Episode Transcript
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Welcome to this episode of the Fourscore
and Seven Project, the productionof the New Majority Foundation.
My name is Roger Clark, your host.
This is partthree of our Governor Pete Wilson series,
a wide ranging and intimate conversationwith the former California governor
that explores a wide range of subjectsand issues
that are both topicaland timely to California and the nation.
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Pete Wilson was a 36governor of California from 1991 to 1999,
a United States Senator from California,from 1983 to 1991,
and the 29th mayor of San Diegofrom 1971 to 1983.
He's a United States Marine serving on
active duty from 1955 to 1958
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and a graduate of the UC BerkeleySchool of Law and Yale University.
Governor Wilson, through his lifeand lifetime of public service,
has given us a powerful example of what
it means to be a leaderfor all the American people.
A true American patriot.
A man who can teach and instruct us todayon the principles of statesmanship
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that all current politicaland business leaders should heed.
In our third episode of the series.
Governor Wilson discusses what,in his opinion, is ailing California.
The trouble with a one party State.
The Importance of education.
Public employee unions. Taxes. And
the importance of
sound fiscal responsibility.
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California.
I, for one, was surprisedwhen the 2020 census came out because,
like so many of those Californianssince 1850 has been a growth state.
And then we found out 2010 from 2020, yes,
California was growing in population,
but it wasn't growingas fast as the rest of the country.
And Florida and Texas were doublingor more than doubling.
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California's growth and. Our expense.
At our expense.
And then a couple of weeks ago,I was reading
an article in The Economist magazine,which is out of London.
What it was was talking about New York,Florida, Texas and California
and had a nice chart about growthcompared to population growth.
And I was really shocked to see thatsince the 2020 census, California
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gone into negative growth, it's losingseven or 800,000 people a year
and so is New York.
And but yet Texas and Florida
are gaining somewherebetween seven or 800,000 a year.
So their growth has acceleratedand California's got negative growth.
What can we do to reverse that trend?
When I came to office as governor,very shortly
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after I had won the election,
I had to meet with my director
of finance, whomI had appointed to work out
what the budget for the ensuingfiscal year would be.
The budget that I inheritedwas from George Deukmejian,
a friend of years and years, a decades
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a conservative.
He was shocked when he learned
and I learned at the same time, two weeksafter the election,
having lunch with him in his office,that the decline in revenue
that they had begun to detectin the summer this point,
this was November, he was waitingfor the October revenue numbers
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and sure, as
we were sitting therein walked his director of finance
and he said, Governor,I have the October revenue numbers.
We're down 260 million.
I said, Now wait a minute.
Again, that was October.
The four months, the quarter plus October.
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And he said, no, sir, that's just October.
For the four monthswe're down 400 million.
And there was silence in the room.
Duke was shocked
and with good reason.
And it was because
finally what had beenwhat had come late to California,
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it was an international recessionthat was deeper
and stayed longerthan in the rest of the country.
It was also a timein which base closures were occurring.
The second one hit California hard.
The Navy in particular.
All the bases in the Bay Area,I think were close at that time.
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The big submarine base at Muir Island
closed the Army Supply
center in Oakland,Northern California, really got hit.
Actually, San Diego was lucky in that
the consolidation that the Navywas required to make occurred.
They thought most naturallyby having it occur in San Diego.
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So it was but one of the few placesthat came up.
Well, but the homeowners in Los Angeles.
Half of them were upsidedown on their mortgages.
So it was a tough time.
And when I announced
the budget that I was going to havefor the next fiscal year, the Democrats
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in the legislature hooted
in, holleredand laughed and said, dead on arrival.
Because I said,
we are going to have a budget
that, unlike this one, meetsthe requirements of the state
constitution,that spending shall not exceed revenues.
Simple, clear statement
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wasn't clear to the legislature.
They thought, What the hell that idea.
And that's unfortunatebecause what was happening
is something that was even more importantthan the than the weapons
contracts,all the things that were happening
were on top of the performance
of, frankly, of the legislature.
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Duke restrained them as best he could, but
they were bound and determined to spend,and they didn't
spend as much as they'd like to,but they spent a hell of a lot more.
And they were also testing me.
And the Republicanswere not very courageous
because one of the things that was makinglife difficult
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was that two years before the election,there had been a ballot measure
in which the people had voted to provide
funding for school districts based upon
the revenue taken in by the state.
