Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 26 Comeback

AT THE END OF 2005, I was happy to leave Sacramento thousands of miles behind by climbing on an airplane and embarking on a long-planned trade mission to China. I led a delegation of seventy-five California employers—including high-tech entrepreneurs, strawberry growers, construction engineers, and merchants—and for six days, we traversed the world’s fastest-growing economy promoting the strengths of our state. For me, it was an important trip, not just because it provided a welcome change of scenery after having lost the special election but also because seeing China transforming itself helped put things back into perspective. The Chinese were building on such a vast scale. I felt I was witnessing a modern power taking shape before my eyes and felt the challenge and opportunity this posed for Americans. And, of course, for a pitchman like me, it was also a thrill to be out in the world again, selling California products in Asia. That trade mission brought California a nice little symbolic success. For the first time, we were able to export California strawberries legally to Beijing, just in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics there.

When I got back to California, my staffing issues took center stage. It was a hard time to make big changes, with the 2006 gubernatorial election less than a year away. But it was right to make them. I now knew far more about California politics, and I knew more of the players. I needed not just smart, experienced people but also a cohesive team. After the special election, only 27 percent of voters in public-opinion surveys thought that California was headed in the right direction, and my own approval rating was only 38 percent. I also needed ballsy people who weren’t going to be paralyzed by that, and who could even see the black humor in the fact that my approval rating was almost as low as the legislature’s.

I already knew who I wanted as my new chief of staff: Susan P. Kennedy. She was, as the press quickly began to describe her, a small, tough, blonde, cigar-smoking lesbian—and the least conventional choice I could have made. Not only was she a lifelong Democrat and a former abortion-rights activist, but also she had served as cabinet secretary and deputy chief of staff for Gray Davis. She’d quit that job out of disgust with the paralysis in the capitol building.

I had come to respect Susan when she was a Public Utilities Commissioner, because even though she was a Democrat, she was always pushing to eliminate regulations that got in the way of business growth. She would occasionally send memos with dead-on, crystal-clear commentaries about the challenges my administration faced. She was frustrated because she thought we were in danger of squandering a historic opportunity for change.

We had some preliminary discussions, and I offered Susan the job. Before accepting, she came down to talk to Maria and me at our house as soon as I got back from China. The discussion covered a lot of issues, including what Susan would be up against in dealing with the Republicans on the staff. “I’ll do everything possible to avoid a bloodbath, which would just slow us down and damage your image even further,” she said. “But you have to give me the ability to recommend whatever changes need to be made. And if there’s a fight, you have to back me one hundred percent.”

“I’ll back you up; we’ll work on this together,” I promised.

Finally I asked her the question you always ask at the end of a job interview: “Do you have any questions for me?”

“Yeah,” she said. “What do you want your legacy to be as governor?”

I looked at her for a few seconds before I said anything. When you’re a governor, you get that question all the time. And I knew she was already aware of what my administration had achieved and what we were trying to do. But I thought this short, feisty woman might really want to know what I cared most about. “I want to build,” I said. “I want to see cranes everywhere.” We were soon going to have fifty million people in our population, and we didn’t have the roads, bridges, schools, water systems, communication systems, rail, or energy projects to be ready for that.

I got pretty animated talking about building, and then she got animated, and next the thing you knew, we were both hyperventilating about cranes, trains, highways, and steel. “I saw you on TV talking about that while you were in China!” she said. “You said we should be talking about a fifty-billion-dollar or one-hundred-billion-dollar bond measure—not Mickey Mouse stuff—and then your staff tried to walk that back down to something smaller. Well, that’s bullshit, and you were absolutely right!”

That’s when I knew we were going to click. Susan didn’t roll her eyes like so many people did when I started talking about infrastructure. She shared my view that the state had not scaled up its roads, bridges, dams, levees, and rails to match the growing population: it was living off the visionary investments of governors in the 1950s and 1960s who’d built highways and water projects and had helped nurture the state’s economy. As a result, we had a system built for a population of eighteen million rather than the fifty million who would be living in California by 2025. Susan didn’t balk at investing in projects that wouldn’t be completed until many years after we were out of office.

