Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  I also formed a solid relationship with the new minority leader of the assembly, Kevin McCarthy. He was a high-energy thirty-nine-year-old from Bakersfield whose district included Antelope Valley, where my supersonic airport would have been. Kevin got his start as an entrepreneur who opened his first business, a sandwich shop, at age nineteen to help pay for college, and we clicked as fellow businessmen. He’s now the majority whip of the US House of Representatives.

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  Turning on the charm with the lawmakers helped get my reform ideas into the legislative debate and produced some agreements that were an important start. But after trying a bunch of different maneuvers, I found that what gave me by far the greatest leverage was the ballot-initiative process. Because of my big approval ratings, I could threaten to go directly to the voters and thus pressure the legislature to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.

  That was how we ended the abuse of workers’ comp. I’d made it one of the top issues in my campaign, because it was poisoning our economy and driving businesses out of state. As in every state, employers in California are required to carry insurance that pays medical expenses and lost wages for workers who are injured on the job. But in California, premiums had doubled to twice the national average. How did that happen? Mainly because the laws had been written so loosely by the Democrats that it was easy for people to abuse the system. I knew a guy who’d hurt his leg skiing one weekend. He waited to go to the doctor until after work on Monday and said, “I hurt my leg working.” When businesses challenged bogus claims like these, the worker always won. I also knew a guy at the gym who was squatting four hundred pounds. He told me, “I’m on workers’ comp leave.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “You’re squatting more weight than me!”

  “I needed to take care of my family,” he said.

  Unions, lawyers, and doctors had prevailed on the legislature to relax the rules so much that an employee could play the system and get treatment for just about any ailment—not only work-related injuries—and be fully reimbursed with no cap or even a copay. This amounted to free, unlimited health care and sick leave with pay, all paid for by the private sector. It was a backdoor way for the Democrats to get what they wanted. John Burton once came straight out and told me, “Workers’ comp is our version of universal health care.” Which is another way of saying that the law was written to be abused.

  I became something of an expert on the subject because Warren Buffett was in insurance, and he told me long before I ran for governor how screwed up California was. I had allies in the business community draft a ballot initiative that would put an end to this. The initiative was much tougher than parallel legislation that I supported in the legislature—it took more away from workers. But that was the strategy. If workers, attorneys, and doctors feared the initiative, they might be willing to give more ground in a legislative deal.

  I sold the initiative hard. Whenever negotiations with the legislature bogged down, I’d leave Sacramento and travel the state to help gather signatures on the initiative in Costco stores.

  The public found this very entertaining, and it succeeded. The Democrats and workers’ groups did get scared, and they struck a deal on legislation that would save employers big money on their premiums. The Democrats hated being threatened with an initiative, though, and they dragged out negotiations, offering a few more reforms each time I showed them a new stack of signatures we’d collected. We reached the agreement just as the number of signatures on the initiative hit the one million mark—which would have been enough to qualify it for the ballot. Applying leverage had worked. Because of our reform, within the next few years, premiums dropped by 66 percent, and a total of $70 billion went back to California businesses in the first four years.

  Still, the budget itself remained badly broken. And when I sent the legislature a $103 billion proposal for the fiscal year beginning on July 1, 2004, they stalled for more than a month of pointless negotiations so that the budget was late. July 1 came and went, and then a week, and then another week. This was exactly what I’d promised the voters we’d avoid, and I suddenly remembered what those previous governors had warned me about the day I was inaugurated: you’re going to spend a lot of summers solo and sweating in Sacramento. That didn’t seem to have worked too well for them, so I took my great poll numbers and went out to the people. Speaking to hundreds of shoppers in a Southern California megamall, I made the case that our lawmakers were part of a political system that was “out of shape, that is out of date, that is out of touch, and that is definitely out of control. They cannot have the guts to come out there in front of you and say, ‘I don’t want to represent you. I want to represent those special interests: the unions, the trial lawyers.’ ”

  I don’t regret having said any of that. But in the next breath, I went over the top: “I call them ‘girlie men.’ They should get back to the table, and they should finish the budget.”

  Needless to say, the girlie-men line was unscripted. It was the kind of outrageous improvisation that my team always worried I was going to come up with in front of a crowd. The joke got big laughs. The crowd knew that I was alluding to the Saturday Night Live spoof of me featuring the characters Hans and Franz. I also urged the crowd to “be terminators” on Election Day and throw out the legislators who voted against my budget.

  My playful joke caused an uproar, with headlines nationwide. I got blasted for being sexist, antigay, a name caller, and a bully. The most damning criticism came from Assembly Speaker Núñez, who said, “Those are the kinds of statements that ought not to come out of the mouth of a governor.” He added that his thirteen-year-old daughter, whom I’d met and who liked me, was upset by what I’d said.

  On one level, he was right. The voters had elected Arnold, and talking movie talk and saying outrageous things had helped me win. But once I got to Sacramento, I was representing the people, and I couldn’t just be Arnold anymore. I was supposed to work with legislators who are constitutionally part of the system, so I shouldn’t belittle them.

