Reflections on Governorship and Politics

I was very much aware that when I ran for governor, that it could go south.

Political advisors would tell me,

says, you know, this is not going to be like in acting.

In acting, people, they love your

movies. And if they don't love your movies, they just don't go.

But no one is out there attacking, not liking your movie.

He says, yeah, 50 of the people

at all times would hate what you do.

That's just the way politics works, right? 50 will love it and 50 will hate it.

Can you really take that?

Do you have thick enough skin? And I said, yeah, I can take it.

So I knew when I went in there, that's what's going to happen. Are you kidding me?

I had such a fantastic time being governor.

It's such an exhilarating kind of thing to do,

to have the responsibility over 38 million people,

to have the challenge of bringing Democrats and Republicans and decline

to state and all of those people together to come to a decision and all this stuff.

And of course, you sometimes

you have great victories and then you have sometimes great failures. And I tell you

that I'm extremely proud of my two terms as governor of what we've accomplished.

And I'm also really pissed off that we never

really got the budget problem done because I was surrounded by Democrats that had

absolutely no interest in really reducing the spending.

Then when Jerry Brown came in,

they were willing to reduce the spending immediately by 10 billion.

I had some wonderful Democrats that were my allies that helped

me to get a lot of things done that helped me also actually getting reelected.

So I will never forget it was a great experience.

And we were able to

set the base for the environmental agenda to let them know that when you go green,

it doesn't mean that the state is going to go and dump in the ocean,

that you actually can be more successful.