Instead of wrapping up the interview, I relit my cigar.

“No way California can go on like this,” Susan agreed.

“We need to rebuild in a big way,” I said.

“But in Sacramento, nobody thinks like that.”

That was true. I’d learned that for the politicians, it was all incremental. The rule of thumb in Sacramento was that you can’t have a bond issue over $10 billion because the voters will never approve double digits. That’s why the Democrats were talking about asking for $9.9 billion this year. And then they’d divvy it up among all the interest groups and say, “Two billion dollars for schools, two billion for highways, two billion for prisons,” and so on. Never mind that you couldn’t build anything with that!

Susan said that it bugged her to see my staff undermining me when I talked about big plans. In China, one of my aides had told reporters, “No, no, no. The governor didn’t really mean fifty billion or a hundred billion. He was just thinking out loud.”

She’d put her finger on something that had been eating at me: when I talked about my vision, I often felt like I was being humored. Not being taken seriously had been a big problem. I would say, “I want a million solar roofs,” and the staff would react like I was exaggerating for effect—as if maybe I meant only one hundred thousand solar roofs. But I did mean a million! California is a giant state; there was every reason to shoot for a million solar roofs.

I was often coming up with ideas only to be advised that they were too much, as well as the wrong thing politically. And up until now, I’d had nobody to bounce those big ideas off professionally, to shape and refine them and not simply dial them down. Susan likes to say that she thinks of me as the biggest engine in the world, and her job is to build a chassis that can hold together with the engine running at top speed. Now I had a partner.

Before I hired Susan, I made enough phone calls to know what the reaction was going to be. Not pretty. My choice blew a lot of minds, especially among my fellow Republicans. All they knew was that she was a Democrat and a former activist. They didn’t know she was a seriously pissed-off Democrat who wanted to see change.

Their standard reaction to my choosing Susan was “You can’t do that!” and I would reply, “I can. Of course I can. I can and I will.” A couple of times, I had to explain that even though her last name was Kennedy, she wasn’t a member of the Kennedy clan, and Teddy really wasn’t taking over the state. A few people even talked about drafting actor Mel Gibson, whose controversial movie The Passion of the Christ had been a big hit among religious conservatives, to run against me in the 2006 Republican primary.

The directors of the California Republican Party asked for a private meeting with me at the Hyatt Regency hotel across the street from the capitol. They demanded that I reconsider my choice. One of the party leaders insisted that Republicans wouldn’t work with me if I didn’t pick someone else. “We don’t trust her, and we won’t let her in our strategy meetings,” was the message. “So you’ll end up completely isolated.”

I told him he had to make decisions as a leader of the party, but I had to make decisions as a governor. It was my responsibility, not theirs, to select a staff. And I said I was confident that Republican legislators would cooperate with Susan because she was terrific.

She started unofficially just before Thanksgiving 2005. The first move that Susan made was really shrewd. Instead of starting by making personnel changes, she focused on the big goal of rebuilding the state. She called together the senior staff and told them to collect all the information they could find on expanding highways, water, housing, prisons, and classrooms. She asked them, What kind of California did we envision twenty years from now? And how much would it cost? Some objected to the idea as too ambitious, but Susan said, “I hear what you’re saying. But let’s suspend disbelief and just plan.”

The answers came back and added up to $500 billion. That was how much federal, state, local, public-private partnership, and private money we would need to build the California of 2025. Half a trillion dollars. The figure was so mind boggling, even for us, that we couldn’t work with it. So we cut the time frame to ten years and asked the staff to repeat the exercise. Now the number became $222 billion, of which the state contribution would be $68 billion in general obligation bonds. Those figures were still enormous. If California tried to borrow that much for construction, it would be by far the biggest bet on itself that the state had ever made. But we came up with a plan to spread the borrowing over the whole ten years. Then it became a manageable amount of debt. California leaders had abdicated responsibility for planning major investments, leaving big infrastructure projects to the whims of a handful of special-interest groups that would collect signatures and “sell” pots of bond money to those willing to help fund the campaign for the initiative. The result was that voters approved tens of billions of dollars in general obligation bonds over the years, most of which got spent on special-interest projects, and nothing valuable got built.

