From the LAT via Keith Olbermann’s newsletter today:

“It’s become time to define a Schwarzenegger Republican — a Schwarzenegger Republican is a Bush Republican who says he’s a Schwarzenegger Republican,” Beatty said. “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?”

In his first-ever commencement speech, Warren Beatty — an Oscar-winning actor-director and liberal citizen-activist — “derided the governor for ‘his reactionary right-wing agenda,’ ‘his bullying of labor and the little guy,’ his plan to spend money on a “totally unnecessary special election” and his refusal to raise taxes on the rich.”

Beatty asked Schwarzenegger to “cut down the photo ops, the fake events, the fake issues, the fake crowds … the scapegoats, the ‘language problems,’ the broken promises, the ‘Minutemen,’ the prevarications and put some sunlight on some taxes. More Beatty below:

More from the LAT:

Beatty, a political veteran who’s worked for every Democratic presidential candidate since Robert Kennedy in 1968, dismissed Schwarzenegger’s claims of uniting both sides of the political aisle. “By bipartisanship, do you mean the Kennedy family?” he said to the Berkeley crowd. “Governor — I knew Jack Kennedy.


“Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Governor, you’re no Kennedy Democrat.”

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Over the weekend, Beatty, 68, gave his first commencement speech ever to the graduating class of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and used the occasion to humorously but witheringly attack Schwarzenegger — much like the candid candidate Jay Billington Bulworth from his 1998 political satire.

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Within hours, Beatty, a blue-chip Hollywood figure famous for 46 years, was swatted down by the Schwarzenegger team. The governor’s communication director, Robert Stutzman, dismissed him as a “crackpot.”


“I don’t think that that’s the most intelligent response for Arnold to have his people give,” Beatty muses a couple of days later, though he seems jazzed by his return to the public policy limelight. “I guess I needed to say some of those things.”