POLITICO - Edward-Isaac Dovere
At SXSW (South by Southwest Festival), the former California governor lets loose on climate change,
Donald Trump and gives his first in-depth remarks on #MeToo.
 |
| Paul Kane/Getty Images |
AUSTIN, Texas — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s next mission: taking oil
companies to court “for knowingly killing people all over the world.”
The former California governor and global environmental activist
announced the move Sunday at a live recording of POLITICO’s Off Message
podcast here at the SXSW festival, revealing that he’s in talks with
several private law firms and preparing a public push around the effort.
“This is no different from the smoking issue. The tobacco industry
knew for years and years and years and decades, that smoking would kill
people, would harm people and create cancer, and were hiding that fact
from the people and denied it. Then eventually they were taken to court
and had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because of that,”
Schwarzenegger said. “The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did
their own study that there would be global warming happening because of
fossil fuels, and on top of it that it would be risky for people’s
lives, that it would kill.”
Schwarzenegger said he’s still working on a timeline for filing, but
the news comes as he prepares to help host a major environmental
conference in May in Vienna.
“We’re going to go after them, and we’re going to be in there like an
Alabama tick. Because to me it’s absolutely irresponsible to know that
your product is killing people and not have a warning label on it, like
tobacco,” he said. “Every gas station on it, every car should have a
warning label on it, every product that has fossil fuels should have a
warning label on it.”
He argues that at the very least, this would raise awareness
about fossil fuels and encourage people to look to alternative fuels
and clean cars.
He added, “I don’t think there’s any difference: If you walk into a
room and you know you’re going to kill someone, it’s first degree
murder; I think it’s the same thing with the oil companies.”
Schwarzenegger was at SXSW for an extensive discussion of lessons he
learned in his seven years as governor, and how he’d apply them to the
current political situation in Washington and beyond. On the list:
Maximize the bully pulpit; use the carrot but have the stick ready; and
no one gets a perfect “10,“ because there’s always room for improvement.
Those, he said, were part of his art of the deal, and explained how
he’d been able to institute major laws from worker’s compensation reform
to environmental standards to a state election overhaul to implement
independent redistricting and a “jungle primary” system, in which the
top two advance.
Schwarzenegger also addressed, for the first time since the national
reawakening around the #MeToo moment, the charges of groping and
inappropriate behavior that surfaced from multiple women against him at
the end of his first campaign for governor in 2003. He acknowledged that
the change in the moment made a huge difference.
“It is about time. I think it’s fantastic. I think that women have
been used and abused and treated horribly for too long, and now all of
the elements came together to create this movement, and now finally puts
the spotlight on this issue, and I hope people learn from that,” he
said. “You’ve got to take those things seriously. You’ve got to look at
it and say, ‘I made mistakes. And I have to apologize.’”
He stressed the importance of sexual harassment training, like the
one he made his staff do once he was elected— including himself.
“We make mistakes, and we don’t take it seriously. And then when you
really think about it, you say, ‘Maybe I went too far,’” Schwarzenegger
said. “You’ve got to be very sensitive about it, and you’ve got to think
about the way that women feel—and if they feel uncomfortable, then you
did not do the right thing.”
The past few months, he said “made me think totally differently,” adding, “I said to myself, ‘Finally.’”
Schwarzenegger took a number of shots at Donald Trump, dismissing the
president’s latest attack on him, delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania
on Saturday night, for having “failed when he did the show,” a reference
to the former governor’s rocky one-season stint as the host of “The
Apprentice” on NBC last year.
“I never know really why the Russians make him say certain things,”
Schwarzenegger said. “It’s beyond me. Why do you think he says those
things? He’s supposed to be very busy.”
Later in the interview, he returned to the attack on Trump, teasing
that the script of the new “Terminator” movie, which Schwarzenegger is
set to start filming in June and is expected to be released next year,
had to be rewritten to include Trump. “The T-800 model that I play, he’s
traveling back in time to 2019 to get Trump out of prison,”
Schwarzenegger joked.
He wouldn’t reveal any actual details about the script other than
that he is still the T-800 model. This isn’t his only upcoming foray
into old film franchises: He’s due to shoot “King Conan” and “Triplets,”
an update on the 1988 film “Twins,” with Eddie Murphy as the third
brother. (“There’s something funny there with the mixing of the sperm,”
he said.)
Schwarzenegger said he’d like to see Ohio Gov. John Kasich run for
president but urged him to run in the Republican primary rather than as
an independent.
“He’s a great Republican,” Schwarzenegger said.
But he said don’t expect him to be a major campaign presence in 2020.
He’ll be focusing on pushing gerrymandering reform, and has gotten
involved again with California Republicans, with whom he’ll be meeting
in the coming days back home.
“The Republicans that are the new thinking Republicans in California
want to get things done,” Schwarzenegger said, adding that he wants
elected officials to remember, “ultimately, you are a public servant,
not a party servant.”
He urged the GOP to pay attention to what happened in California,
where Democrats have become completely dominant. Republicans there, he
said, “are stuck with an ideology that doesn’t really fit anymore with
what people want.”
He cited the environmental work of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as examples.
“Today, those are all things that are absolutely a no-no in the
Republican Party. I didn’t change; it’s the Republican Party that’s
changed,” he said. “Now we have to work very hard to get the party back
to where it was.”
Back at the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton wrote Schwarzenegger a
long letter that ended with Clinton urging Schwarzenegger to become a
Democrat. Schwarzenegger said he wasn’t interested then, and isn’t
interested now, for all his problems with Trump and the current GOP.
“That’s a fun letter, and I like supporting him on some issues,”
Schwarzenegger said. “But the bottom line is that I’m a Republican, and
I’m a true Republican, and I will always be a Republican. It’s a
fantastic party, but they’ve veered off into the right into some strange
lanes.”
Links
