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 naive 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.”
Behind 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 Nunez.
I made progress in these talks, particularly the talks with Nunez, 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.
The other problem was my staff, which still did not believe that the unions would ever agree. They also thought my agenda was so big that it couldn’t be accomplished on my timetable. That’s not how government works, I kept being told; they just don’t move that fast upstairs. Fabian and I raced against the clock to complete a deal in time to cancel the special election. After around-the-clock negotiations, we came to an agreement—only to be told by the secretary of state that it was too late to cancel; that there wasn’t enough time to draft and vote on the bills in the legislature before the overseas absentee ballots had to be mailed. The special election was on; there was no turning back.
The special election became a cause celebre for public-employee labor unions nationwide. Before I knew it the
I saw Teddy Kennedy when I joined Maria and the kids in Hyannis in August. “If you want me to talk to the national union chiefs or get involved,” he volunteered, “let me know.”