And there were three levelsthat prescribed how much would go out
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and go out almost automaticallyto the school districts?
Well, there was one way as a safety valve
to have, in effect, a referendum
that would undo that requirement
if it passed two years before
and so when we came up, Democrats
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in both houses, the Senateand the Assembly, they just ignored it.
And then on the final night of the fiscalyear, they passed it.
They passed a billin which I had prescribed cuts
that were very deep in that current year.
The next year would be much lesser.
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The assembly didn't,and they kept us there
and kept themselves there all summer long.
And finally it occurred to themthat they were up for reelection.
This was about Labor Day.
The Speaker, Willie Brown,and the pro tem of the state Senate,
David Roberti, came to me and they said,
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okay, we're here to be realists, Nick.
We're here to offer you
the maximum that we can getfor the Democratic Senate
and the Democratic Assembly is to go along
with half of what you are proposingin the way of cuts.
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And I remember well, they said, Governor,take your choice,
whatever tax increase is leastobnoxious to you.
I said, they're all obnoxious to me.
And so anyway, I've had a meeting
with the Republicans in the Assembly,and I told them this story.
And the then Republican leader,nice guy, Ross Johnson,
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said, Governor, he said, I do hopeyou're not going to ask us to vote
for a motion to suspend Proposition
98, which was the three level requirement.
That was what the overage was all about.
It had to be on the least revenue
and they didn't like it.
Anyway, I said, Ross, of course,
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that's what I am going to ask you to doand I'm going to ask right now
because it's the only waythat we can avoid
killing tax increases
or violating the Constitution.
So, of course,that's what I'm going to ask you.
I said, let me see right nowby a show of hands, how many of you born
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again tax fighters are going to supportthat motion.
They're in an assembly
that consistedof about 33 of the 80 members.
How many hands do you think went up? Two.
Pretty good one.
And I confess, I lost my temper.
But in any case, we had two year
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increase of one taxin three years of another,
and then they would automatically sunsetand there could be no change.
They said, we're going to complywith the Constitution.
That's what happened.
They then tried in the second yearto do something similar.
And I said,You weren't listening last year.
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Forget it.
Finally, in the third year, well,we came out of the coffee room
behind the assembly chamber,and he walked up to his desk,
which was in the rear left corner, rightnearest to the coffee room,
and he picked up his mike.
The acting president said
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the speaker is recognized.
And Willie said,Some of you are wondering why.
I carrying Pete Wilson's water.
He said, You may not like the man,but he's no fool.
This is as good as it's going to get
vote for.
And he pressed his button.
And of these 80 lights all dark,
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his lit up green leaning, I vote.
And then all of the Democratswent up green
and then all the Republicans would agree.
So finally, we had come to a
an understanding, a realization
that we were not going to play games.
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We're going to have to livewithin our means.
What happened was that
there was in additionto a number of changes,
we raised money
for purposesthat made California more attractive.
And the word went outand the professionals
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who were in the business of locatingor relocating
manufacture tourist distribution centers,what have you said?
Okay, this seems to be a different place.
Maybe we better give it a second look.
And I even said, you know what?
I think it's time we all went on a trip.
We being the speaker,the president pro tem,
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the Republican leadersin both houses and a couple of others.
And we went on trips.
First up was Minneapolis, Saint Paul.
The next stop was Chicagoin this format was
that I would open it up, welcomeour guests.
I'd make a little speech.
Then I would say,I said, and Willie, I will recognize you.
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And then we'll go to Ken Matti,the Republican leader in the Senate,
and we'll have about four of usmaking speeches.
Then we will open it to questions.
The second question we gotwas from a man in Chicago,
and he said, Governor, gentlemen,thank you for your invitation.
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I appreciate thatyou've asked us to respond
and you told usthat we should come to California
if we have market share that warrantsa second
distribution centeror a second second manufacturing center.
He said, I think I owe you some candor.
I am here to tell youthat it's the last damn place
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in the worldI would ever bring a new plant.
Did he explain why?
Yeah, he saideverything is wrong with California.
The taxes are too high, way too high.
And even worse than that,the regulatory excess is a killer.
Hell, no.
I'm not going to come to California.
Well, we went to the airport forthe next stop, the Democratic floor later.
