Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  Soon Paul Folino hit on a solution to make me feel more comfortable asking for money. He suggested that we make my fund-raisers low-key: dinner parties and small receptions. We found that as soon as I was in a relatively informal setting where I could schmooze, I was able to pass the hat very effectively.

  I loved finding new allies. In November I took our draft of Prop 49 to John Hein, the political chief of the California Teachers Association, the most powerful union in the state. John was used to people asking for favors. I didn’t expect him to be very receptive because Republicans and unions usually don’t mix. So when I made my pitch, I told him right off the top, “We need no money from you. If you endorse this, you don’t have to put a million dollars into the funding or anything like that. I’ll go out and raise the money. But we want to go into this together.” I also made the point that after-school programs not only help the kids but also reduce the strain on their teachers.

  To my delight, he approved of our idea. In fact, he recommended only two changes in the proposal, the main one being that we add some language about hiring retired teachers. This wasn’t something I wanted to encourage too much, because young kids relate better to young people, especially after a whole day of teachers and school. They want counselors in jeans and with spiky hair, who can serve as parent figures but who don’t look like them. Still, it wasn’t a lot to ask, and we made the deal. And ultimately it worked out fine because not that many retired teachers wanted to go back to work anyway.

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  By normal standards, the start of an election year is way too early to put a ballot initiative before the public, since the vote isn’t until November. But I had to juggle Prop 49 and Terminator 3, which was ready to start filming. So we had our kickoff in late February, just before the California state primaries. Instead of some boring press conference, I did a two-day fly-around of cities up and down the state, with rallies and kids and hoopla to get us on TV and pump up support.

  Then we went back to the slow, painstaking work of building alliances and raising funds. Just like bodybuilding, campaigning is all about reps, reps, reps. I met with Parent-Teacher Associations, city councils, taxpayer groups, and the California Medical Association. This is when I discovered that raising cash from the set of a movie was a huge advantage, and Terminator 3 was the greatest set of all. People loved coming to see the special effects, the loading of the weapons, the explosions. Sometimes I’d meet them with my makeup still on: an LA Times columnist interviewed me one day when the Terminator had been through a fight. About a quarter of my face and scalp were bloody and torn off, exposing my titanium skull. It was a funny way to be talking about middle school.

  The California attorney general, Bill Lockyer, also came to visit, and he was a Democrat! I knew him from T2, when he was a state senator who helped get us permission to film the scene in San José where the T-1000 rides a motorcycle out of a second-story window into a helicopter. I talked to him about the initiative. We needed him because it’s the attorney general’s office that issues an opinion on the cost and legal propriety of every initiative. He was on the set the day I was hanging from the hook of a giant crane. This was like heaven for him. No wonder he went for the initiative.

  In September, after Terminator 3 moved into postproduction, I went to Sacramento to ask for endorsements from state senate and state assembly leaders. I was curious to see what they’d say, although I wasn’t holding my breath. The legislature was two-thirds Democrats, for one thing. And elected officials usually hate ballot initiatives because they reduce their power and make the state harder to govern. In fact, our loudest opponent was the League of Women Voters, which was adamantly against what it called “ballot box budgeting” for any program. Still, I had in my pocket a three-page, single-spaced list of all the organizations that endorsed us; we’d built the widest coalition that anybody could remember for a ballot initiative. That was going to be hard for the politicians to ignore.

  One of my first stops was Bob Hertzberg, the speaker of the assembly. Bob is a smart, ebullient Democrat from the San Fernando Valley, about the same age as Maria. He’s so friendly that his nickname is Huggy. Within two minutes, we were swapping jokes. “What’s not to like?” he said about our ballot proposition. But he warned me not to expect support from the Democratic Party itself. “God forbid we should endorse a Republican initiative,” he wisecracked.

  I got into heated debates with some labor leaders. The head of one of the big state employees unions asked, “What is your funding mechanism?” Other interest groups would claim that we were crowding out their programs. But two years earlier, legislators had approved a pension deal that could potentially involve $500 billion in unfunded liabilities. To the same people who were now asking me about my funding mechanism, I said, “You just committed the state for hundreds of billions of dollars. What’s your funding mechanism? We’re just talking about four hundred million a year for the kids.”

  “We take it out of the taxes.”

  “Well, you’re crowding out plenty.”

  The support of the Republicans was no slam dunk, either. They would normally oppose any additional spending. But assembly minority leader Dave Cox, an older guy who was very gruff on the surface but sweet underneath, became our unexpected ally. He not only endorsed Prop 49 but also invited me to San Diego while the Republican lawmakers were holding a regular powwow. Standing before them, I could see as much skepticism as enthusiasm on their faces as they listened to my pitch. Then Dave got up and turned to the group. “You know why this is a Republican issue?” he asked “Because it is a fiscal issue. You may see this as asking the taxpayer to spend four hundred twenty-eight million more dollars. But, in fact, we are saving almost 1.3 billion.”

  Then he described a new study I hadn’t even heard about, by this very prestigious institute at Claremont McKenna College. “For every dollar we spend in an after-school program,” Dave said, “we save three dollars down the line because of fewer arrests and less teenage pregnancy and less trouble in the neighborhood.” You could feel the mood in the room shift. All the Republicans really needed was that fiscal rationale— they voted unanimously to endorse Prop 49.

