PressEthic

From the AP article:

Beatty Tries to Crash Schwarzenegger Rally

Actors Warren Beatty and wife Annette Bening tried to crash a campaign appearance Saturday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzengger as the governor sought to drum up last-minute support for a group of statewide ballot measures.

The Hollywood couple strode side-by-side to the entrance of an airport hangar where several hundred of the governor's supporters had gathered.

A Schwarzenegger aide told the ''Bulworth'' star he was not on the guest list and did not have the appropriate wristband to get inside.

''You have to have a wristband to listen to the governor?'' Bening asked. ''He represents all of us, right?''

The couple's appearance caused momentary confusion. Just before the governor took the stage, the hangar door was closed -- literally in their faces. It was later reopened as Schwarzenegger spoke.

Inside, Schwarzenegger told cheering supporters that his slate of four ballot proposals on Tuesday's ballot would ''reform the broken system.''

Hmm. Beatty and Bening are made to look an awful lot like celebrity kooks. The “star of ‘Bulworth,’” in particular, sounds a bit suspect. The guy had, after all, made about a thousand movies before Bulworth. My guess is that the reporter’s implying that Beatty doesn’t know where to draw the line between movies and reality (in some fairness, he does say that Beatty has been a “a democrat and longtime political activist,” but not until the third to last paragraph). That might be a fair point, except that we have no idea why the actors were even there—except to “crash” the party, which itself is a suspect assertion. We get a vague idea, but not until the seventh and eighth paragraphs.

Beatty planned to shadow Schwarzenegger throughout the day as the governor campaigned. He has been repeatedly mentioned as a possible challenger to Schwarzenegger, but he said Saturday that he would not be a candidate in next year's gubernatorial race.

''To me, this is an abuse of the initiative process,'' Beatty said of Schwarzenegger's campaigning for the ballot measures.

Gee, that would have been nice to know in the lead. A couple of paragraphs later, we get this:

''There's the main event, then there is the sideshow,'' Schwarzenegger said. ''I don't care about the sideshow.''

Earlier, Beatty boarded a bus draped with a banner reading ''Truth Squad'' and urged people to vote against the ballot measures supported by Schwarzenegger.

Why was Beatty in a bus that said “Truth Squad”? I have no idea, but out of context, it makes him sound an awful lot like--as Schwarzenegger said--a “sideshow.”