Pete Wilson: America's Finest City, Proposition 187, and Deregulation

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Pete Wilson was born in Illinois in 1933 and raised in St. Louis. He earned an English degree at Yale, served as a Marine infantry officer, and finished law school at UC Berkeley in 1962, then failed the California bar three times before passing. After disliking criminal defense work, he became an advance man for Richard Nixon's run for governor and Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. Elected mayor of San Diego in 1971, he restructured city government and pushed downtown redevelopment. When the 1972 Republican convention was moved from San Diego to Miami Beach amid the ITT scandal, he declared that week America's Finest City Week, a phrase that became the city's nickname.

Wilson beat Governor Jerry Brown for the Senate in 1982, pressing Brown's appointment of Chief Justice Rose Bird. In the Senate he backed the Strategic Defense Initiative, voted for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, voted to override Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act, and championed 1988 reparations for interned Japanese Americans. Elected governor in 1990, he raised taxes during a deep recession, vetoed AB 101 in 1991, and in 1994 won reelection with 55 percent after backing three strikes sentencing and Proposition 187, which federal courts struck down. He left office in 1999 with a $16 billion surplus, and his 1996 electricity deregulation law was later tied to the 2000 and 2001 energy crisis.

• In May 1985 he was brought by ambulance from Bethesda Naval Hospital, still on an IV after appendix surgery, to cast a tie-breaking budget vote.
• A 63 day budget standoff in 1992 forced California to pay workers and vendors with registered warrants.
• His budgets included a sales tax on snack foods and a roughly 40 percent university tuition increase.
• A vocal cord nodule and surgery sidelined his 1996 presidential bid, and he was the first major candidate to drop out.
• He co-chaired Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign in the 2003 recall election.