Despite rookie missteps and setbacks, Schwarzenegger stuck with his crusade to reform California’s ossified political culture. He has begun to break the will of the powerful labor establishment, itself the author of many laws, through sheer relentlessness: after the corrections-officers union blocked one of his efforts to curb their power, Schwarzenegger all but called the members out as thugs and, in an unprecedented display of executive authority, voided their contract, then beat back the legislature’s attempt to reverse him. Though public-employees unions defeated his ballot reforms, Schwarzenegger extracted significant concessions on pensions from some of them. And drawing on his network of supporters and allies, Schwarzenegger financed and co-sponsored two successful ballot initiatives to end partisan gerrymandering and to institute a top-two selection system for partisan primaries. From now on, California’s elections for state executive and legislative posts will be contests between the top two primary vote-getters, regardless of party.

Previously, California’s gerrymandered districts rewarded fealty to entrenched partisan factions. As a result, few Republicans would ever vote for a tax hike and almost no Democrat would take on the unions. Redistricting will recast many legislative districts, making them significantly less Democratic or Republican. And candidates running in a wide-open primary will have to rely on a broader base of contributors. The power of the unions, the shock jocks, the anti-taxers, will all be diluted.

How did Schwarzenegger achieve these potentially far-reaching political changes? The standard answer is that he made it up as he went along, leveraging celebrity (his own and that of the Kennedys via his marriage to Maria Shriver, daughter of Sargent Shriver) and then fashioning political compromises. He lurched left and right. But there’s a simpler explanation: when you speak to Schwarzenegger, you realize he lacks the crippling desire to be liked that most politicians unctuously exude. And indeed, after he pushed and pushed and pushed, after he threatened to cut out the bottom of California’s social safety net, after unions spent millions of dollars demonizing him, he isn’t very well liked.

But he couldn’t care less, because his political ambition ended at the doorstep to the tent he set up as a makeshift smoke shack/negotiation chamber outside the Capitol. He can’t run for president, and he’s not interested in a Senate seat. “I was always much more free,” Schwarzenegger told me. “I was not feeling like there was a line in the sand, and everything that is to the right is everything that I should do, and everything to the left I should reject.” One clever bit of line-crossing that stunned Sacramento: his hiring of Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy, a Democratic operative who had worked for his predecessor, Gray Davis. When Schwarzenegger addressed Republicans after appointing Kennedy, a Republican assemblywoman he knew, Bonnie Garcia, teased him: “That’s not bipartisan, that’s bipolar!” Schwarzenegger didn’t care. In fact, if the Democratic candidate, Jerry Brown, becomes governor and takes credit for Schwarzenegger’s investment in solar power, he told me, it won’t bruise his ego. “The less you’re concerned about getting credit, the more work you can get done,” Schwarzenegger said. “My father-in-law always told me that.”