Action star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took to Reddit Tuesday for an AMA -- an "Ask Me Anything" Q&A session with the site's thousands of users.
Schwarzenegger, a self-described moderate Republican, offered a few thoughts on the platform he thinks his party should maintain. "We need to be a party where people know what we are for, not just what we are against," he explained. That means remembering that "Reagan was the one who dealt with the ozone layer with the Montreal protocol" or that "Nixon almost passed universal healthcare," wrote Schwarzenegger. He also challenged the GOP to provide comprehensive immigration reform and "stay out of people's bedrooms."
When asked to name one current American politician who "best embodies what is good about politics," Schwarzenegger encouraged Redditors to research Democratic Mayor Chuck Reed of San Jose, Calif. and his work on pension reform.
"Even though Congress has an approval rating of 9% (and loses to cockroaches and colonoscopies in polling), there are still some leaders who are doing the people's work instead of the partys' [sic] work," wrote Schwarzenegger. "That's political courage to me, being willing to risk your job to choose what's good for the public instead of getting stuck in your ideology."
That answer got props from Reddit user halp_me_pls, who responded, "A republican giving ups to a democrat. You sure know how to reddit Mr. Arnold."
Despite his strong political message, the Governator chose to answer mostly pleasant and admiring questions about his Hollywood career during the AMA -- not a surprise considering that he's currently promoting his upcoming film "The Last Stand." Schwarzenegger discussed his biggest film regrets, which ad-libbed one-liners were his favorites and the directors he'd most like to work with. In other words, the type of pablum typical of an entertainment news interview, say.
Still, he managed to put his own quirky spin on things by hand-writing most of his responses on an iPad and uploading the notes as images to Reddit.
And of course, Schwarzenegger couldn't do a Reddit AMA and not offer his thoughts on the "horse-sized duck" conundrum -- the forum's biggest inside joke. But for The Governator's AMA, the scenario was slightly altered: "Would you rather fight 100 duck sized Predators or 1 Predator sized duck?"
His answer? Go big. "I would choose the 1 Predator sized duck instead of dealing with 100 duck-sized Predators," wrote Schwarzenegger. "I've already fought a Predator-sized Predator so I am confident I could handle the duck."
Here are some more key points we learned about The Governator:
- His German language skills have really atrophied. The Austrian-born figure is "definitely more comfortable in English."
The best thing about the AMA was Schwarzenegger's hand-scrawled responses for the majority of the questions. Below are photos of all his responses from Tuesday's Reddit Q&A.