I’m a tightwad when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money, but I’m an equally strong believer in investing for the future. I had to educate the legislators about that, especially Republicans, who thought that building was the same as spending. When you spend money, it’s gone. It’s like building a house versus buying a new couch. Build a house, and your investment returns value. Buy a couch, and the minute you take it out of the furniture store, it loses value. That’s why I always say a house, you invest in; furniture, you spend money on.

In fact, building infrastructure is one of only three ways to lock in a benefit from a dollar one hundred years in the future. Number one is to build public works that will last for that long. Number two is to use your dollar to invent something that will still be used in a century. And number three is to educate your children and grandchildren so that they see the benefits of knowledge and educate their own children and grandchildren in turn. Do any of these successfully, and you’ve invested wisely. You may even be remembered for it.

The vision of all the schools, roads, transit systems, bridges, ports, networks, and waterworks that $68 billion would finance was like heaven to me. I told Susan and the staff to go ahead and develop a formal plan. I thought Californians would love the idea of building for the coming generations, and I knew I could sell it.

Our decision to focus on a major project right away dispelled fears among the staff and did a lot to restore morale. People perked up and got back to work. And as it turned out, not as many people needed to be replaced as we thought. The staff shakeup proceeded more gradually, and in the end we brought in just six new senior people. As my spokesman, I hired Adam Mendelsohn, a brilliant, imaginative Republican who’d worked with Matt Fong, California’s previous treasurer. For the key operating position of cabinet secretary, I brought in Dan Dunmoyer, a conservative Republican insurance executive with a lot of Sacramento experience. We also brought in a few aides who had a history of working successfully with Susan, led by Daniel Zingale, a Democratic health care expert and a onetime advisor to Gray Davis. He was also Maria’s chief of staff. The team jelled almost instantly and became the only truly bipartisan administration in California history. And they had one vision: mine.

With the gubernatorial election coming up, I also needed new political consultants. I turned to Maria for help. Finding talented people is one of her great skills—she inherited it from her father. And even though she was not as familiar with the talent on the Republican side, she worked behind the scenes to recruit high-powered Republicans who were comfortable with my often-unconventional views. We signed up Steve Schmidt, who had helped shape George W. Bush’s campaign for a second term, and Matthew Dowd, formerly the chief campaign strategist of George W. Bush. Schmidt was pretty blunt about my dismal reelection prospects. At one of the first meetings that we held to discuss them with the senior staff and Maria, he told me the polls showed the voters were mad. They didn’t think they had elected a partisan guy, and they certainly didn’t think they should be doing the deciding for me. But there was a bright spot to his message: people liked me. His advice was: “Be humble. Apologize for making a mistake and stop pulling political stunts like the thing with the wrecking ball.” When Schmidt finished talking, I took a few puffs on my cigar. I think in images, and I needed thirty seconds to visualize who that governor would be. Finally, I told him, “I can play that role perfectly.”

When I stepped to the podium in the statehouse on January 5, 2006, to deliver my State of the State speech, I was a better governor. I wasn’t the bullying, belligerent conservative I’d been portrayed as in the special election. I appeared pragmatic and earnest, and I wanted to make progress.

It made sense to start with an apology: “I’ve thought a lot about the last year and the mistakes I made and the lessons I’ve learned,” I said. “I was in too much of a hurry. I didn’t hear the majority of Californians when they were telling me they didn’t like the special election.

“I have absorbed my defeat, and I have learned my lesson. And the people, who always have the last word, sent a clear message: cut the warfare, cool the rhetoric, find common ground, and fix the problems together. So to my fellow Californians, I say: message received.”

I joked about my approval rating, which by now had sunk further, to the low thirties, and the fact that people had started asking, “Don’t you wish you were back in the movie business?” But I said that I still thought this was the best job I ever had, and that I now stood before them happy, hopeful—and wiser.

I bragged about things for which we all deserved credit, from balancing the budget without raising taxes, to banning soda and junk food in schools. I reminded them of the big things we had accomplished—the workers’ comp reform, the funding of stem-cell research, the refinancing of state debt, new laws to make government more transparent and accessible.

