Bush then called Rove back in and said, “He likes you.” Karl shook my hand and smiled. “I’m looking forward to working with you,” I said.
They probably guessed what I would say next. After the debate, I’d complained to the media about how much in taxes Californians pay the federal government and how little California gets back compared to other states like Texas. I’d told CNN, “I am not only the Terminator but the Collectinator,” and vowed to get our fair share out of Washington as governor.
So I said, “We can have a good relationship, but I need your help. As you know, for every dollar of taxes we pay, we are getting only seventy-nine cents back. I want to get more money back for the state of California because we are having problems.”
“Well, I don’t have any money either,” the president said. But we had a good dialogue in which he promised to find ways to be helpful, especially on infrastructure programs.
Three weeks later, I was back in Sacramento, on the same steps of the capitol where I’d raised the broom, being sworn in as the thirty-eighth governor of the state. Vanessa Williams, my costar in Eraser, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the swearing in. Maria held an antique leather-bound Bible on which I put my hand as I took the oath.
In my speech, I reflected on the lessons I’d learned studying to become a citizen: how sovereignty rests with the people, not with the government, and how the United States emerged in a time of turmoil by a coming together of contending factions. That had been called the miracle of Philadelphia, I said, and “now the members of the legislature and I must bring about the miracle of Sacramento. A miracle based on cooperation, good will, new ideas, and devotion to the long-term good of California.” Emphasizing that I was a newcomer, I said that I would need a lot of help. But I let the crowd see how eager I was for this giant challenge. I wanted our state to be a beacon for the world just as it had been for an immigrant like me. The crowd cheered, and a choir sang songs from The Sound of Music as the congratulations began. Gray Davis, who had conceded very graciously, and his three predecessors, George Deukmejian, Jerry Brown, and Pete Wilson, all had come to see me sworn in. They drew me off to the side as we headed toward a reception. They were in a jovial mood.
“Enjoy this day,” said Deukmejian, the oldest of the three. “There is only one other day when you will feel this good.”
“When is that?”
“The day you leave.” The others smiled and nodded. Seeing I was skeptical, they started to explain. “Soon you’re going to be attending funerals of firefighters and law enforcement officers, and you’ll have tears in your eyes. You’ll be devastated that you have to shake the hand of some three-year-old who just lost his dad,” they told me. “And then you will be stuck here in Sacramento for three months every summer not being able to go on vacation with your kids, because those assholes in the legislature won’t pass a budget. You will be sitting here with frustration and anger.”
They bopped me on the shoulder and said, “So have a good time! Let’s go have a drink.”
CHAPTER 25
The Governator
I WAS THE SECOND person in American history to be elected governor in a recall election, and I came into office after the shortest election campaign in the modern history of California. My transition period was three weeks shorter than a normal transfer of power between governors. I took office, with no previous experience as an elected official, at a time of crisis, with the state facing massive budget deficits and an economic slump.
I’d been a student of politics for a long time, and I’d done my homework at Schwarzenegger University, but there’s only so much you can absorb by cramming, even if it’s twelve hours a day. I wasn’t familiar with the cast of characters in Sacramento: not only the lawmakers themselves but also the thousands of lobbyists, policy experts, and influence peddlers who do much of the work—and write much of the legislation.
I didn’t even know most of my own staff. Everyone wanted to meet with me, but still, it was hard to hire people so quickly. Our scramble was especially tight: we had just five weeks after the election to fill the 180 staff positions in the governor’s office, including 40 or so high-level ones. Our pool was small because few political professionals had expected me to win, and some of the best candidates had already found new jobs after the 2002 election. I tried to hit the ground running, by looking for people with experience in California politics, Republicans or Democrats. But few of those political veterans had experience with me, and even those who had worked on my campaign had known me for only a few months.
We ended up drawing heavily on veterans of the Pete Wilson administration. For my chief of staff, I brought in Patricia Clarey, who had been Governor Wilson’s deputy chief of staff. She was an organized, hard-driving fiscal conservative who had gone to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and had worked in the insurance and oil industries. Rob Stutzman, my communications director, was another tough Wilson veteran who had been through a thousand fights.
I did bring with me a handful of key aides who’d known me for years: Bonnie Reiss, my right-hand person in the after-school movement; David Crane, the San Francisco financier who was my closest advisor on economics and finance; and Terry Tamminen, an environmental innovator whom I chose to head California’s Environmental Protection Agency. They were Democrats, but that didn’t matter—at least not to me. When Republican Party stalwarts objected, I explained respectfully that I wanted the best, regardless of their party affiliation, if they shared my vision in a particular area. These new appointees were all smart, thoughtful, open-minded people, but, like me, they didn’t know Sacramento or its strange ways.
The only way to understand Sacramento, we learned, was to throw away your civics books. It didn’t help to know how Washington works or how other state capitals work, because Sacramento runs by completely different principles. Common sense is not one of them. Nothing adds up.
