Bad '70s flashbacks for front-runners (CA recall) S J Mercury News

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Posted on Fri, Aug. 29, 2003

Bad '70s flashbacks for front-runners
PAST: SCHWARZENEGGER SEX INTERVIEW, BUSTAMANTE STUDENT GROUP IN THE NEWS

By Laura Kurtzman and Edwin Garcia
Mercury News

The 1970s have come back to haunt the two leading candidates to replace Gov. Gray Davis.

Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger is shrugging off crass remarks he made about sex in a 1977 interview with the soft-porn magazine Oui, while Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is trying to swat down the accusation that a group he belonged to as a student was racist. As with much political dirt since the 1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Schwarzenegger interview surfaced Wednesday on the Internet. The accusations about Bustamante have been circulating via e-mail for several days.

Schwarzenegger's colorful past as a bodybuilder has been amply recorded in articles, books and the movie ``Pumping Iron.''

A recent Field Poll on the actor's image found that rumors of his infidelity and steroid use were minor liabilities with voters.

Bustamante's controversy is more obscure to the average voter, although it is being featured on conservative talk radio and Fox TV news. It involves his participation in a Mexican-American student group called Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan that critics say espouses separatist and racist views. Bustamante was a member in 1975, as a student at California State University-Fresno.

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