He’ll admit that he’s short, fat and balding — not exactly the picture-perfect politician one would expect from a state known for its beautiful people. Certainly this son of a barber who grew up in a poor farming community is not the one getting all the international buzz even though he’s the one ahead in the polls.

California’s Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante stands to become the next governor if voters recall Gov. Gray Davis next month. It’s his race to lose in a Democrat-leaning state with an exploding Latino population.

If Bustamante doesn’t energize California’s Mexican-American voters, then The Arnold might well do it for him.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Republican candidacy in the recall effort to oust Davis, a Democrat, has caught people’s attention for all the wrong reasons. Despite his early spike in the polls, the action-movie star of “Terminator” fame carries a lot of baggage that’s starting to drag his candidacy down.

No one should be surprised that the national news media didn’t home in on Schwarzenegger’s negatives from the very beginning. They have few, if any, Hispanic reporters or editors who could enlighten their newsrooms about Schwarzenegger’s outright hostility toward Latinos when it comes to language and culture.

For starters, Schwarzenegger put former Gov. Pete Wilson in charge of his campaign — not a good sign for those who might have hoped that Schwarzenegger would be a moderate beyond the issue of abortion rights. Wilson, with Schwarzenegger’s support, championed Proposition 187, a 1994 voter referendum that sought to deny illegal immigrants public services, which would have had the effect of punishing their children by locking them out of school. The actor also backs English as the official language — an odd position for an international celeb born in Austria.

In California, where families have crossed back and forth to Mexico for hundreds of years, Proposition 187 didn’t sit well with Latinos — nor was it constitutional. The courts made that clear.

No one disputes that English is beneficial to get ahead in this country, but in a global economy it doesn’t hurt to know other languages that are key to growing trade, and Spanish certainly helps. Besides, America’s Founding Fathers had the young nation’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution translated into various languages. Why not? Many of them spoke and read other languages.

California’s changing demographics the past two decades make a diverse candidate not only appealing to many voters in that state but also signal the battles to come in the 2004 presidential race. California’s Democratic congressional delegation backs Bustamante’s strategy of having voters mark “no” on the recall question but nevertheless picking him as a successor on the second ballot question just to hedge the bet. He’s also earned the support of that state’s labor unions, which have been working hard the past decade to bring more Latino workers into their membership.

As Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. House minority leader from California, has acknowledged, the two-prong pro-Davis/pro-Bustamante strategy is meant to lock up the Latino vote and grow Hispanic support throughout the nation for a Democrat to unseat President Bush, who aggressively courted Hispanics in 2000. Bush made a dent in California’s Latino vote last time, but his support has been slipping since the Iraq war.

Bustamante, a pro-business moderate who backs the death penalty and has taken agriculture’s side in some environmental disputes, can make history. He would be only the second Hispanic governor since Romualdo Pacheco served less than a year in 1875. The Latino vote, which accounted for 14 percent of California’s voter turnout in 2000, can make a critical difference in a race with 135 candidates vying for governor.

For California’s Latino voters, it’s not only a matter of Bustamante’s strong qualifications for the job, it’s a matter of respect as full citizens of this country. They are right to question why a recall of Davis should have precluded Bustamante’s taking the job. After all, he won the lieutenant governor’s post in his own right.

Of course, the Republican-driven recall effort had another thing in mind: breaking a Democratic stronghold. Bustamante’s gutsy move put them on notice that Democrats weren’t about to play dead.