State Secret: Arnold's Big Night Out

How desperate is Governor Schwarzenegger to avoid reminding people that he belongs to same political party as George W. Bush, let alone remind them that he was one of the featured speakers supporting Bush at the 2004 Republican Convention? Desperate enough to sneak across the country and into the White House yesterday, while trying to hide his trip from reporters.

Yesterday, a statement from the governor's press office drily explained that there no official business scheduled, because the governor was "out of state". Unfortunately for the I'm-not-really-a-Republican Republican governor, the White House was not so discrete. As Carla Marinucci explains on the San Francisco Chronicle's Politics Blog, the Office of the First Lady put out a press release announcing that Governor Schwarzenegger and his wife would be VIP guests at last night's gala White House dinner hosted, of course, by President Bush. The dinner was in honor of Schwarzenegger's mother-in-law, Eunice Shriver, so naturally you'd expect the gov to be there. Going to a dinner to honor his mother-in-law should be good enough cover to allow to him butch up and admit what he was doing, you'd think. But no. Phone calls to the governor's office trying to confirm his whereabouts yesterday went unreturned. Again, the First Lady's Office in D.C. was more forthcoming, confirming that Arnold was indeed breaking bread with W.

I can't wait to see the photos from the gala dinner when they are released. If Arnold is willing to go this far to try to avoid being associated with W, what did he do when the White House photographers came around? Put on Groucho glasses? Slip on a burka? Slap on even more of the tanning creme that gives him his healthy orange glow and try to pass himself off as a giant carrot? We'll just have to wait and see.