We still lost. The voters rejected every key measure, and in the next few months, the legislature had to go back to the drawing board and grapple with the 2008–2009 budget yet again. Sadly, my apocalyptic vision wasn’t far off. In June I had to announce $24 billion of spending cuts. Thousands of teachers and public servants were laid off. The state had to hand out $2.6 billion of IOUs to pay bills, since we were again about to run out of cash. (We didn’t sell the coliseum or San Quentin, though.)
In our household, that summer was a time of terrible loss. Eunice and Sarge went as usual to Hyannis Port for vacation, even though they were now very frail and old: he was ninety-three, and she was eighty-seven. Sarge was in such an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s that he no longer recognized anybody, even Eunice. They’d been in Hyannis for only two weeks when on August 9 Eunice was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital; two days later she died.
Eunice had touched so many lives that there was a global outpouring of grief. The Kennedys mourned her at a requiem Mass in the same church where Maria and I had gotten married more than twenty years before. And while Sarge was able to attend the requiem, Teddy couldn’t come because he was in the end stage of brain cancer. Two weeks later, in Boston, he too died.
It was hard for me to let Eunice go. She’d been my mentor and cheerleader and the best mother-in-law in the world. But my loss was nothing compared to my wife’s. Maria was in more pain than I’d ever seen her experience. We had long conversations about her mom, but she wouldn’t talk publicly about her grief until after two months, when she went to speak at her women’s conference. She told thousands of attendees who had gathered at the Long Beach Arena, “When people ask, I say I’m fine, I’m holding up well. But the real truth is that I’m not fine. The real truth is that my mother’s death has brought me to my knees. She was my hero, my role model, my very best friend. I spoke to her every single day of my life. I tried really hard when I grew up to make her proud of me.”
I traveled to Denmark later that fall on a mission that I knew would have made my mother-in-law proud. Eunice and Sarge never hesitated to step across borders or to break bureaucratic barriers when there was important work to do for other people. That was how Eunice built the Special Olympics and how Sarge built the Peace Corps.
The United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and I had been working on an ambitious response to global warming. Two years earlier, in 2007, he’d been so impressed by California’s climate change initiative that he’d invited me to speak at the opening session of the United Nations. When I stepped to the podium that fall, I was almost overwhelmed to realize that I was standing where John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, and Mikhail Gorbachev had all addressed the UN before me. The occasion gave California a world stage—and an opportunity to contribute to a crucial international conversation.
Now, two years later, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was meant to be the most important meeting on global warming since the completion of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. After years of environmental conferences and programs and debates, leaders from more than 110 nations were coming to Copenhagen to hammer out an action plan. But Secretary-General Ban was concerned that the prospects for agreement between industrialized nations and developing ones were poor. The United States had failed to ratify the Kyoto accords, while China and India had made it plain that they didn’t want Europe or America dictating their climate policies. The problems went on and on.
Since his visit to San Francisco in 2007, Ban had watched with great interest as California built broader and broader coalitions with other US states and “subnational” players abroad. The Western Climate Initiative, our regional cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, had expanded to include seven US states and five Canadian provinces. And our second Governors’ Global Climate Summit in late 2009 drew governors and provincial leaders from six continents in spite of the world recession.
This subnational climate change movement had built bridges to the developing world. Washington and Beijing on a national level were still in a stalemate over climate issues, but they were willing for us to form region-to-region connections. California had already made agreements with the city of Shanghai and several of China’s most industrialized provinces aimed at reducing greenhouse gases and cooperating on projects in solar and wind power and electric buses and high-speed rail.
As news got around about these developments, people in the environmental community began to sense a giant opportunity here. Ban Ki-moon was receptive when I pitched California’s approach as plan B for Copenhagen, to supplement the main UN effort to address climate change. “Even if the negotiations hit an impasse,” I argued, “the conference doesn’t have to look like a failure. You can say that although the national governments are stuck, we have great successes over here on the subnational front, and we’re going to continue the fight.”
—
All great movements in history—civil rights, women’s suffrage, the campaign against apartheid, worker safety—start out on a grassroots level, not in places like Washington or Paris or Moscow or Beijing. That was my inspiration in trying to cope with climate change. For instance, when we cut our pollution by 70 percent at the Port of Long Beach, the second-busiest seaport in America, Washington didn’t tell us to do it. We did it ourselves. We passed laws that forbid trucks from idling, and gave truckers tax incentives to switch over to electric engines and clean diesel and hybrids. In the same way, California built the Hydrogen Highway (a chain of refueling stations for hydrogen-powered vehicles), launched the Million Solar Roofs program, and committed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions radically, all without waiting for Washington. So if we could create a groundswell of such projects around the world, getting people involved, getting companies involved, getting cities involved, getting states involved, national governments could then respond.
