blushed, beautified in repose — I was overcome. The grief and incomprehension left me dizzy and wordless.

I had seen him last at a touch football game, Thanksgiving prior. He burned me on a long touchdown pass, striding just out of reach as he crossed the goal line. I couldn’t catch him then. Now I was too late.

All of us were.

At the start of the service, the priest, a Franciscan in simple robe and sandals in keeping with the poverty vows of his order, made us take one more look at the boy in the coffin.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

You put a young man in the ground on a spring day and it changes you forever. I came home feeling like I would never let my own children out of the house again. I came home convinced there was something toxic about our age and theirs — a collision of trash culture and children in adult bodies.

In the American West, we like to think we have more freedom. But we also have more of the fatal consequences of that freedom. Binge drinking, easy gun access, traffic fatalities, the proliferation of meth — those are among our regional trademarks.

A teenager in Wyoming is four times more likely to die of a traffic accident than a teenager in Washington, D.C. Seven of the top 10 areas in the country for underage binge drinking are in the West.

Growing up in Spokane, the biggest little city in Idaho, Montana and Eastern Washington, I was immortal — especially when driving Saturday night on a dirt road at the edge of town. And then I lost my two best friends to the kind of careless hubris that was the mark of those Saturday nights — to two separate car accidents.

Much as I’d like to blame geography, it’s too easy. A child born today will live to be about 80 years old, on average. But the challenge is getting them through age 16, 17, 18, 19 — the most hazardous time of their lives. A kid with a car, a kid with a gun, a kid with a bottle — any one of those combinations is much more of a risk than a terror attack or a flu from China.

The law has been some help in this regard, and so has technology. Many states now restrict 16-year-olds from driving at night or with other teens. Other countries have raised the age at which a teenager can get a license to 18.

And Safeco Insurance Company has just unveiled a new device that allows parents to keep track of their teenagers at all hours while they’re driving — an electronic leash, of sorts, that transmits information about a car’s speed, location and other facts. By remote control, parents can even turn the ignition off.

It is the kind of device that seems, on its face, like a perfect safeguard. We are there, even when we aren’t.

These dangers are not new to our age, or theirs. But boomer parents have a dilemma unique to our generation. Do we lie about our own lives, to save a life now? Do as I say, not as I did.

Do we say: I got through it, by blind dumb luck, and so will you — have fun?

The minefield never scared me when I had to walk through it; it petrifies me now.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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Where’s EuroArnold?

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: June 7, 2007

As long as President Bush does not give German Chancellor Angela Merkel another one of those surprise neck rubs, the Group of 8 meetings should settle into cautious choreography on how to bring down the planet’s fever and reduce global inequities.

But one other leader from the world’s major industrial powers should have been invited to this week’s summit at Heiligendamm — the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.

While Mr. Bush angered his fellow world leaders this week with yet another foot-dragging proposal on climate change, the governor has been working his own brand of international diplomacy on the issue and leading by example. And he has shown that in politics, and not just bodybuilding, it’s possible to be re-inflated — this time without the steroids.

Some people still think of California as a land of sunbaked barbarians, killing kilowatts in their hot tubs and spewing greenhouse gases from gridlocked freeways. But California, where America goes for rehab and reinvention, is no still-life in decay.

Only a handful of states use less energy, per capita, than California. No state has committed to such a broad change in lifestyle and environment. And no state has tried so consistently — even having to defy the federal government — to get to where the world wants to be on slowing climate change. California is what the rest of the nation could have been had not Vice President Cheney disparaged conservation as a wimp issue for the virtuous, choosing to perforate more public land in a last-gasp stumble for fossil fuels.

Not all of this is Arnold’s doing. An audacious plan to reduce auto emissions was enacted a year before he won the governor’s race in 2003. But despite enormous pressure from automakers, the governor has fully backed the measure and threatened to sue the federal government for the exemption California needs to move ahead. He went a step further when he signed a law committing California to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. And last week he was in Canada, making climate goal agreements with two provinces while blasting his own government for failing to show any leadership.

Home to one in eight Americans, with an economy bigger than Canada, California has global swagger — and the governor is starting to use it. The state is further along than any other country on this issue.

“The power influence we have is the equivalent of a nation, or even a continent,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said last week in British Columbia.

Some industry executives have cried a Salton Sea of tears over having to comply with all the new initiatives. Hybrids, hydrogen cars, engines running on salad dressing — how’s General Motors supposed to fend off bankruptcy with innovation?

But other corporations view the opportunity to serve one of the world’s largest auto markets as a potential motherlode.

Check into any college lab in California, from the gilded interiors of Stanford to the mobile-home campuses in Riverside County, and you find a frenzy of experiments on how to light, heat, cool and transport ourselves without wrecking the globe. You find the same thing up the entrepreneurial ladder, from garages in Salinas to kids in flops at Google headquarters.

The Governator himself is a fascinating hybrid. Two years ago, his approval rating was at Bushian levels, just above 30 percent. Then he had a California epiphany — Eureka! He embraced universal health care, edgy capitalism and market-based environmentalism, while vowing to keep taxes low. Now he is the most popular major politician in California.

But to some fellow Republicans, he is a traitor, a product of all that Kennedy compounding with his wife, Maria Shriver. Rush Limbaugh called him “a sellout.” But it took a former Mr. Universe to do what no significant Republican had yet to do: he said Mr. Limbaugh was “irrelevant.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger, the policeman’s son from a small town in Austria, has morphed into his logical political fit: EuroArnold, at home in the pragmatic politics of Tony Blair or Mrs. Merkel.

It would have been intriguing to have him in Germany this week, showing the rest of the world that not all Americans are in the last century on the big issues of the day. And, of course, he’s one of the few Americans who’s used to wearing a Speedo without blushing.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

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