Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

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.

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 found 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.