That was the idea I took to the national leaders assembled in Copenhagen. We held a press conference after the speech, but at a separate hotel from the conference, to dramatize the message: “While the national governments are meeting over there, we are here. You should pay close attention to us as well as to them. Not to us instead of them, because we are supporting players and they are the stars. But without the supporting players, they are not going to get it done.”
As the pessimists had predicted, no binding agreements were reached at the Copenhagen summit. President Obama dominated the headlines, with his dramatic personal intervention and his effort to hammer out an eleventh-hour accord with China, India, South Africa, and Brazil. Our initiative was not enough to change the course of events, but it did add a crucial new dimension to the debate. Ban Ki-moon and I became good friends, and in the following year, we teamed up to seek new ways for subnational governments to take climate change policy forward.
President Obama and I became friends too. Shortly after his 2008 election night victory, I congratulated him in a speech before a Republican audience, saying that I hoped he would be a successful president because Californians would benefit from effective national leadership. Knowing that I wanted to cooperate with him, President Obama invited me to the White House, and we developed a strong working relationship. He knew about my bipartisan record and the goals we shared on the environment, immigration, health care reform, and infrastructure, and that I could be trusted not to take potshots at him once I left his side. He greeted me with a hug. Our conversations were relaxed and full of humor, even though we were both facing dreadful economic challenges: a recession, high unemployment rates, huge deficits.
—
In the public opinion polls, my approval rating was down to 28 percent, reflecting the widespread unhappiness and misery about the economy. At least it wasn’t as low as the legislature’s approval rating of 17 percent. I had a choice. I could go along to get along and try to improve my poll numbers, or I could continue fighting hard to fix what was broken in Sacramento and watch my approval ratings kiss the floor. I chose to fight. Unlike regular politicians,
I had nothing to lose. I had only a year left in my governorship, and I was barred by term-limit laws and the Constitution from seeking another term or the presidency.
Six years of ups and downs forged me as a governor the way Conan was forged by pit fighting and the Wheel of Pain. I now understood politics and government, and in spite of all the struggles and the recession and low approval ratings, I had more forward momentum than ever before. I felt more like a hungry eagle rather than a lame duck.
In 2010 I managed to achieve some important goals. I persuaded the legislature to once again adopt a sweeping budget reform measure establishing spending limits and a rainy-day fund. This was my final chance to fix a broken budget system. The measures passed in 2004 were good for starters but weren’t big enough to fix the system. The most carefully crafted, bipartisan measure passed by the legislature in 2009 got killed by the voters because it was tied to the “grand compromise” that included temporary tax increases. This time—the last, best chance we had to stop the crazy deficit spending once and for all in Sacramento—I convinced a worn-down legislature to put the measure back on the ballot (without the hated tax increases), even though it wouldn’t be voted on until after I left office. I vowed to raise the money to get it passed by the voters come hell or high water. I was disappointed when I learned that my successor, Governor Jerry Brown, signed a bill to remove those reforms from the 2012 ballot at the behest of Democrats and labor unions. The polls had shown it headed for a landslide victory this time, with 84 percent planning to vote yes, according to the reform group the Think Long Committee for California. In the end, politics as usual produced a tax increase with no real safeguards to restrict further spending. And now the budget reform initiative will not be voted on until 2014.
In the fall, I signed a historic pension reform that rolled back some of the worst excesses threatening to bankrupt the state. By cutting a lot of red tape, we issued permits for so many solar power plants in California—more than 5,000 megawatts in 2009 alone (one hundred times all the solar permitted in the United States a year earlier)—that California was being called the Saudi Arabia of Solar. California is now on track to build not just the most but also the largest solar projects in the world. I clinched agreement with the federal government and the state of Oregon to remove dams on and near the Klamath River, the largest dam removal and river restoration in US history. We adopted the nation’s first Green Building Standards requiring all new buildings in California to meet strict energy efficiency and sustainable development standards.
In 2010 I also teamed up with the NAACP and President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, to win a huge victory on education reform, giving parents the right to move their children out of failing schools. The teachers’ unions and school administrators fought vehemently against these reforms, but the bipartisan force of a Republican governor teaming up with a Democratic president and the premier civil rights group in the country was too much even for the most powerful labor union in the state.
But the real measure of success in 2010 came from the voters. I was more aware than ever that the key to real, permanent reform is being in sync with the hearts and minds of the people. In June, despite my low approval ratings, the voters passed the second piece of our political reform package: the open primary. The first piece, a landmark reform that broke a 200-year-old American tradition of rigging the boundaries of election districts, had passed in 2008. Combined with that reform, the open primary system would once and for all end the dominance of the far left and the far right special interests in our election system. The top two vote getters in each primary would square off in the general election regardless of political party. Independents and moderates of either party would be able to vote for any candidate they chose, ending the stranglehold that extremists had over both parties in a closed primary system. It passed with 54 percent of the vote.