And then I laid out the big numbers: the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment that we would need in order to support California’s growth in the future. As a first step, I presented the ten-year plan my team had scrambled to refine. We’d named it the Strategic Growth Plan. I asked the legislature to put before the voters the $68 billion in bonds we would need.

The headlines in the newspapers the next day were perfect: the governor saying “Build It.” I’d taken a lot of lawmakers by surprise by proposing something so politically inclusive and big. Of course, there was skepticism on both sides, with Democrats saying, basically, “Yeah, sounds good, but show me,” and Republicans saying, “How are you going to pay for this?” Still, so many people from both parties and from labor came to me and said, “Okay, let’s get a fresh start,” I knew I was on the right track.

With the election approaching, we had three messages we wanted to send voters: Arnold is a public servant, not a party hack. He is not afraid to tackle big problems. You are better off today than you were under Gray Davis. We drove home those messages using one strategy: every time we get something passed, we go out and declare victory.

Behind the scenes, we were also doing an incredible amount of fence mending. We needed to make nice with the important groups that my special election had managed to alienate and that had just spent $160 million beating me. In her office, Susan put up a white board that listed all the groups, and Schmidt titled it “The Coalition of the Pissed Off.” It included all public-employee groups, of course: the teachers’ union, firefighters, nurses, and prison guards, as well as all the major Indian gaming tribes, and on and on. Also on the list were groups that usually lean Republican, such as police chiefs, sheriffs, manufacturers’ associations, and small business associations.

In fact, with the single exception of the California Chamber of Commerce, every important political interest group in California was planning to either not support me or work actively to defeat me. And, as I’d learned the hard way, they had the power to block initiatives and stop change. We needed to choose our battles and our opponents if we were to get anything done.

One by one, we set out to work with our friends and neutralize our opposition. It helped enormously that California’s economy was finally growing again, so billions in tax revenues were unexpectedly swelling the treasury. We settled an old lawsuit with the teachers, and we met repeatedly with the fire chiefs, police chiefs, and sheriffs to ease their concerns about pensions. In some cases, the fence mending took months. Key unions had contracts coming due, so we took our time with negotiations, knowing that the unions would watch my growing strength in the opinion polls and decide that there was a good chance I’d be reelected, and that they might have to deal with me for four more years.

As always, the biggest challenge was winning the cooperation of the Democratic majority in the statehouse. We did that by taking on the issues that Democrats couldn’t oppose, such as infrastructure investment and the environment. The approach gave them a bitingly clear choice: they could fight me and be seen as obstructionist while I tried to move the state forward. Or they could work with me and make progress on issues dear to the hearts of their constituents. They realized that having a Republican governor lead on big issues was a “Nixon goes to China” moment they couldn’t afford to pass up.

After months of hard negotiations, the Democrats chose the path of cooperation. In May we achieved the two-thirds majority required to put through the bond package. My $68 billion proposal had gotten reworked and resized and came out as $42 billion. It took us two more years to negotiate funding for the prison and water proposals, but we got it all eventually. By far, this was the most ambitious infrastructure package of its kind in California history. The press called it “historic.” Now the package would have to go before the voters for approval in November, but its passage in the legislature alone—the fact that California had gotten its act together on a major issue confronting every state—made national news.

I knew exactly how to sell something that sounds as boring as “infrastructure” to the voters. We presented it on the personal level. We didn’t just harp on infrastructure and bond amounts. Instead, I talked to voters up and down the state about how angry they were at always being stuck in traffic, about how they were missing their kids’ soccer games or dinner with the family. I talked to them about how frustrated they were with the crowded and temporary classrooms where many of their kids went to school.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it was easier for me to make people aware of how vulnerable California’s old levees were. In prehistoric times, the whole middle part of the state had been a vast inland sea, and now it was a little like Holland. Except for the levees and flood control, the waters could come back and turn us into the Louisiana of the West Coast. One bad earthquake could destroy the system and flood the interior valley, wiping out the source of drinking water for tens of millions of people in the southern part of the state.

