Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [73]
“If someone had told you when you were building this wall that you would wind up governor of California, what would you have said?”
“That would be all right,” he said, not exactly catching my drift.
“As a boy,” I said, taking another tack, “did you believe you’d lead something other than an ordinary life?”
“Yes.” He didn’t miss a beat.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“No one has had this kind of crazy, wild ride,” he says, as we speed away from the brick wall, but in a tone that suggests the ride was an accident. “I was influenced a lot by America,” he said. “The giant six-lane highways, the Empire State Building, the risk taking.” He still remembers vividly the America he heard and read about as a boy in Austria: everything about it was big. The only reason he set out to grow himself some big muscles was that he thought it might be a ticket to America.
If there had not been a popular movement to remove a sitting governor, and the chance to run for governor without having to endure a party primary, he never would have bothered. “The recall happens and people are asking me: what are you going to do?” he says, dodging vagrants and joggers along the beach bike path. “I thought about it but decided I wasn’t going to do it. I told Maria I wasn’t running. I told everyone I wasn’t running. I wasn’t running.” Then, in the middle of the recall madness, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opened. As the movie’s leading machine he was expected to appear on The Tonight Show to promote it. En route he experienced a familiar impulse—the impulse to do something out of the ordinary. “I just thought, This will freak everyone out,” he says. “It’ll be so funny. I’ll announce that I am running. I told Leno I was running. And two months later I was governor.” He looks over at me, pedaling as fast as I can to keep up with him, and laughs. “What the fuck is that?”
We’re now off the beach and on the surface roads, and the traffic is already heavy. He veers left, across four lanes of traffic, arrives on the other side, and says, “All these people are asking me, ‘What’s your plan? Who’s on your staff?’ I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a staff. I wasn’t running until I went on Jay Leno.”
His view of his seven years trying to run the state of California, like the views of his closest associates, can be summarized as follows. He came to power accidentally, but not without ideas about what he wanted to do. At his core he thought government had become more problem than solution: an institution run less for the benefit of the people than for the benefit of politicians and other public employees. He behaved pretty much as Americans seem to imagine the ideal politician should behave: he made bold decisions without looking at polls; he didn’t sell favors; he treated his opponents fairly; he was quick to acknowledge his mistakes and to learn from them, and so on. He was the rare elected official who believed, with some reason, that he had nothing to lose, and behaved accordingly. When presented with the chance to pursue an agenda that violated his own narrow political self-interest for the sake of the public interest, he tended to leap at it. “There were a lot of times when we said, ‘You just can’t do that,’ says his former chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, whose hiring was one of those things a Republican governor was not supposed to do. “He was always like, ‘I don’t care.’ Ninety percent of the time it was a good thing.”
Two years into his tenure, in mid-2005, he’d tried everything he could think of to persuade individual California state legislators to vote against the short-term desires of their constituents for the greater long-term good of all. “To me there were shocking moments,” he says. Having sped past a DO NOT ENTER sign, we are now flying through intersections without pausing. I can’t help but notice