在许多历险一般的电影里，我们认识了一个硬汉，名为阿诺·施瓦辛格；后来的加州州长位置上，我们又看到了他，这一次，他称之为“California Dream”。

We’ll be back

Some time in 2005 we will look back, call it the California Comeback, and acknowledge it came in all shapes and sizes.

A few months ago it was Genentech. This biotechnology company—California born, California bred—rejected the seductive advances of other states and broke ground on the world’s largest biotech plant: a $600m, 650-employee manufacturing facility in Vacaville, a little more than 50 miles (80 kilometres) north-east of the company’s headquarters in south San Francisco.

More recently I was pleased to hear that Candace Doi and Fred Powers had decided to move their 12-employee, $700,000 company, Lynch Signs, from Las Vegas, Nevada, to La Verne, California, 20 miles east of Pasadena. Lynch is a growth company. It recently signed contracts with some major retailers in California, and has plans to expand and add jobs. Doi and Powers found irresistible the attractions of our California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth, which has launched a ten-state billboard campaign encouraging businesses to set up shop in California (or, as the billboards insist I say, Kah-li-fornia).

Many more companies will be coming because we are reforming the system, making California competitive again. In Sacramento we passed a bill that reformed workers’ compensation, and as a result the insurance premiums, which had increased by double digits between 2000 and 2003, immediately started dropping by double digits. We passed a balanced budget with no tax increases and moved the state’s finances towards structural balance. We reformed employer litigation, moved forwards on programmes to ensure clean and reliable power, and were pleased that the voters approved ballot measures to limit state spending and refinance California’s debt burden.

We’re doing our part, and it is already making a difference. A year ago California was considered a bad bet by Wall Street. All three of the principal credit-rating agencies—Moody’s, Fitch and Standard & Poor’s—had us on credit watch. Now, not only have all three agencies removed us from credit watch, but they’ve also upgraded our credit rating. We’re back on our feet again, heading in the right direction, humming along with “California Dreamin’” not “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”.

I followed my dreams to California and even the ones that seemed impossible—even those dreams—came true. Now, as governor, I still believe in the Californian dream

And this isn’t just good news for the shareholders of a multinational biotech corporation, the owners of a sign company or the other companies and entrepreneurs who will follow. This is good news for every worker in the state, because the bottom line is jobs. A year ago, when I was campaigning for governor, I reminded voters that in the two previous years California had lost 175,000 jobs. Now we have reversed that trend. We’ve created more than 100,000 new jobs in our state since the beginning of 2004. That means 100,000 more Californians can take pride every day in what they do, can provide better lives for their families, buy school books and computers for their children, and fully participate in the American dream.

California has always been home for those with big dreams, for daring optimists. Our original settlers continued to drive west, despite the hardships, because they knew there was something better on the other side of the treacherous mountains. Prospectors of every description, from every continent, have flocked to California for generations because they knew this was where they would hit the mother lode.

Men like Louis B. Mayer and Sam Goldwyn landed in a place that came to be called Hollywood and built an empire of their own that remains a beacon of aspiration and creativity to all the world. Chuck Yeager came here from West Virginia and asked for that last stick of Beeman’s before he tested the first rocket engine, broke the sound barrier and opened the heavens over the California desert. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built one electronics business in a northern California garage and, inspired by them, a generation later Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple home computer in another northern California garage.

Cisco, eBay, Yahoo!, Google, Netflix, nVIDIA, Electronic Arts, Intel: they are all companies that could only have started in California. They are all companies that call California home. And they all will continue to grow and flourish with the California Comeback.

We speak 95 languages in California (96, I guess, if you include my version of English). We have the sixth-largest economy in the world. We have 840 miles of coastline, 15,000 miles of highways and freeways, 12 cargo airports, 11 cargo seaports, and economic sanctuary for those who dream big. Statistics show that California’s economy started its recovery in 2004. Personal income is up; taxable sales are up; exports, construction activity and hiring are all up; tourism is recovering. And history says that when the national economy recovers, California recovers better and faster.

When I was a young boy growing up in Austria, California represented a dream to me, a dream in which anything and everything was possible. I followed my dreams to California and even the ones that seemed impossible—even those dreams—came true. Now, as governor, I still believe in the Californian dream. When it broke ground for that new plant in Vacaville, Genentech said it believed in the dream. With its decision to move here, Lynch Signs staked its claim to a piece of the dream. In 2005 the California Comeback will make the dream come alive for many more.

Q--Tell us your opinion, regarding Arnold's California Dream.