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It was a very nice guy.
Was in the car, in the cab with me,and he said after about 4 minutes
of unaccustomed silence fromhim, he said, okay, governor.
Okay.
I heard what that guy said.
You made a convert.
And I said, Well, good, Tom,because I suspect
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he said exactly what you would have saidin his shoes.
And I said, We have got to changethe image of California
to make us competitive for all of the jobs
that we're now losing to Texas and Arizonaand to Florida.
What happened was it all worked.
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And by the time I left officeat the end of my second term,
Californiahad experienced a tremendous comeback.
We had, in fact, achieved a placewhere we were at one point
almost ahead, if not ahead of France
as a competitive economy.
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We did do all kinds of thingsto welcome people who were coming,
whom we could bring to comeall kinds of different people.
We lost the aircraft industry.
We lost a lot of the weapons producers,
but we started getting them back.
I left Gray Davis, my successor,and off a surplus.
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That was about the same size
as the the deficit that I had inherited
from a good conservative,George Deukmejian.
I mean, he was shocked. I was shocked.
So then what happened after that isthey reverted to type.
That's a generalization that this is it'salso a long answer,
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but that's the answer.
And we are not competitive these days.
You pinpointedsomething that I think is also
we haven't specifically addressed yet,but people, I think, have gotten
used to calling Californiaa one party state.
Now, been quite a few yearswhere we've had a statewide Republican
in the governorship,lieutenant governorship,
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any of the statewide offices.
And you describe the process right nowwhere you're going to head to head,
because you you had a Democraticcontrolled assembly and state Senate.
Let me correct one thing.
In my first reelection effort,I thought I had a pretty good ticket
running with me.
And I also thought we were in good shape.
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I knew we were in good shape.
Things that we had donehad changed the attitude.
Lo and behold, we discovered that
I had a one vote majority
in the assembly and the last personwho had experienced that
same thing, a one vote majority in theassembly was Ronald Reagan.
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25 years before.
Here we all have discussions, as youvery well explain negotiations
and going back and forth between yourselfand people who do not see eye to eye
with you politically. That's a fair state.
But it was a process.
We do not have thatnow with the governorship
and the state House and Senateand assembly are all of the same party.
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Is that healthy? No.
I'll talk about that a little.
No, and it's definitely not healthy.
If they achieved supermajoritiesthat mean they can pass anything
and that the ballot measure,if one is presented to undo it.
Right. Can't undo it.
So I think we havea very similar circumstance now, according
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to the recent reports, I think thatthere was a preliminary budget came out.
Here we are in May and we're coming up inthe June is the deadline,
but we're getting reportsthat new information is being put
on the current governor's desk,
that the revenues are much lowerthan anticipated even 30 days ago
or 55 days ago, talking about a hugeshortfall between spending and revenue.
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It sounds like something very similar
to what you encounteredwhen you went into office.
Yes, it is.
The difference is that Duke,my agent, was a conservative
and the public had votedfor a ballot measure that compelled.
This was Prop 98that required the three levels of revenue.
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And what was set out to the schooldistricts
dependent on the level of revenue?
Well, we didn't have the revenue,
so we complied with the Constitution
and with Proposition 98,
when I ran for reelection,
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I won handsomely by about 15 points
ahead of Kathleen Brown, Jerry sister,who was at the time
the incumbent treasurer, state treasurer,
and she was a very good candidate,very attractive.
She was articulate.
She had a sense of humor.
She had, I think, bad advicefrom her campaign manager.
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I couldn't quite figure out why it was.
They kept hitting me.
She kept attacking me and my strength.
I had three goals when I came to officeand when I was seeking it.
One of them was to write the economic shipand get us back on our feet.
The second was to continuewhat Deukmejian had begun
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to make California a safe place
for decent people to livein, in their homes, in their offices,
in their public parks,because things had gotten pretty tough.
And he did a very good job,but he didn't get it all.
There was too much.
That was my second point.
And I third was reform
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the public school system of California.
California, at one time had the bestpublic school system in the nation.
And in fact, they endorsed methe first time I ran for office.
When I tell people that they're just raw
because what happened subsequentlyis that a New Yorker
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came into California, recruited
about twice as many people to be teachers
as were then in the California TeachersAssociation, changed all the rules.
