On Eisner, Schwarzenegger and lying as a way of life.

LIKE most everyone in and around Hollywood, I have been devouring "DisneyWar," James Stewart's 572-page vivisection of Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Throughout the chilling read, I couldn't shake the feeling that Eisner reminded me of someone.

The answer came when I got to the epilogue. "Eisner's most glaring defect," writes Stewart, is "his dishonesty." Stewart goes on to describe Eisner's "tendency to distort, embellish or forget the truth" until he becomes incapable of distinguishing reality from his own fabrications.

That's when it hit me: Eisner is the Disneyland doppelganger of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's all right there: the unremitting duplicity; the penchant for saying one thing, then doing another: the gift for irrational invective; the way both men forge personal bonds with others, then turn around and stab them in the back.

"DisneyWar" is a laundry list of Eisner's lies and deceptions. We get chapter and verse on his infamous two-faced handling of best friend Michael Ovitz, protege Jeffrey Katzenberg and heir apparent Robert Iger--as well as the dishonesty-drenched disintegration of his relationships with the Weinstein brothers at Miramax and Steve Jobs at Pixar.

There is the same sad, monotonous predictability to Arnold's serial betrayals. Except that Arnold's victims have fewer resources with which to fight back. In the last few months, Schwarzenegger has reneged on well-publicized commitments made to educators, environmentalists, public servants--and voters.

Schools, environment

He promised teachers and students last spring that if they agreed not to fight his plan to withhold $2 billion owed to them, he would never again dip into money earmarked for schools to balance his budget. "Trust me," he said. "Over my dead body," he guaranteed. But at a time when a recent Rand Corp. study reports that California ranks near the bottom nationally in both school funding and student performance, Schwarzenegger's new budget gives schools $2.8 billion less than they are owed.

He promised environmental groups that he would not support Prop. 64, a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored initiative that prevents citizens from using the courts to protect consumers and the environment. The California League of Conservation Voters plaintively called his promise "a commitment he personally gave to environmentalists." Then he turned around and endorsed Prop. 64, which, with his considerable weight behind it, passed.

He promised police officers, firefighters and labor leaders he wouldn't overhaul the state's pension system if they went along with his 2004 budget proposals. They did--and now the governor is betraying them by pushing to privatize California's pension plans and replace them with individual 401(k)-style private accounts.

He promised voters that if they passed his balanced-budget initiative, he would "tear up the credit card and throw it away." They did-but his new budget calls for $6 billion in new borrowing.

Indeed, there have been so many fresh deceptions it's easy to forget Arnold's old ones: his campaign pledge not to accept contributions from special interests (he has since raised over $28 million, most of it from all the usual suspects); his claim that his first act as governor would be an exhaustive audit that would uncover "billions of dollars" in waste (those billions in waste proved as elusive as Saddam's WMD); his oft-repeated vow that he would become "the Collectinator," bringing back much-needed federal funds from Washington (instead, things are moving in the opposite direction). And then there were his P.R.-driven promises to convert one of his Hummers to hydrogen power and to hire a "well-respected investigative firm" to look into whether he was a serial groper (both promises no sooner made than abandoned).

Special relationship

So how have pathological deceivers like Eisner and Arnold been able to stay at the top of their fields? They can both thank the enablers who have allowed them to flourish.

Eisner has been aided and abetted by a compliant, see-no-evil Disney board that happily did his bidding. For Arnold, it is the absence of an effective loyal opposition, fueled by environmental groups that continue to treat him as something other than what he is: a Bush Republican willing to sacrifice the environment whenever corporate interests demand it, and content to balance his budget on the backs of the poor, the sick, the young, the aged and the disabled.

The California League of Conservation Voters' "Environmental Scorecard" complained about Schwarzenegger's broken promises and anti-environmental moves, but the group made this astounding assertion: "He's unpredictable, but that's enough to give us hope." Which is like a battered wife saying she is hopeful because her man doesn't beat her up every night.

Not surprisingly, Arnold and Eisner have been good friends for years. Indeed, Disney was one of the corporate backers of Schwarzenegger's trip to New York to speak at this summer's Republican National Convention. And, in November, Arnold boasted of their special relationship.

But he denied that the relationship had anything to do with a gaping loophole in California's tax code that allows Disney to pay only a nickel per square foot in property taxes for much of its land while the average new homeowner in the area pays over 3,000 percent more. So Arnold gets to use Disneyland for free, and Disneyland gets to use California for almost free.

Arnold has saddled the state with mounting debt, cut services to the needy, decreased access to higher education, vetoed an increase in the minimum wage and legislation designed to protect workers, the environment and consumers--and is poised to continue inflicting George Bush's mean-spirited, right-wing agenda on California.

Eisner's failures come with a limited price tag. Arnold's failures are bringing pain and suffering to millions of Californians, while sacrificing the state's future on the altar of the special interests that fund him.

Arianna Huffington, a syndicated columnist, ran against Schwarzenegger during the gubernatorial recall campaign.