  As November approached, I felt confident we would win, but I wasn’t taking it for granted. California had been in recession, and since the dot-com crash in 2000, household incomes were down and the state was running billions of dollars in the red. Voters were worried about spending more money. Meanwhile, the governor’s race had turned ugly between Gray Davis and his main challenger, a conservative pro-life Republican businessman named Bill Simon. The governor still had low approval ratings, but voters in surveys said they disliked Simon even more.

  We wanted to make sure that Proposition 49 didn’t get swept away in some big tsunami of gloom. So in the closing weeks, we added more rallies and poured an extra $1 million into TV ads.

  On election night, my advisers thought we should gather at a fancy LA hotel, which was the custom in California races. I insisted we go to the Hollenbeck Youth Center, which was much more relevant to what we were trying to achieve. We ordered food for the neighborhood kids, well-wishers, and people who’d worked on the campaign, and waited around for results. Just before midnight, enough polling data were in for us to declare victory and start a big party on the basketball court. Proposition 49 ended up passing with 56.7 percent of the vote, while Republican candidates lost every election in the state.

  Gray Davis won that night too. But it wasn’t much of a reelection to celebrate. After the most expensive campaign in California history, most voters simply stayed home—it was the lowest turnout for a governor’s election in the history of the state. Davis won with only 47 percent of the vote against Simon and the minor candidates. That was a much narrower margin than in 1998, when he’d won by a sizable majority.

  To the amazement of the rest of the country, a grassroots movement to unelect Gray Davis started almost the minute his new term began. Outside the state, people thought this w
as just more evidence that Californians are crazy. But the same direct-democracy provisions of the state constitution that allowed for ballot initiatives also provided a process for recalling state officials through special election. Like ballot initiatives, gubernatorial recalls had a long and colorful history. Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, and Pete Wilson had all faced attempts, but none of their challengers had ever collected enough signatures to get anywhere.

  The Recall Gray Campaign started among a handful of activists. It tapped into the widespread feeling that the state was heading in the wrong direction and he wasn’t doing enough to fix California’s problems. There was an uproar in December, for example, when Davis announced that the state budget deficit might be 50 percent more than had been estimated just a month earlier, or $35 billion total—as much as all the other state deficits in America combined. People were still angry about the electricity crisis too. You could see those and other concerns reflected in the recall petition, which accused the governor of “gross mismanagement of California Finances by overspending taxpayers’ money, threatening public safety by cutting funds to local governments, failing to account for the exorbitant cost of the energy fiasco, and failing in general to deal with the state’s major problems until they get to the crisis stage.”

  I didn’t pay much attention to the recall campaign at first, because it seemed like a total long shot. Besides, the after-school movement was having a crisis of its own. In February Bonnie Reiss and I were flying around the country promoting the Inner-City Games. We’d just landed in Texas when her cell phone rang. It was a friend calling to alert us that President George W. Bush had just submitted a budget proposal that wiped out the federal dollars for after-school: more than $400 million of annual funding that programs all over the country depended on. Of course, the Texas media couldn’t wait to ask my reaction. Wasn’t this a direct insult to my favorite cause? Was the White House declaring war on Arnold?

  “I’m sure the president believes in after-school,” I told them. “The budget isn’t done yet.” As soon as I could, I called Rod Paige, Bush’s secretary of education, to ask what was going on. He explained that the reason Bush gave for zeroing out the money was a new scholarly study claiming that after-school programs really weren’t as effective as we’d thought in steering kids away from crime, drugs, and such.

  “You know what?” I said. “That doesn’t mean we should zero it out. It means let’s learn from this study and fix the problem. Why don’t we have a ‘Best of After-School’ summit?” I didn’t think this was a crazy idea. I knew the experts, I had experience making people from the public and private sectors and from both parties work together, and I had a track record of organizing summits across fifty states. How difficult could it be? Secretary Paige liked that idea and said his department might be willing to sponsor it. I’d suggested the summit instinctively, so I laughed when Bonnie interpreted it as a clever political tactic. “I see what we’re doing,” she said after the call. “If the administration holds a summit about how to improve after-school programs, that gives the president cover to reverse his position and put back the funds.”

  “Hey,” I said, “we’re just trying to fix the problem.”

  We immediately planned a trip to Washington to lobby key lawmakers on the budget. When my political guru Bob White got wind of this plan, he sent me a memo strongly advising me not to do it. Essentially it said, “Let it go. Never second-guess a president from your own party. If you succeed in getting back the money, you seem disrespectful. If you fail to get it back, you look bad as a leader. Either way, you hurt your future chances of running for governor.”

  I could see the political wisdom of this, but my own feeling was that protecting after-school was worth the risk. Losing federal funding would do great damage to a lot of kids. I said to myself, “Let’s not pay attention to politics in this case.”