For example, the biggest single thing Sacramento does is allocate money for K–14 education. Because of Proposition 98, passed by the voters in 1988, K–14 education claims nearly half the state budget. This doesn’t count the money for building schools or for funding the pensions of retired teachers or the billions of dollars from the state lottery dedicated to education. Prop 98, the Classroom Instructional Improvement and Accountability Act, ensures that education funding increases every year regardless of whether or not the state takes in more money. The formula that governs this is so arcane that only the guy who wrote it knows exactly how it works. His name is John Mockler. He likes to joke that he wrote it that way on purpose and put his kid through Stanford advising people about the formula. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office had to produce a twenty-minute video explaining to state lawmakers how the law works, and even it needed to hire Mockler for advice.
Multiply the education funding formula a thousand times, and you get a picture of the absurdity of Sacramento. Its full-time legislature passes so many new laws each year—more than a thousand—that legislators don’t have time to even read the bills before they vote on most of them. Voters get so frustrated that they pass major legislation by initiative, like Prop 98, to force Sacramento to focus on real problems like education funding. Absurd.
Sacramento grew up as a boomtown: it was the main trading post in the great California Gold Rush of 1849. When Californians made it the state capital, they built a grandiose capitol building to rival the US Capitol in Washington, DC. But they didn’t get around to building a White House, so there’s no separate place where the governor can work. Instead, he and his staff share the capitol building with the legislature, and each governor makes his own living arrangements. The governors before me had all moved their families to Sacramento, but Maria and I decided we didn’t want to uproot the kids. So she stayed in Los Angeles with them while I rented the top-floor suite of a hotel near the capitol. My idea was to shuttle back and forth every week to spend time at home.
The governor’s offices are
called the Horseshoe, as they occupy three sides of an open-air atrium on the ground floor of the capitol. The legislators’ offices are on the five floors above. Protocol called for the governor to stay put and for lawmakers who wanted to see him to make the trip downstairs. That wasn’t my way. I often left my office and took the elevator to the upper floors to call on the legislators myself. Being in movies actually provided a great opening: a lawmaker might not know what to make of me as governor, but his staff would want to take pictures with me and would ask for autographs to bring home to their kids. If a lawmaker felt intimidated that I really might be the Terminator—it’s funny how literally people take these movie roles—I wanted him to think of me more as the open-minded Julius in Twins.
I’d promised the voters that I would deliver results fast. Within an hour of being sworn in, I canceled the tripling of the vehicle registration fee and, soon after, with the help of the legislators upstairs, got rid of the law allowing drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants. “Now, that’s what you call action,” I told the cameras. Within two weeks of taking office, I put before the legislature the financial-rescue package on which I’d based my campaign—including a refinancing of California’s debt, a sweeping budget reform, and a reform of the workers’ compensation system that was driving employers out of the state. We were pushing for a “hard spending cap” as the anchor of my budget reform proposal. That was where the Democrats drew the line, and soon we were headed for war. When talks with the Democrats broke off, I got lots of advice from across the political spectrum, most of it contradictory.
The Republican veterans of Pete Wilson’s administration who were on my team urged me to take a hard line: put all my reforms on the ballot for the voters to consider next year. Republican legislators were gleefully putting on war paint and suggested we let the state government run out of money and shut down until the Democrats caved. I was feeling pretty bullish myself. But at a dinner that week (ironically, in celebration of bipartisanship), I put the idea to George Shultz and to Leon Panetta, the beloved California statesman who had served Republicans and Democrats and had most recently been Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff. They raised their eyebrows.
“Is that the way you start your term, with a showdown?” George asked. “Your guys are right that you have momentum with the voters and you’ll probably win. But it will be a long, bloody fight, and what will happen in the meantime? There will be chaos, and everyone will get depressed that nothing has changed in Sacramento. California will suffer because businesses won’t have confidence to invest or create more jobs.”
Panetta agreed, saying, “It’s more important to cut a deal. Even if you only postpone the budget problems, it’s a way to show the public that you can work with both parties and make progress. You can come back later on for a fuller reform of the budget.”
I took that advice to heart. After assuming office and winning some immediate big victories using the momentum of my election, it was important to show the people that Sacramento can work together to solve California’s fiscal problems. So I went back to the capital, called the legislative leaders from both parties, and said, “Let’s sit down and try one more time.”
My fellow Republicans acted like they’d been punched in the stomach. “You have them on the ropes, go in for the kill!” they said. This was my first real taste of the new Republican ideology that any compromise is a sign of weakness. The Democrats were relieved to avoid a huge fight, but some interpreted my willingness to negotiate as a sign that I’d rather back down from a fight than risk my popularity with voters. That made negotiations more difficult. After so many years of ugly, pointless fighting in Sacramento, both sides had lost touch with the art of negotiation. In fact, the legislative districts were drawn to elect the most partisan, uncompromising members of each party; legislators who were bred to fight, like roosters bred for cockfighting.