  Besides, it was stupid to antagonize the legislators. When you are governor, you cannot pass legislation; you can only sign or veto legislation. They have to pass it. That’s the way the political system is set up. So if you need the legislators to make your vision of the state a reality, why insult them? Yes, you can put the squeeze on them, embarrass them, let the public see that they are not doing their jobs. But there are other ways to do that than to call them girlie men.

  I decided I had to acquire new diplomatic skills if I wanted to accomplish big things. I would have to be more cautious in giving speeches—not just the written ones but also the statements I would deliver without notes. Of course, then I went right out and opened my big mouth again.

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  One of Maria’s inspirations upon becoming First Lady was to take a California women’s conference that dated back to the 1980s and transform it into a major national event. In December 2004, ten thousand women gathered at the Long Beach Convention Center for a one-day agenda on “Women as Architects of Change.” The program featured prominent women from California’s business and social-services worlds, as well as high-profile speakers such as Queen Noor of Jordan and Oprah Winfrey.

  Because it was officially the California Governor’s Conference on Women and Families, it was natural for me to kick off the event. I joked that for once I got to be Maria’s “opening act.” As I began this carefully prepared speech celebrating women’s contributions to California, a group of protestors jumped up and created a commotion on the floor. They unfurled a banner, waved signs, and started chanting, “Safe staffing saves lives!”

  The protestors were from the nurses’ union, and they were angry because I’d suspended a Gray Davis mandate that would have cut the standard workload for hospital nurses from six patients per nurse to five. Most of the audience in the giant hall barely seemed to notice, but the news cameras zoomed in on the fifteen chanting women being escorted away. I fou
nd their behavior really irritating. If their beef was with me, why screw up Maria’s event? Turning to the audience, I said, “Pay no attention to those voices over there. They are the special interests. Special interests don’t like me in Sacramento because I kick their butt.” Then I added, “But I love them anyway.”

  Big mistake. Ridiculing the protestors embarrassed Maria, for one thing. And the nurses’ union took my words as cause for war. For months afterward, I was greeted by nurses picketing and chanting at every public appearance.

  In the top drawer of my desk, I kept a list of the ten major reforms I’d promised to bring about when I ran for governor. I knew a certain amount of confrontation was inevitable because I was challenging the powerful unions that controlled the Democrats and were exploiting the state. High on that list were abuses like tenure for mediocre teachers, gold-plated pensions for state employees, and gerrymandering of political districts to protect the elected class.

  Above all was the crying need for budget reform. Even though we’d finally passed a balanced budget for 2004, and the state economy was starting to revive, the system was dysfunctional. While revenues in 2005 were projected to go up by $5 billion, expenses were set to go up by $10 billion because of those weird budget formulas that mandated increases no matter what. These included big program expansions and generous pension benefits that the Democrats had locked in for the public-employee unions at the height of the tech boom. Maddeningly, California was headed right back into the red. We were facing another multibillion-dollar deficit for 2005. Unless we made fundamental changes, this same imbalance was going to cripple us year after year.

  I saw our workers’ comp victory as a model. I’d used the threat of a ballot initiative to force the other side to negotiate and make a deal. So why not apply the same strategy to achieve reform on a much larger scale? I was pumped about that success, and the one we’d had on the economic recovery money. With that sense of accomplishment, during the last months of 2004, my staff and I set out to draft a whole new arsenal of ballot initiatives.

  In education policy, we wanted to make it harder for inferior teachers to get tenure. (Instead of being retrained or fired, bad teachers would often be shuffled from school to school in what was known as “the dance of the lemons.”) In budget policy, we wanted to prevent the state from spending money it didn’t have, and to get out from under the automatic increases for education. We wanted to change public-employee pensions, making them more like modern 401(k) plans in the private sector. And we wanted to weaken the unions’ grip on the legislature by requiring them to obtain permission from their members before using dues to fund political contributions. It might have been naïve to think we could do so much, but my natural instinct after that first year was to just keep punching through my to-do list.

  These initiatives eventually became known as my reform agenda. When I unveiled them that January, I told the legislature, “My friends, this is a time for choosing . . . I get up every morning wanting to fix things here in Sacramento. I ask you today: help me fix them.” I proclaimed grandly that 2005 would be California’s year of reform. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my rhetoric came across as way over the top. In essence, I had declared war on the three most powerful public-employee unions in the state: the prison guards, the teachers, and the state employees. People who heard the speech told me afterward that it was either a crazy-brilliant strategy to empty the entire war chest of the labor unions going into the next election year, or it was just crazy—political suicide.

  I didn’t grasp how big a mistake I’d made. The way I presented my plans made everybody in the labor movement say, “Uh-oh. This is a whole different Arnold. We’d better mobilize.” The public-employee unions weren’t looking to do battle until then. They could have been persuaded to come to the table and reach a reasonable agreement. Instead, I’d given them Pearl Harbor—a motivation to band together and fight.

