Get ready for Schwarzenegger
One hundred fifty-five years ago, California was virgin U.S. territory, with a population smaller than Rhode Island. Then came the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill along the American River in the Sacramento Valley. Suddenly, California became the destination of choice in the land of opportunity.
Filmmakers Michael Trinklein and Steven Boettcher produced an excellent PBS documentary a few years back on the California Gold Rush. They saw it as the singular event that redefined the American Dream.
The nuggets discovered at Sutter’s Mill would forever change a young nation, they related. “The simple life would no longer be enough. In its place would come a new kind of lifestyle: entrepreneurial, wide open, free.” That’s the ethos California has been known for throughout much of its history, from its statehood in 1850 to today — from the Gold Rush in Sacramento Valley to the birth of the motion picture industry in Hollywood, from the heyday of Southern California’s aerospace industry to the go-go days of Silicon Valley.
California is the modern-day promised land, not only to the millions of Americans who’ve left their home states to take up residence in the Golden State, but also to the millions of immigrants who’ve left their native countries to live, work and prosper in California.
Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, sworn in this week as California’s 38th governor. He arrived from Austria a mere 35 years ago “with absolutely nothing,” he said, in his swearing-in remarks. And since then, he has “gained absolutely everything” he could have dreamed of.
Ronald Reagan, the former California governor, the former president, spoke of America as “the shining city on the hill,” Schwarzenegger recalled. “I see California as the golden dream by the sea,” said the former body building champion, the motion picture star.
Alas, many, if not most, Californians fear that the golden dream of which their new governor spoke may have gotten beyond their reach. It is why they recalled Schwarzenegger’s hapless predecessor, making him the first in the state’s history to suffer such an ignominy.
“The state of California is in crisis,” Schwarzenegger acknowledged. “We spent ourselves into the largest budget deficit in the nation. We have the worst credit rating in the nation.
“We have the worst workers’ compensation costs in the nation. Next year, we will have the highest unemployment insurance costs in the nation. And we have the worst business climate in the nation.”
He also might mention that the state’s electricity costs are among the highest in the nation. And that its public school students are among the worst-performing in the nation.
California residents do not expect their new governor to solve all of the state’s woes in days or weeks or years. They recognize that the crisis in which their state finds itself was many years in the making.
They know they did not elect a technocrat, a person intimately acquainted with the machinations of government. In fact, they purposely got rid of one in Gray Davis.
Californians elected Schwarzenegger because they wanted a leader, because they wanted a governor willing to set party partisanship aside for the good of the state, for the benefit of its 35 million diverse residents.
But most of all, they elected Schwarzenegger because he understands the aspirations of the common man and woman; the aspirations he brought with him to the Golden State three and one-half decades ago.
“California has always glimmered with hope and glowed with opportunity,” said Schwarzenegger. That is the luster that has brought so many millions to California since gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill more than a century and half ago.”
In recent years, the Golden State has lost much of its luster. It is up to the state’s new governor to restore it.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)