The only thing that he was smart enoughto keep was the name of the organization
California Teachers Association.
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To which great goodwill on the part of parents attached.
They were all for teachers.
Well, me too.
And also in terms of adequatecompensation.
However, what happenedwas that they completely changed
the standing and the purposeand the practices
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of the new California TeachersAssociation.
They didn't believe in merit pay.
They believed instead in seniority.
They didn't believe in the kinds of thingsthat imposed
strong academic requirements.
To the contrary,they had a terrible, terrible idea
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of what the schools ought to be.
And you've seen some reaction to it
when this D.A., district attorneyin San Francisco,
was put out of office by a recall.
So we're three members of thisof the school district in San Francisco.
Who looked at one of the early stateof the state address.
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And to go back to thatand you said, quote, Nothing we can do
can have a more profoundand lasting impact on California's
competitivenessthan the quality of our schools.
Yes. And then I believe it.
Was from all that just focused
not on the university systems,but but on the secondary school.
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Right.
And so forth.
To put it in a summary where we got off
track, we had such a good public educationsystem.
You've already addressedthe fact that I think
what we're we're really talking aboutis that the focus became
not on the students,but on things other than the students.
If I was getting the gist of your.
Absolutely. Here's what happened.
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They doubled the number of peoplein the organization.
And I think now number or somethingin excess of 300,000,
that's a lot of people, you know.
Also, Jerry Brown
and his I think second term as governorpassed a state version
of what became a 40 yearfederal Supreme Court precedent.
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The Janus decisionoverturned that one finally.
But what happened in the meantime isthat a similar version came to California.
Jerry sponsored it.
It predictably had people in it
who were not of the kindthat had been in it before.
Before he changed it.
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It existedfor the exclusive purpose of improving.
Enhancing the qualityof classroom teaching.
And in particular,
I was interested in seeing to itthat they were change it in a way
that would improve the ability of children
to become proficient readersat the end of grade three.
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That's what happenedwhen we started getting new employers
in California who had decidedit was a pretty good place to sell
and it's a pretty good placeto do business. Right.
That was terrific.
The one thing that they did findvery unattractive
were the public schoolsand the people who were hurt the worst
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by this were the people who had no option
and the families that were living in areas
where neighborhood schoolswere the only option they had.
And the people who were teachingwere the most junior
and they had the least political sway.
The people who were poor livingin those neighborhood
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districts,their kids were not getting a fair shake.
And it showed.
It showed terribly on their test scores.
What we did when we had come back
and were prospering, we said, okay,
we're not going to let this continue.
Instead, I did two things.
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I was the first governor in the countryto sign
a bill that authorized charter schools.
The other thingthat was even more important,
because it took a long time to grow thenumber of authorized charter schools. But
at the point where
we were able to afford it,I said, you know what?
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We are not going to send the moneyout to the schools
for this purposejust to put it on the table.
Instead, what we're going to do is create
not a mandate, but a state programin which public schools
can have no more than 20 students.
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Kindergarten through third grade per
class, one teacher, 20 students,
so that the kids can get the individualattention necessary to assure
that they do become proficient readersby the end of grade three.
Because if they don't, they'regoing to fall behind other schools,
other places and employerERs are going to look at that.
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And we will keep losing employersthat we have in this state
that has createdso many jobs created so many companies.
General Dynamics.
The first week I was there,they left, went across the line
into another statethat is that was the third thing.
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And it still isbecause we have seen nothing but growth
in the number of teachers.
But look at what happenedduring the COVID pandemic.
A great number did not go to schoolto teach their students.
They said we are in danger.
Not much.
Not at thenot at the age Most of them are.
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Right? Right. Even the most senior.
What happened was that the kids missed
two, three years of school.
That's criminal. I mean, they.
They can't get that backwithout a concerted effort.
And even with that,they're going to be late.
And don't think the employersdidn't take note of it.
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They did.
Thank you for joining usfor this fascinating
and informative discussionwith former Governor Pete Wilson.
My name is Roger Clark, your hostfor this episode of the Fourscore
and Seven Project, a productionof the New Majority Foundation.
Please shareand like us with your friends.
And be sure to join usfor the final episode of our conversation
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with Governor Wilson,where we will continue to explore
Governor Wilson's observationson California education, public employee
unions, public safety, drugs, gangs
and getting California on the right track.