California’s future should be. Without that, he just didn’t catch fire with the voters. For me, talking convincingly about the future was easy: all I had to do was point to what we’d achieved since I came into office.
On November 7, 2006, the people of California chose me in a landslide: a 17-percentage point margin of victory. And they passed all of the bond propositions too—the Strategic Growth Plan provided $42 billion we could use to start building the twenty-first-century Golden State.
CHAPTER 27
Who Needs Washington?
I WAS IN A fantastic mood when I headed off to Sun Valley in late December with Maria and the kids. After working really hard in Sacramento and on my reelection campaign, I was eager for a break. Two days before Christmas, we were at the ski area near our house, where we ski so much that there is even a trail called Arnold’s Run. I’m a good skier, and Arnold’s Run is a black diamond, or expert, trail full of moguls. But when I broke my leg that afternoon, I have to admit it was on a bunny slope—and I simply tripped over one of my poles. I was going too slowly for my skis even to pop off. As I went down on the pole, it applied so much leverage to my leg that the thigh bone broke. I felt a snap.
We had a makeshift Christmas in Sun Valley, and then I flew back for surgery in LA. Maria came with me, but she flew right back to host a big party we gave up there every year. Being laid up in a hospital, missing my family and the party—not to mention the excruciating pain—made me miserable. The surgeons had to insert a metal rod with a wire around the bone. According to the doctors, I’d need eight weeks to recover. Late one night, Sylvester Stallone dropped by to cheer me up. He gave me a pair of boxing gloves to remind me to fight. Others like Tom Arnold and our pastor Reverend Monsignor Lloyd Torgerson, came to the hospital, and during one visit, I burst into tears. “This must be the medications talking,” I told my friends. “I’m really not the crying type.”
I was depressed not only because the injury put a damper on the holidays but also because it threatened to wreck the inauguration and keep me from starting my second term with a bang. I was scheduled to deliver the inaugural address on January 5, 2007, and my State of the State address four days later. I had prepared landmark statements of what I wanted to accomplish in the next four years. But if I was distracted by pain or doped up on painkillers, it was hard to see how I’d deliver them. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, once got shot by a would-be assassin while making a speech and calmly finished his remarks before seeing a doctor. I wondered how he’d pulled that off.
I was preparing for my speech as best as I could, but as the date drew closer, Maria assessed the severity of my condition. Finally she said, “This is not going to happen.” I was still recovering from complex surgery, wearing a brace on my thigh, and in no condition for an inaugural event. We agreed to postpone it.
The next morning I was fuming at myself. I had visions of my visits with injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, veterans who’d been operated on the day before. They wanted to heal, get back to the battlefield, and continue the fight. I thought to myself, “Those guys want to go back into battle, but I want to cancel a speech?” I felt like a total wimp.
I had to go forward with the inaugural, even if I had to crawl on all fours up the steps of the capitol. I called Maria and told her we had to resume our original plans. She recognized that I was in machine mode and that no one was going to stop me, and she went all out to make the inauguration a success. Besides boosting my morale, she personally supervised the construction and arrangement of the inaugural stage in Sacramento so that I could get on and off easily with crutches.
The gathering in Sacramento was packed and festive, with members of both parties, leaders from business and labor, press, friends, and family. Willie Brown, one of the longest-serving Democrats and the former speaker of the state assembly, was the emcee of the event, a gesture to sell the idea of postpartisanship. I felt proud to be there.
I had big ambitions heading into my second term. I was determined to keep my reelection promises and take on big, tough issues that would position California as a leader in health care, the environment, and political reform. We’d already launched major programs on climate change and infrastructure. The recession was past, the economy was growing again, and thanks to that and a lot of discipline, we’d narrowed the budget deficit from $16 billion in 2004 to $4 billion in the current fiscal year. In the budget for the year starting July 2007, which I was about to submit to the legislature, the deficit would be zero for the first time in years. So the stage was set for dramatic action.
I planned to use my inaugural speech to challenge partisanship itself. I was dismayed by the crazy polarization of our political system and the waste, paralysis, and damage it caused. Despite bipartisan deals in 2006 on infrastructure, the environment, and the budget, California had become deeply divided. Republicans and Democrats could no longer meet in the middle and compromise on shared interests as they had during the great boom of the postwar years. Now California politics was this big centrifuge that forced voters, policies, and parties away from the center. Election districts had been drawn to eliminate competition; conservative Republicans ran some, liberal Democrats ran others. The late congressman Phil Burton was so proud of the gerrymandering he did for California’s Democrats in drawing the congressional lines in 1981 that he called it his contribution to modern art. I said in my 2007 State of the State speech that because of gerrymandering, the California legislature had less turnover than in Austria’s Hapsburg monarchy.
There had been a really appalling example of this in the two days after 9/11. While the nation was reeling from the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, the legislature pushed through a redistricting bill that further entrenched incumbents and hard-liners of both parties. This was a worldview that put parties ahead of people, and I thought it needed to change.
So when I got out of bed, picked up my crutches, and went to give my inaugural speech, I challenged Californians to stop yielding to the far left and the far right and return to the center. To the politicians, I said, “Centrist does not mean weak. It does not mean watered down or warmed over. It means well balanced and well grounded. The American people are instinctively centrist. So should be our government. America’s political parties should return to the center, where the people are.”
And I reminded the voters, “The left and the right don’t have a monopoly on conscience. We should not let them get way with that. You can be centrist and be principled. You can seek a consensus and retain your convictions. What is more principled than giving up some part of your position to advance the greater good? That is how we arrived at a Constitution in this country. Our Founding Fathers would still be meeting at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia if they hadn’t compromised.”
Four days later, I delivered the State of the State speech to the legislature. I was able to compliment them despite the ways we’d often tortured each other during my first term. I didn’t even have to lie; all I had to do was contrast them with the politicians in Washington. “Last year the federal government was paralyzed by gridlock and games,” I said. “But you here in this chamber acted on infrastructure, the minimum wage, prescription drug costs, and the reduction of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. What this said to the people is that we are not waiting for politics. We are not waiting for our problems to get worse. We are not waiting for the federal government. Because the future does not wait.”
Then I painted a vision for the state. “Not only can we lead California into the future, we can show the nation and the world how to get there. We can do this because we have the economic strength, the population, and the technological force of a nation-state. We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta.” And I laid out a half dozen ambitious ways for California to set national and international examples, from building classrooms to combating global warming.
The average politician doesn’t give a shit about Athens or Sparta, of course, or any kind of vision. But I’d just won an election, so for the moment, they had to listen to me. I was willing to bet that at least some would rise to the challenge of doing even more than we’d achieved in 2006.
Before I was off my crutches, my staff and I were back in high gear. Between the goals I’d laid out in my speeches and the budget initiatives that year, we launched the most ambitious reform agenda of any state administration in modern history: the most sweeping health care reform legislation in America; carrying out the most comprehensive climate change regulations in the country, including the world’s first low-carbon fuel standard;
