If you wonder why many good people you know or know of, shun running for political office, watch the Arnold Schwarzenegger campaign and you’ll find your answer.

Not in what he does, but in what’s done to try to defeat him. Democrats are petrified with fear that a Republican might become governor of the huge electoral vote-rich state of California. He seems the most likely, so they’ll do whatever it takes to poison the Schwarzenegger well.

I’m sure investigators have been hired to search for dirt in the way of dalliances with other women, drunken or drug escapades, hurtful words spoken about minorities, anything.

I mean, if Straight Arrow, the highly respected Gov. Dan Evans, could do it, why not Gov. Gray Davis and the California Democrats? Oh, you don’t remember that? Evans admitted in 1972 that he hired a private detective to check up on former Gov. Al Rosellini, who came out of the primary with 75,000 more votes than Evans and the total Democratic vote for governor was 250,000 above the total Republican vote. I wrote on Oct. 18 that the only thing that could stop a Rosellini comeback now was a picture of him on his back porch at night with the head of the mafia.

The week before the final election, a story broke linking Rosellini to notorious gambler Frank Colacurcio because Al made a telephone call about a liquor license in Hawaii that involved a relative of Colacurcio’s whom attorney Rosellini represented. Rosellini plummeted in November.

Before that, in 1968, then-Attorney General John O’Connell was riding high in the primary against Evans who looked like a one-term governor. Then news broke in mid-October about O’Connell having cashed a $10,000 line of credit at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. That was a little much for Washington voters who deep-sixed O’Connell in November. O’Connell accused state GOP chair Gummie Johnson of leaking the story to the press but a state official friend of mine, now dead, told me the editor told him Evans himself brought it in.

That’s nothing, though, compared to what was done to U.S. Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson during his presidential campaigns. Donald Segretti, the famed top dirty trickster of the Nixon camp, went to jail for writing a letter on U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie’s stationery, accusing Jackson and Sen. Hubert Humphrey of diversified sexual practices.

That was during the Florida primary campaign in 1972. Florida was a hot bed of trouble for Jackson. Twice, when he was scheduled to speak at black college auditoriums, someone telephoned in advance and said he’d canceled out. He arrived to find the meeting place locked up.

Once, someone telephoned a small airport in Apalachicola to say that Jackson’s plane would not be coming in there as scheduled. Jackson’s pilot radioed ahead on approach and got the field lights turned on again so he could land.

The first dirty trick of the 1976 campaign was in 1974. Jackson’s advance man, Mike Casey, was in Fresno to make arrangements for the boss’s swing through California. After Casey left town, someone using his name telephoned to charter a 10-passenger plane, which, with two pilots, waited for hours to take Jackson from Merced to Redding, all the while Jackson was in Wyoming.

Do they all do it? No, not all, but both parties have done their share of mud slinging and dirty tricks. Telephones are tapped and conversations recorded illegally. Pictures are taken of pols dining out with women not their wives. Lawmakers’ voting records are wrongly reported.

The liberal press is already in full cry after Schwarzenegger. The day after his announcement, Katie Couric was reminding us that his father was a Nazi officer. Columnist Susan Estrich pointed out that he lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion in Brentwood, “within spitting distance of O.J.’s old house,” as if that somehow made him tainted. “The Savage Nation” blasted him for donating two Bentleys to charity; apparently unaware the charities sell them for cash. I think the libs can’t stand it that an immigrant made a fortune here the old fashioned way. He worked for it.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA., 98340.).