  Teachers, firefighters, and cops quickly joined the nurses protesting at my public appearances. Every time I arrived at an event, they’d be out there, waving signs, booing, chanting, and ringing cowbells. The unions formed coalitions with names like the Alliance for a Better California and started pouring millions of dollars into TV and radio ads. One commercial featured a firefighter who was convinced that my pension reforms would take away benefits to widows and orphans. Another showed teachers and PTA members saying how disappointed they were with me for trying to put California’s budget troubles on the backs of the kids.

  The heat of the protests surprised me, but the reforms were too important to give up. My spokesman told the press, “Our door will be open twenty-four hours a day to any Democrat who is serious about negotiating. But they haven’t been serious before, and we can’t wait forever.” I started running counteradvertisements to dispel the worst of the unions’ distortions and to remind voters that California needed to change. A commercial showed me on a cafeteria line talking to people and asking them to “help me reform California so we can rebuild it.”

  But if you’re perceived to be attacking teachers, firefighters, and cops, your popularity is going to take a beating. My approval ratings dropped like they’d been tasered, from 60 percent in December to 40 percent in the spring. The surveys showed that a lot of voters were also frustrated that I seemed to be turning into just another Sacramento politician, picking partisan fights that would just lead to more paralysis.

  My Year of Reform campaign was extremely uncomfortable for Maria. The Kennedys and Shrivers had always been close to labor, and here I was making antilabor moves. She pulled back. I could feel the change: I no longer had a partner who was taking my side but all of a sudden a kind of a neutral partner. “I’m not going to talk about these issues in public,” she said.

  Despite our different views, politics had never been an issue in our marriage up until then. In my mind, I wasn’t antilabor, I was just straightening out California’s mess. When Teddy had been campaigning for his seventh US Senate term in 2000, Maria and I had helped by hosting a party for five hundred people at our house. Every important union leader in America was there to support Teddy and lobby him for deals, and afterward they wrote the most gracious thank-you letters to Maria and me. I remembered walking around greeting people on the lawn and deciding, “I feel okay hosting these labor leaders at my house.” There were a lot of trade unions—plumbers, butchers, pipe benders, carpenters, bricklayers, and cement workers—and I always had a good relationship with them. It was the excesses of the public-employee unions that I found intolerable.

  As summer arrived, I made good on my threat that if the Democrats and their backers wouldn’t come to the table, we would let the voters decide. Exercising my prerogative as governor, I called a special election on my reform initiatives for November. This intensified the pressure on Maria. She started getting calls and letters from labor leaders around the country saying, “You’d better talk to Arnold about this issue.” She always informed me about these contacts but never argued their case.

  She also found herself having to defend me to Eunice and Sarge. They would ask questions like, “Does he really have to go after labor this way? Does he really have to be so harsh? Why doesn’t he try being harsh on businesses too?”

  “Arnold is trying to deal with a fifteen-billion-dollar deficit, and labor wants more money,” Maria would explain. “And he promised reform in his campaign, and now he’s trying to deliver. Of course, that doesn’t go over very well with labor! I understand your position, but I also understand his concerns.” Being caught in the middle made her feel awkward and weird.

  My phone was ringing too. Business leaders and conservatives were saying to me, “I know those Kennedys are trying to convince you to back off, but just remember, we’ve got to continue this battle.” The idea of me living and sleeping with the enemy had always driven them nuts. You could almost hear the extreme ones thinking, “Holy shit, this could very well be when Teddy takes over California.”

  Beh
ind the scenes, negotiations moved by fits and starts. I was having a hard time not only because the unions were so fierce but also because many on my own staff disagreed with me. Pat Clarey and other veteran Republicans were cynical about our chances of ever getting the unions to negotiate in good faith, and took a hard line. They seemed to want a big political fight more than I did.

  Rather than argue with them, I went around them. I reached out personally on my own. I met quietly with the teachers’ union, which had been my ally during the campaign for my after-school initiative, although that now seemed like centuries ago. I sought out leaders of the police and firefighters’ unions with whom I’d worked successfully. And I enlisted my friend Bob “Huggy” Hertzberg, the Democratic former assembly speaker, to set up secret meetings with Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez.

  I made progress in these talks, particularly the talks with Núñez, which took place not in Sacramento but on my home patio. My goal was to work out compromise measures to replace the ballot initiatives. Then I would either take the initiatives off the ballot one by one and work with the legislature to make the reforms, or replace the initiatives on the ballot with compromise versions agreed to by all sides.

  We were told by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a Republican, that the deadline for revising the ballots was mid-August. As it drew near, Fabian and I were close to a deal. But two things stood in the way. Some of the unions were reluctant, even though I was willing to meet them more than halfway. I’m sure their political advisors were pointing to the public-opinion surveys and asking, “Why compromise now when you can crush him in the special election?” They were on their way to spending $160 million in a campaign against me, and they tasted blood. All of a sudden, the lions saw they could eat the lion tamer. The crack of the whip wasn’t scary anymore.