[Paleopsych] NYT: Hometown Snubs Schwarzenegger Over Death Penalty

[Premise Checker]

Hometown Snubs Schwarzenegger Over Death Penalty
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/international/europe/27austria.html

[Note the elite vs. popular opinion split. There are similar splits over 
immigration and school prayer. I'd like to know why elite opinion about capital 
punishment is so strongly held. I cannot make up my own mind. I'm familiar with 
the various arguments, but I cannot weigh the various pros and cons and come to 
an overall conclusion. But elite opinion seems to ignore anything positive 
about capital punishment. It is absolutist and bigoted.

[I'd also like to know why elite opinion has shifted. Who are the conformity 
enforcers? Are there fresh arguments against it that I have missed? If not, why 
weren't the old arguments accepted before?

[I should make a list of splits in mass and elite opinion.]

    By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

    BERLIN, Dec. 26 - For years the quaint Austrian town of Graz trumpeted
    its special relationship with its outsize native son, Arnold
    Schwarzenegger.

    Born in a village nearby and schooled in Graz, Mr. Schwarzenegger was
    an honorary citizen and holder of the town's Ring of Honor. Most
    conspicuously, the local sports stadium was named after him.

    But early on Monday, under cover of darkness, his name was removed
    from the arena in a sort of uncontested divorce between the California
    governor and the town council, which had been horrified that he
    rejected pleas to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, former
    leader of the Crips gang, who was executed by the state of California
    two weeks ago.

    The 15,000-seat stadium had been named after Mr. Schwarzenegger in
    1997 as an act of both self-promotion and fealty toward the poor
    farmer's son and international celebrity, who has always identified
    Graz as his native place.

    But when he declined to commute Mr. Williams's death penalty, the
    reaction was swift and angry in Graz, which, like most places in
    Europe, sees the death penalty as a medieval atrocity.

    "I submitted a petition to the City Council to remove his name from
    the stadium, and to take away his status as an honorary citizen,"
    Sigrid Binder, the leader of the Green Party, said in a recent
    interview. "The petition was accepted by a majority on the council."

    Before a formal vote was taken on the petition, however, Mr.
    Schwarzenegger made a kind of pre-emptive strike, writing a letter to
    Siegfried Nagl, the town's conservative mayor, withdrawing Graz's
    right to use his name in association with the stadium.

    There will be other death penalty decisions ahead, he wrote, and so he
    decided to spare the responsible politicians of Graz further concern.

    "It was a clever step," Ms. Binder said. "He took the initiative," she
    continued, and then suggested a bit of the local politics that had
    entered into the matter. "It was possible for him to do so," she said,
    "because the mayor didn't have the courage to take a clear position on
    this point."

    Needless to say, Mr. Nagl, a member of the conservative People's
    Party, who opposed the name-removal initiative, does not agree.

    He is against the death penalty, he said in an interview, and on Dec.
    1, he wrote a letter to Mr. Schwarzenegger pleading for clemency for
    Mr. Williams. But he blames the leftist majority on the City Council -
    consisting of Greens, Social Democrats and two Communists - for trying
    to score some local political points at Mr. Schwarzenegger's and, he
    believes, Graz's own expense.

    "One stands by a friend and a great citizen of our city and does not
    drag his name through the mud even when there is a difference of
    opinion," Mr. Nagl said in a letter he wrote to Mr. Schwarzenegger. "I
    would like to ask you to keep the Ring of Honor of the City of Graz."

    The heated nature of the debate revealed how much a relatively small
    place like Graz, certainly a place with no military might or
    diplomatic power to speak of, wants to play a role as a sort of moral
    beacon, waging the struggle for what it considers the collective good.

    Graz, a place of old onion steeples, museums and Art Nouveau
    architecture, designated itself five years ago, with a unanimous vote
    of the City Council, to be Europe's first official "city of human
    rights." While the designation has no juridical meaning, it provides a
    sort of goal to live up to.

    "We are against the death penalty, not only in word, but really
    against the death penalty," said Wolfgang Benedek, a professor of
    international law at Graz University.

    He said the council's reaction reflected the special circumstances
    surrounding Mr. Williams: a man who had written a children's book
    aimed at steering young people away from violence, he had already
    spent many years in jail, and seemed, to Europeans at least, to have
    reformed himself.

    "Many people around the world pleaded with Mr. Schwarzenegger to show
    mercy in this case, and when he didn't, the city had somehow to
    react," Mr. Benedek said.

    Mr. Benedek allows that there is an element of elite versus popular
    opinion on this matter. A poll by the local newspaper found that over
    70 percent of the public opposed removing Mr. Schwarzenegger's name
    from the stadium.

    This adds to a practical consideration very much on Mr. Nagl's mind:
    that Graz will no longer be able to count on using its special
    relationship with the governor to promote its image.

    "We had the great classical culture on the one side," Thomas
    Rajakovics, the mayor's spokesman, said, referring to other important
    figures who are associated with Graz, from the astronomer Johannes
    Kepler to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, to the
    conductor Karl Böhm. "And on the other, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger
    and the popular culture. These were the two poles for us, but we're
    not allowed to use his name any more."

    The Schwarzenegger name has, as it were, been erased. The new name is
    now simply Stadion Graz-Liebenau (a district of Graz), though there
    were other proposals. One was to name the stadium after the Crips, the
    gang that Mr. Williams founded, but that idea did not get widespread
    support. Another was to name it Hakoah, after a Jewish sports club
    that was banned after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.

    But the first "city of human rights" did not seem quite ready for that
    either. It is not that there was vocal opposition but, as Ms. Binder
    put it, Austrians do not generally want a daily reminder of the
    terrible wartime past.

    Meanwhile, city officials are holding on to Mr. Schwarzenegger's
    honorary citizenship ring, which arrived from the governor during the
    holidays. Mr. Rajakovics said they would keep it for him in the hope
    that one day he would take it back.