I also had big plans to complete the state’s plumbing: a canal to ensure the flow of water from the North, where it is abundant, to the South, where it is not. In the early 1960s, Governor Pat Brown, Jerry’s father, had begun the project with ambitions to make the system so monumental that water would never be fought over again. But Ronald Reagan had put a stop to the construction when he came into office in 1967, and the issue continued to cause battles between Californians, as it had through most of their history.

To sell the package to voters, I invited legislative leaders of both parties to travel with me around the state. It was the weirdest thing: Democrats and Republicans had done something together! The fact that Democratic legislators were campaigning with a Republican governor who was running for reelection made it all the more stunning to see us together on the trail. And it drove my Democratic opponent, Phil Angelides, crazy. But the legislators were able to declare victory, and they saw how positively the people responded. They were so used to hearing “Your poll numbers are in the toilet, no one likes you, you’re wasting money, you’re a self-serving bastard, you’re in cahoots with labor, you’re in cahoots with business …” Now all of a sudden they felt like winners. They’d passed these bonds, and the public was saying, “Wow that is really great, Republicans and Democrats working together—finally!”

So the logjam broke. The momentum from the bond package propelled us into a very productive year. That summer, we passed a $128 billion budget for 2006–07 that included a big increase in funding for schools plus $2 billion in debt repayment. We did so without the perennial delays and fights, making it the first on-time budget in years. After some wrangling, we negotiated a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage. My Million Solar Roofs Initiative became law in September, creating $2.9 billion of incentives for Californians to equip houses with solar power. The idea was to stimulate innovation, create jobs, and get 3,000 megawatts of solar up and running in ten years—enough to replace six coal-fired power plants.

In 2006 we took our boldest policy leap: landmark legislation on climate change, one of the most divisive issues in modern American politics. The California Global Warming Solutions Act committed California to cap and then drastically reduce carbon emissions in the next fifteen years: 30 percent by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050. It was the first such legislation in the nation, and political and environmental leaders predicted it would have ramifications worldwide. British prime minister Tony Blair, who’d helped sell the Democrats on cap and trade, attended the signing ceremony via satellite hookup. He was from the Labor Party, and he convinced Fabian and other Democrats that cap and trade was okay. We received a formal commendation from Japan.

For California to meet such aggressive goals, we would have to attack greenhouse gases from every angle. The law would affect not only dozens of industries but also our cars, homes, freeways, cities, and farms. As the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out, it could lead to more public transportation, more densely built housing, the planting of a million new trees, and major investments in alternative energy.

The global warming act was news not only because California was America’s second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after Texas but also because we were taking such a radically different course than the Congress and President Bush. California and Washington, DC, had been at odds over climate change well before I came to Sacramento. Gray Davis had signed a law requiring automakers who wanted to sell cars in California to reduce passenger car emissions by nearly a third by 2016, and boost average fuel efficiency from twenty-seven miles per gallon to thirty-five miles per gallon. Passenger car emissions accounted for 40 percent of the greenhouse gases in our state. But the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bush blocked us from enforcing this so-called tailpipe law. The auto companies were fighting our environmental vision so hard that they banded together and sued California—and me! They went all out to try to stop our progress, but in the end we won. When President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, he basically adopted California’s standard, and the automaker coalition agreed to a compromise that would require them to build cars for the entire nation that improved fuel efficiency to thirty-five miles per gallon by 2016, a 40 percent improvement over today’s twenty-five-miles-per-gallon standard.

I’d never made a secret of my impatience with President Bush’s foot-dragging on climate change, and we had talked directly about it. He was a Texan who thought he was a great environmentalist for setting aside acres of forests and sea. But even though his administration proposed ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, his EPA administrator tried to derail our efforts at every turn. For me, action meant bringing in people and making them part of the movement. A lot of environmentalists who talk about global warming want only to expose the problems. That’s a good way to make people feel guilty and hopeless—and nobody likes to feel like that. Besides, it’s hard to relate to a polar bear on an ice floe when you’re out of a job, or worried about your health insurance or about educating your kids. I promoted the California Global Warming Solutions Act as good for business—not only large and established businesses but also entrepreneurial businesses. In fact we wanted to create a whole new clean-tech industry that would create jobs, develop cutting-edge technology, and become a model for the rest of the country and the world.

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.