After many days of negotiations, we agreed on a compromise in which I got a balanced budget amendment, a ban on using bond debt to pay for operating expenses, and a weak version of my rainy-day fund. The legislators got their economic recovery money. The proposal was on the ballot in the March election and passed with two-to-one support from the voters. We completed major workers’ compensation reform just a few weeks later. That showed leadership and got us off to a great start. Refinancing the debt lifted California’s credit rating dramatically and saved the state over $20 billion in bond interest over ten years. And when the business community saw that I was able to deal with both parties, some of the gloom on the economy started to lift.
My relationship with lawmakers was now complicated, however. Part of that complication was due to the huge mismatch in popularity between me and them. As I proved that I could get things done, my public approval rating shot up into the seventies while the legislature’s was down in the twenties. I was being lionized as the “Governator,” not only in California but also in the national and international media. In a presidential election year, journalists speculated about me as a future contender, although that would require a change in the Constitution that nobody really expected. My numbers stayed high all year, right through the November 2004 election, when California’s voters backed me on every ballot initiative on which I took a position. The most dramatic of these were measures to stop “shakedown” lawsuits against businesses and the landmark stem cell initiative, in which we put up $3 billion for groundbreaking scientific research after the Bush administration restricted federal funds. We also shot down two initiatives that would have increased the already outrageous privileges of the Indian gaming tribes.
I was making such a splash that Republican leaders asked me to help in the push to get President Bush reelected. They invited me to give the prime-time keynote address at the Republican National Convention. Never mind that I was much more of a centrist on most issues than the Bush administration, which had shifted more and more to the right. They knew I could attract attention.
So on the night of August 31, I stood at the podium at Madison Square Garden—my first time in the spotlight there since my victory as Mr. Olympia thirty years before. Except that back then, it had been in front of four thousand fans in the Felt Forum. Tonight it was fifteen thousand cheering delegates in the main arena, in prime time on national TV. Maria, who in years past would have been an NBC correspondent covering the convention, sat with the kids next to the elder George Bush. Every time the cameras looked for his reaction, she was captured smiling in the shot. I was touched by what a team player she was that night.
My heart was pounding, but the cheering crowd reminded me of winning Mr. Olympia, which had a calming effect. As I began to speak and heard them respond, I felt like it was no different than posing. I had them in the palm of my hand.
I’d prepped for this appearance more intensively than any in my life. The speech had been revised and revised, and I’d practiced it dozens of times, doing my reps. It was a pinnacle of my life.
“To think that a once scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become governor of the state of California and then stand here in Madison Square Garden and speak on behalf of the president of the United States—that is an immigrant’s dream,” I told the crowd.
My favorite part of the speech was an incantation on “how you know if you are Republican.” If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, if you believe that a person should be treated as an individual, if you believe that our educational system should be held accountable for the progress of our children—those were some of my criteria. I wrapped up with an appeal to return George W. Bush to the White House for another term and led the convention chanting, “Four more years! Four more years.” The speech brought wild applause.
Eunice and Sarge, who had watched it on TV, joined Maria and me for breakfast at the hotel the next morning. Eunice had really gotten a kick out of my inclusiveness theme. “The way you made it sound, I’m a Republican!” she wisecracked.
Back in California, my p
olitical opponents tried to portray me as a bully in part because of my popularity. But I went to great lengths to charm the legislators during that first year and encourage them to work with me. I’d call their mothers on their birthdays. I’d invite them to schmooze in my smoking tent in the atrium outside my office. The tent was the size of a cozy living room, furnished with comfortable rattan chairs, a glass-topped conference table with a beautiful humidor, lamps, and an Astroturf floor. Photographs hung along the walls, suspended by wires from the metal framework. I’d set up the tent so that I would have a place to smoke my stogies (since smoking is forbidden in California’s public buildings), but people nicknamed it my deal-making tent.
I paid special attention to leaders like John Burton, the president pro tempore of the state senate, and Herb Wesson, the assembly speaker. John was a crusty San Francisco Democrat who had actually boycotted my inauguration. He wore round wire-rim glasses and had a bushy white moustache. The first time we met, he was barely willing to shake hands. So I sent flowers. Once we got to know each other a bit, it turned out that we had things in common. He knew a little German because he’d been stationed in Europe in the army. (He was fascinated by the great nineteenth-century Austrian diplomat Metternich.) Often we disagreed, especially in the beginning. But eventually we found that our views were similar on major social issues like health insurance and foster care, and we got to a place where we could say, “Forget the big fighting in public; let’s find things we can work on.” We became effective collaborators and even friends; he’d drop by the tent sometimes just to bring me apple strudel and Schlag for my espresso.
Herb Wesson, the assembly speaker, was an easygoing five-foot-five guy from LA who would tease me about whether I was actually six foot two, like my bio says. I teased him back by calling him my Danny De-Vito and sending him a pillow so he could sit taller in a chair. I didn’t get to know him as well as I got to know John, because he was nearing his term limit. His successor, a smart ex-union leader named Fabian Núñez, also from LA, would in time become one of my closest allies among the Democrats.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 56