  So we went to Washington in early March to make our case. Our first stop was to see Congressman Bill Young, the powerful Florida Republican who chaired the Appropriations Committee. I’d become good friends with him and his wife, Beverly, because their passion was helping wounded veterans at places like Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital. They’d gotten me involved in visiting the hospitals regularly. There were never any cameras or press for these occasions; I went because I loved seeing the young veterans and entertaining them and thanking them for their great work.

  When Bonnie and I got to Bill’s office, he was laughing. “Before you say anything, let me tell you a story,” he said. Beverly had come to him the minute she heard about the president’s budget proposal. “What’s the story with the four hundred million that Bush cut out for after-school?” she asked.

  Bill said to her, “Well, we’re going to have a debate.”

  “Hell no! You are not going to have a debate about this. I’m telling you right now, that money’s back in, do you hear me?”

  So Bill assured us that he would do everything he could on our behalf.

  Our next stop was Bill Thomas, the Republican congressman from Bakersfield, California, who was the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means. He was legendary in Congress for his brains and hot temper. Bonnie and I sat down with him and his top aide and had just begun to chat when he said, “You know, this is our first time meeting, and I don’t know if you want to bullshit for a little while or just get down to it.”

  I smiled and said, “Let’s get down to it.”

  “I know you’re here to get the money back for after-school,” he said. “That’s done, in. Let’s talk about the recall.”

  Then he launched into an analysis about why the Gray Davis recall movement was a phenomenal opportunity for me. “In a normal election, you have to raise at least sixty million dollars,” he said. “Then you have to run in the primary, and since you are such a moderate, you might not even get the nomination, because in Republican primaries it’s mostly the hard-core conservatives who come out to vote.

  “But in a recall situation, there is no primary! Any number of candidates can get their names on the ballot, and whoever gets the most votes wins.”

  I’d assumed that a recall would be just like a normal election. “Let’s back up,” he said and then proceeded to explain how the process worked under California law. If enough voters petition for a recall, the state is required to hold an election within eighty days. The ballot consists of two questions. First, should the governor be recalled? That is a simple yes-or-no choice. Second, if the governor does get recalled, who should replace him? To answer that, the voter chooses one name from a list of citizens who have qualified as candidates. Getting on the list was easy, Thomas explained. Instead of spending millions on a primary, you need to collect only sixty-five signatures and pay a $3,500 fee to enter your name as a candidate. “Of course, that means it’ll be a crowded race,” he said. “It’ll be a madhouse! But the more crowded it gets, the more you have the advantage. Everybody knows you.”

  He said he would back me if I ran. But the thing I had to do right now was to step in and be willing to put up a couple of million dollars to collect the necessary signatures to qualify the recall petition. Almost nine hundred thousand signatures were needed under the law, and right now the recall petition was circulating on much too small a scale.

  Running for governor of California was not on my list of goals for 2003, of course, but I was fascinated and promised the chairman I’d give it careful thought. Instinctively, though, I knew the strategy he was recommending was wrong for me. If I were to lead the recall, it would seem brazen and disrespectful. After all, we’d just had an election, and Gray Davis had won it fair and square. I could have tried to run against him, but I had to make Terminator 3 instead. It wouldn’t be right for me to suddenly turn around and say, “Okay! Now that the movie’s done, I’m going to take him out; now it’s convenient for me, so please can we have another election?” Instead, I had to keep my distance. If a recall came about, it had to be org
anic, the will of the people, not something paid for by me. Even so, I followed the recall movement much more closely over the next couple of months.

  Just as the congressmen had promised Bonnie and me, after-school funding was restored as the budget made its way through Congress. And the After-School Summit, held in Washington in early June, produced an important breakthrough. When organizers from around the country pooled their experience, we discovered that after-school programs that included academic as well as physical activities were by far the most effective. From then on, homework help became a key element in the after-school world.

  The White House was my final stop while I was in Washington for the summit. Like many of the people who’d worked for the first President Bush, I wasn’t close to his son, but the governor situation in California made me want to touch base with his senior domestic advisor, Karl Rove. I did this because, to everybody’s amazement, the prospect of a recall election that fall suddenly seemed very real. The Gray Davis recall campaign had been energized by Congressman Darrell Issa, a wealthy San Diego Republican who had his eye on becoming governor himself. In May he’d decided to pump almost $2 million of his own money into advertising and signature gathering, which pushed the campaign into high gear. Now it had more than three hundred thousand signatures, while the governor’s popularity continued to sink.

  Rove greeted me in the reception area on the second floor of the West Wing and led me to his office, just above the president’s study. We talked for a half hour about the California economy, the Special Olympics, and helping with President Bush’s reelection in 2004. Then I said, “Let me ask you, what do you think will happen with the recall? Issa just put in two million dollars, and the signature gathering is gaining momentum.” I pretended to be innocent. “You’re the master behind getting Bush elected. What is your take on the whole thing?”

  “It will never happen,” Rove said. “There will be no recall election. Plus, if there were to be one, I don’t think anyone can unseat Gray Davis.” Before I could ask a question or express my surprise, he went on. “As a matter of fact, we’re already focused on 2006.” Then he stood and said, “Come with me.” He led me down the stairs to the first floor, where, almost like they had choreographed it, Condoleezza Rice came walking toward us from down the hall.