Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Building a consensus was very hard, and the Global Warming Act was far from perfect. There were fierce disagreements internally and with legislators and interest groups. But we dealt with those disagreements by listening to one another and debating the merits. We talked to leading activists and top academics. We talked to carmakers, energy giants, utilities, growers, and transportation companies. While we were working on the climate change act, I went to the heads of Chevron, Occidental, and BP because I wanted to assure them that this was not an attack on them. This was an attack on a problem we never foresaw one hundred years ago, when the industrialized world shifted to oil and gas.

I wanted them to endorse our idea and to attend the bill signing, and I wanted them to start working toward that goal of a 30 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020. I said, “The way to do that is by starting to invest in biofuels and in solar and in other means that don’t cause the pollution and the side effects.”

I worked hard to convince the members of my own party too. There is no contradiction in being both a Republican and an environmentalist. After all, it was Teddy Roosevelt who established the national parks, and Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency and championed the Clean Air Act. Ronald Reagan signed environmental laws both as governor and as president, including the historic Montreal Protocol to protect the earth’s ozone layer. And the first president Bush put in place a pioneering cap-and-trade system to curb acid rain. We were continuing that tradition.

We were so focused on the California Global Warming Act and other big changes that there was scarcely any time to campaign for reelection in the usual way. It didn’t matter. Making real progress on major issues that both Democrats and Republicans cared about was more effective than any slogan or campaign ad—that was a big part of our reelection strategy.

I had formed a reelection committee as early as 2005 for a simple reason: the people who supported my agenda wanted to make sure they weren’t wasting their money or time on someone who wouldn’t stick around. They were asking, “Why should I invest in Arnold if he leaves next year and a Democrat comes in and punishes me?” Eunice sent me $23,600, the most her household could contribute under the law. In her note, she said, “Please don’t tell Teddy. I’ve never given him this much even when he ran for president.”

Not everyone in my family was delighted by my decision to seek a second term. Maria again had to read about it in the papers, and she was upset. And with her biting sense of humor, she found a way to get her message across: she sent me a lovely framed photograph of her, with a handwritten question at the bottom. “Why would you run again when you can come home to this?” Having watched American politics up close, she was a big believer in how it could destroy relationships. She was thinking, “He’s gotten a taste of power—it’s typical, he’s hooked. Maybe he’ll run for Senate next.” I smiled when I got the picture, but I wanted to finish what I had started. My original plan was to go for one term, fix the problems, and walk away. But by now I had realized that you can’t do that in three years.

Luckily, I benefited from having a weak opponent. To run against me, the Democrats nominated Phil Angelides, the state controller. He was a very smart man and a caring public servant, but he was a poor candidate. He ran on the single-minded notion of raising taxes. That set me up for my best ad-lib in our one televised debate: “I can tell from the joy I see in your eyes when you talk about taxes, you just love to increase taxes. Look out there to the audience right now and just say, ‘I love increasing your taxes.’ ” It left him speechless, just as he reacted when I asked him in the same debate what had been the most fun moment in the campaign so far.

Of course, ad libbing can backfire when you’re running for governor. I got in trouble by referring to my friend Bonnie Garcia, a Latina legislator from near Indio, as “very hot” because of her “Black and Latino blood.” I said it during a two-hour private yack session with my staff which ended up on the internet—unedited. We were brainstorming in preparation for a big speech and the speechwriter was taping so he wouldn’t miss any pearls of wisdom. Bonnie is a Latina who can be passionate and blunt when she locks in on an issue, like me. I declared that this passion was genetic. “Cuban, Puerto-Rican, they are all very hot,” I said. She reminded me of Sergio Oliva, the Cuban weight-lifting champion I battled for the Mr. Olympia title back in the 1970s. He was a fierce competitor, a hot-blooded, passionate guy.

Adam, my communications director, was used to hearing me say wild things. But this time his shop accidentally put the unedited transcript on the server that held our public press releases. It didn’t take long for Phil Angelides’s people to find it and release the politically incorrect part to the Los Angeles Times.

My campaign staff scrambled to do damage control. They found Bonnie, who was not only gracious and helpful but also really funny in accepting my apology. (The papers reported her wisecracking later, “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.”) I called every Latino and Black leader I knew, starting with Fabian Núñez and Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, both of whom dismissed my comments as Arnold being Arnold and not the least bit offensive. Rather than let Angelides leak out sections at a time to keep the negative stories going, Adam simply released the entire two hours of unedited transcript to the public. In the end the media credited us with handling “Tapegate” very effectively, and we went back to campaigning.

To my mind Angelides was too negative. He criticized me, but never offered a clear alternative vision of what 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.

I WAS IN Afantastic 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.”