An
angry Berkeley physician, Kenneth Matsumura, announced in September 2005, that he was
launching a recall of California's celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The story was covered by the New York Times and the Washington Post. It generated global
media interest. Thousands volunteered to gather recall signatures. The street anger was
generated by the governor's repeat vetoes of the raise in the minimum wage, his taking
money from the schools and shutting down art and music classes, and his failing to
maintain state infrastructure like the levees whose collapse would cut off the flow of
fresh water to Southern California. Schwarzenegger was also denigrated for breaking
a promise to protect the environment, and for attacking widow's pension of firefighters
and police officers killed helping the public.
What transpired over the following six months is remarkable and historic. Schwarzenegger
made the passage of the raise in the minimum wage his lead message in his State of the
State speech in January 2006. He agreed to return monies to the schools, proposed a 37
billion dollars bond issue to fix California's infrastructure, and made California the
first state in the union to join the fight against global warming. He acceded to virtually
all the demands of the recallers.
In an easy, conversational style, Kenneth Matsumura tells the story about this amazing
turn of events that not only transformed the image of the celebrity governor but also how
these events changed California.
Kenneth Matsumura is a physician-scientist in Berkeley, California. For over three
decades, by choice, he has doctored the poor in San Francisco East Bay. He is also the
Chairman of Alin Foundation, one of the oldest biotech concerns in the world, with many
breakthrough medical developments. TIME magazine named his bio-artificial liver
'Invention of the Year" in 2001.