Shriver Endorses Obama

Can you imagine the battle at the California governor's mansion this morning? Maria Shriver announced that yet-another Kennedy-family member is endorsing Barack Obama as her choice for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination. And sitting across the table is "The Governator," Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, staring you down?

"Obama!"

"McCain!"

"Obama!"

"McCain!"

"Obama!"

"Hasta la vista, baby."

The strange bedfellows that money and power can make are astounding.

Shriver, famously left-of-left in her limited political commentary, has been married to Schwarzenegger since 1986, when she was a broadcast journalist. She has been on and off with her journalism career, and vowed with disgust that she was forever out of being classified as a journalist following the feeding frenzy surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith. She can still be seen occasionally as a fill-in interviewer for the program Larry King Live on CNN.

Shriver and Schwarzenegger have been at odds politically before during their marriage, with her initially balking at his run-off election hopes when Gray Davis was thrown out of office in a recall vote, but supporting his re-election campaign - while carefully choosing which of his issues she will get behind.

Shriver is the niece of assassinated President John F. "Jack" Kennedy and Attorney General Robert "Bobby" Kennedy - and the daughter of Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, and Democratic vice presidential nominee in the 1972 election. Her father is credited with the Democratic party reaching out to the African American voter, when he convinced then-nominee John Kennedy, his brother-in-law, to get behind the civil rights movement, and help get Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. out of an Alabama jail.

Shriver's father ran the War On Poverty during the Johnson administration, while she was but a teenager.

Schwarzenegger and Shriver could not be farther apart on political and social issues. Schwarzenegger is a hard core political conservative, and Shriver has refused to get behind several of his initiatives, although she has been in the front of California's programs to recognize the contributions of women to society, looking for means to end the "cycle of poverty."

Schwarzenegger grew up in a family that he called "cold" in his autobiography, the son of an Austrian police officer. He came to the United States in 1968 as a bodybuilder, with an accent that made his broken English even more difficult to understand. LA Weekly called him the country's "most famous immigrant" in 2002.

Imagine the consternation of their children, ages 17 to 9, with the political arguments that must be heard behind closed doors.