The final test came in November. We had rattled so many cages on the left and the right with our reforms that we faced three ballot measures designed to repeal our victories. First was an effort to repeal the redistricting measure passed in 2008. Both parties funded the campaign to repeal the measure and return the districts safely into the hands of incumbents. They were also trying to defeat a new measure to expand fair districts to congressional races. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her California members pony up millions of dollars to defeat this measure and repeal ours. The fight was on.
The second was a referendum placed on the ballot by labor unions to punish business for supporting my spending cuts and political reforms. The referendum would have repealed the business tax reforms we fought so hard to win in 2009 as part of the compromise. Unfortunately, this was a typical move: get historic bipartisan agreement on tax increases and tax reforms that lower costs for business, and then the labor unions try to repeal the business reforms after the tax increases are in place.
The third measure was the centerpiece. Proposition 23 was put on the ballot and funded mainly by Texas oil companies to repeal our historic global warming act. Their campaign preyed upon peoples’ fears about the economy and claimed that our climate change efforts would push unemployment even higher. They plastered the state with TV ads that said. “Jobs First—Yes on 23.” We answered with a stunningly powerful campaign cochaired by George Shultz, Jim Cameron, and venture fund leader Tom Steyer which raised $25 million. One of our most effective ads showed a kid reaching for an inhaler and struggling to catch his breath. We didn’t just beat Proposition 23. We pulverized it by 20 points. We terminated any hope the Texas oil industry had of rolling back California’s leadership on climate change.
In fact, the voters backed every one of our initiatives that year, over the passionate opposition of political parties, labor unions, and Texas oil companies. Historic political reform, business tax reform, the strongest possible endorsement of our climate change efforts: it felt good to be in the powerful center again, with the people standing behind us.
We were turning a corner. All across California, you could see a new energy economy taking hold. A decade that had begun with blackouts and despair ended with the state approving more renewable energy projects than the entire United States combined and leading with resolve. A state in love with freeways and automobiles was now leading the nation in the development of alternative fuels. A state mired in gridlock was now blowing up the partisan boxes that shielded political parties from the voters they are supposed to represent.
My schedule got busier as my term neared the end. On the final leg of a trade mission to Asia in September, I’m proud to say I found a way to cram thirty-six hours of work into a single day. On Wednesday, September 15, I started at eight in the morning in Seoul by meeting the American Chamber of Commerce at the Grand Hilton. Then I spent time with Special Olympics athletes, met the chairmen of Korean Air and Hyundai Motor, chatted up the mayor of Seoul, signed a business cooperation agreement between Korea and California, rode a high-speed train, visited a department store, and rallied the US troops based in Korea. When I learned about a massive gas-pipeline explosion in San Bruno, I cut my schedule short and flew directly to the Bay Area instead of going home, crossing the international date line so that it was again Wednesday afternoon when I arrived. In San Bruno, I visited the scene of the explosion, was briefed by emergency officials and talked with victims who were still in shock. I spoke to families who lost their homes, their loved ones, their community. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, nothing is seared in my memory more than looking into the eyes of a person who has just lost everything he loved in the world.
—
In December, after the voters chose Jerry Brown to succeed me and plans for the transfer of power were well under way, a reporter asked why I didn’t quietly coast out the door like most governors would after two hectic terms. I told him I believe in sprinting through to the finish line. “There’s a lot of work that still can be done,” I said. “So why would I stop in November or December? It wouldn’t make
any sense.”
The state was still in the grip of the deepest national financial crisis in modern history, and regardless of all our efforts, the next governor would be staring down the barrel of a continued budget deficit, probably for the next two years. I could have just ignored the numbers through the fall, leaving the task to Jerry Brown. Democratic legislative leaders certainly wanted me to do that; they were sick and tired of me pushing them for more spending cuts. But it would have been irresponsible to let months go by without action. So I called yet another special session of the legislature. This time I knew in advance that the legislature would fail to act. They were out of gas, and they prayed that the new Democratic governor would come in on a white horse and raise taxes, saving them from having to make more cuts. There was no way in hell they were going to make more cuts no matter how hard I pushed them. The media wrote the obvious: “He started with budget problems, and he ended with budget problems.”
Yes, I did. But we made a hell of a lot of progress, and we made a lot of history: workers’ comp reforms, parole reforms, pension reforms, education reforms, welfare reforms, and budget reforms not once, not twice, but four times. (And I will be there campaigning in 2014 to make sure the budget reforms pass the voters.) We made our state an international leader in climate change and renewable energy; a national leader in health care reform and the fight against obesity; we launched the biggest infrastructure investment effort in generations; and tackled water, the thorniest issue in California politics. We put in place the most significant political reforms since Hiram Johnson was governor—and in June 2012, the first election in which California’s new open primary system was in effect, the upsurge in the number of moderate, pragmatic candidates drew national attention. And we accomplished all this while dealing with the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 63