Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

A Political Proposition

PEOPLE LOVED TO JOKEabout the possibility of me entering politics. At a governor’s council dinner in Sacramento in 1994, Governor Pete Wilson greeted me from the podium, saying, “I’d like to see you run for governor, Arnold. Someone who has played Kindergarten Cop already has the requisite experience to deal with the legislature.” That got a laugh. But it was not far-fetched that someone from Hollywood would run for governor. Ronald Reagan had already blazed the trail.

The year before, in Sylvester Stallone’s sci-fi movie Demolition Man, his character suddenly lands in the year 2032. He does a double take when he hears somebody talking about the Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. Running for president was off the table for me, of course, because I wasn’t a natural-born US citizen, as the Constitution requires. But I’d fantasize sometimes: what if my mother had gotten frisky at the end of the war, and my father wasn’t really Gustav Schwarzenegger but, in fact, an American GI? That could explain why I always had this powerful feeling that America is my true home. Or what if the hospital where she gave birth to me was actually in an American-occupied zone? Wouldn’t that count as being born on US soil?

I thought I was better suited temperamentally for being a governor than a senator or a congressman, because as a governor I’d be the captain of the ship—the chief executive—rather than be one of 100 senators or 435 representatives making decisions. Of course, no governor calls the shots all by himself. But he can bring a vision to the state and at least feel like the buck stops at his desk. It is very much like being leading man in a movie. You get blamed for everything, and you get credit for everything. It’s high risk, high reward.

I felt tremendous loyalty and pride about California. My adopted state is bigger than a lot of countries. It has thirty-eight million people, or four times as many as Austria. It is 800 miles long and 250 miles wide. You can easily bicycle through some of the smaller states in the US, but if you want to tour California, you should think about riding a Harley and getting your exercise in some more moderate way. California has spectacular mountains, 840 miles of coast, redwood forests, deserts, farmlands, and vineyards. The people speak over a hundred languages. And California has a $1.9 trillion economy—bigger than that of Mexico, India, Canada, or Russia. When the G20 sit down for a summit of the world’s twenty major economies, California should be right there at the table.

The state had gone through fast and slow phases during the years I’d lived in LA, but mainly it had thrived, and I saw myself as a happy beneficiary of that. In my political beliefs, I was conservative in the way that a lot of successful immigrants are: I wanted America to stay the bastion of free enterprise, and I wanted to do whatever I could to protect it from following Europe in the direction of bureaucracy and stagnation. That’s how Europe had been when I lived there.

The 1990s were prosperous years, and California now had its first Democratic governor since the mid-1980s, Gray Davis. He got off to a strong start when he took office in 1999, expanding public education and also improving relations with Mexico. He was a skinny, reserved guy, not much of a showman, yet his programs were popular, and he had a big budget surplus to work with, thanks mainly to the Silicon Valley boom of the eighties and nineties. His approval rating among voters was high: around 60 percent.

The trouble began with the dot-com crash. In March 2000, just before I finished shooting The 6th Day, a sci-fi action film about cloning humans, the internet bubble burst, and the stock market entered its worst decline in twenty years. A big slump in Silicon Valley was bad news for the state, because tax revenues would fall and a lot of hard choices would have to be made regarding government services and jobs. California gets a huge amount of revenue from Silicon Valley. When those businesses drop 20 percent, that ends up as a 40 percent hit on the state’s coffers. That is why I recommended using excess revenues in boom years for infrastructure, paying down debt, or setting aside a rainy-day fund to cover the wobbly economic years. You make a big mistake to lock in programs that require you to keep spending at boom-time levels.

On top of that came the 2000 and 2001 electricity crisis: first, a tripling of electricity rates in San Diego, and then power shortages and blackouts around San Francisco that threatened to engulf the entire state. The government seemed paralyzed, with state and federal regulators pointing fingers at each other instead of taking action, while middlemen—mainly the now-infamous Houston energy company Enron—curtailed supplies to drive prices through the roof. In December 2000, Gray Davis made a point of turning off the Christmas tree lights in the capital right after he lit them, to remind people to conserve electricity and to be ready for power shortages in the coming year. I hated the way this made California look: like some developing country rather than America’s Golden State. It made me angry. Was that our answer to the energy shortage in California? Turning off the Christmas tree lights? It was stupid. I understood it was meant as symbolic, but I wasn’t interested in symbols. I was interested in action.

A lot of this was not Gray Davis’s fault; the economy was just on a slide. But at the halfway mark of his term, people began to think that he would be vulnerable when he came up for reelection in 2002, and soon his approval ratings showed a huge decline. I felt as frustrated as the next guy. The more I read up on California, the more it was like bad news piled on top of bad news. I found myself thinking, “We can’t continue this way. We need change.”

All this played into that long-running debate in my brain about what should be the next mountain to climb. Should I produce movies? Or produce, direct, and star, like Clint? Should I become an artist, now that I’d gotten back in touch with how much I love to paint? I was in no rush to resolve these questions; I knew they’d crystallize into a vision in their own good time. But I still had my old discipline of setting concrete goals each New Year’s Day. Most years, whatever movie I had in the works would be at the top of the list. But while I was committed to a few films in development, including Terminator 3 , nothing was actually scripted or scheduled. Instead, on January 1, 2001, I put at the very top of my list “explore running for governor in 2002.”

The very next morning, I made an appointment with one of California’s top political consultants, Bob White, Pete Wilson’s chief of staff for almost three decades, including Wilson’s eight years as governor. Bob had been the guy who made the trains run on time, and he was seen as one of the key Republican power brokers in Sacramento. I knew him from years of fund-raisers and dinners, and when he’d left the statehouse, I’d asked if we could stay in touch.

Of course, hiring Bob and his team of strategists and analysts didn’t mean that I had the support of the Republican Party. I was too much in the political center for the party higher-ups. Yes, I was fiscally conservative, pro-business, and against raising taxes, but everybody knew I was also pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-lesbian, pro-environment, pro–reasonable gun control, pro–reasonable social safety net. My connection to the Kennedys made many conservative Republicans nervous too, including my admiration for my father-in-law, whom they viewed as a big-government tax-and-spend type. You could almost hear them thinking, “Yeah, right, that’s all we need: Arnold and his liberal wife, and then in comes his mother-in-law and father-in-law, and then Teddy Kennedy, and then they’ll all come. It’s the goddamn Trojan horse.” The party leaders were very appreciative that I helped raise funds and talked about their candidates and Republican philosophy on the campaign trail. But it was always, “This was very nice, thank you so much for helping.” I don’t think they had ever really warmed to me.