Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Maria and Susan both noticed me moping around. What Buffett said meant hard times and diminished expectations for billions of people, not just Californians. I spread the word; Susan heard me describe the conversation many times to members of our staff and key lawmakers. It was a valuable reality check that helped us make hard and unpopular choices in the time that followed.

In fact, the financial crisis made necessary the biggest and most difficult deal of my political career. After months of grueling negotiations, late one night in February 2009, we finally agreed on a budget. It involved $42 billion in budget adjustments and costly compromises on all sides. Democrats had had to make big concessions on things important to them like welfare reform and union furloughs. Now I was asking Republicans to commit heresy—the equivalent of asking a pro-choice Democrat to become pro-life. In running for office I’d promised never to raise taxes except under the most dire circumstances. But I’d also taken an oath to do what was best for the state, and not for me or any ideology. So I gritted my teeth and actually signed a budget that raised income taxes, sales taxes, and even the car tax for the next two years. This was the very same car tax that had cost Gray Davis his governorship and that I cut as my first official act.

I dropped in the opinion polls like Warren Buffett’s deflated ball, as I knew I would. And I wasn’t the only one who took a beating. I coaxed legislative leaders of both parties to go along with me, and they all paid a price. The Democrats, senate leader Darrell Steinberg and assembly speaker Karen Bass, made themselves wildly unpopular with the liberals by agreeing to support open primary elections as well as even more welfare reforms—removing things like automatic cost of living increases. They enraged the public-employee unions by agreeing both to pension reform and to another condition I insisted on: the creation (at last!) of a strict rainy-day fund that could be used only in a true emergency. The Republican leaders paid an even higher price. The party stripped State Senator Dave Cogdill of his leadership position the night of the vote and forced Mike Villines, the assembly Republican leader, out of his post a few weeks later—all because they had accepted a compromise that included a tax increase.

That February budget compromise wasn’t the end of the story. California has so many budget formulas that are baked into the constitution or dictated by previous ballot initiatives that you can do very little fiscally without going back to the voters for approval. To complete the deal, I had to call a special election that May.

This election became a contest of the extremes—left and right—against the middle, those who were inclined to support the deal. Democrats battled Democrats against the spending cuts, and Republicans battled Republicans against the tax increases. The deal itself was messy—nobody really loved it, including me—and that made it politically vulnerable. I was deeply frustrated with party leaders and the press for not making plain the budget history, and the inescapable realities, that had led us to this point. Unions campaigned especially hard against the rainy-day fund because of the limits on spending it would impose.

I was disappointed at the lack of support for elected officials, including me, who had gone out on a limb. Democrats and unions had demanded more revenues for years. Now I, a Republican, had given them tax increases, and what were they doing? They were opposing these tax increases!

My salesmanship failed me. I found that after six years of trying to get citizens to reckon with the state’s budget problems, they were not with me. When it looked like we were going to lose, I even tried scare tactics. I put forward an apocalyptic “budget alternative” to show voters how all hell could break loose if they turned us down. The proposal warned of the release of fifty thousand prisoners, the firing of thousands of teachers and other public workers, and the forced sale of state landmarks such as San Quentin State Prison and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

We still lost. The voters rejected every key measure, and in the next few months, the legislature had to go back to the drawing board and grapple with the 2008–2009 budget yet again. Sadly, my apocalyptic vision wasn’t far off. In June I had to announce $24 billion of spending cuts. Thousands of teachers and public servants were laid off. The state had to hand out $2.6 billion of IOUs to pay bills, since we were again about to run out of cash. (We didn’t sell the coliseum or San Quentin, though.)

In our household, that summer was a time of terrible loss. Eunice and Sarge went as usual to Hyannis Port for vacation, even though they were now very frail and old: he was ninety-three, and she was eighty-seven. Sarge was in such an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s that he no longer recognized anybody, even Eunice. They’d been in Hyannis for only two weeks when on August 9 Eunice was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital; two days later she died.

Eunice had touched so many lives that there was a global outpouring of grief. The Kennedys mourned her at a requiem Mass in the same church where Maria and I had gotten married more than twenty years before. And while Sarge was able to attend the requiem, Teddy couldn’t come because he was in the end stage of brain cancer. Two weeks later, in Boston, he too died.

It was hard for me to let Eunice go. She’d been my mentor and cheerleader and the best mother-in-law in the world. But my loss was nothing compared to my wife’s. Maria was in more pain than I’d ever seen her experience. We had long conversations about her mom, but she wouldn’t talk publicly about her grief until after two months, when she went to speak at her women’s conference. She told thousands of attendees who had gathered at the Long Beach Arena, “When people ask, I say I’m fine, I’m holding up well. But the real truth is that I’m not fine. The real truth is that my mother’s death has brought me to my knees. She was my hero, my role model, my very best friend. I spoke to her every single day of my life. I tried really hard when I grew up to make her proud of me.”

I traveled to Denmark later that fall on a mission that I knew would have made my mother-in-law proud. Eunice and Sarge never hesitated to step across borders or to break bureaucratic barriers when there was important work to do for other people. That was how Eunice built the Special Olympics and how Sarge built the Peace Corps.

The United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and I had been working on an ambitious response to global warming. Two years earlier, in 2007, he’d been so impressed by California’s climate change initiative that he’d invited me to speak at the opening session of the United Nations. When I stepped to the podium that fall, I was almost overwhelmed to realize that I was standing where John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, and Mikhail Gorbachev had all addressed the UN before me. The occasion gave California a world stage—and an opportunity to contribute to a crucial international conversation.

Now, two years later, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was meant to be the most important meeting on global warming since the completion of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. After years of environmental conferences and programs and debates, leaders from more than 110 nations were coming to Copenhagen to hammer out an action plan. But Secretary-General Ban was concerned that the prospects for agreement between industrialized nations and developing ones were poor. The United States had failed to ratify the Kyoto accords, while China and India had made it plain that they didn’t want Europe or America dictating their climate policies. The problems went on and on.