Of course, ad libbing can backfire when you’re running for governor. I got in trouble by referring to my friend Bonnie Garcia, a Latina legislator from near Indio, as “very hot” because of her “Black and Latino blood.” I said it during a two-hour private yack session with my staff which ended up on the internet—unedited. We were brainstorming in preparation for a big speech and the speechwriter was taping so he wouldn’t miss any pearls of wisdom. Bonnie is a Latina who can be passionate and blunt when she locks in on an issue, like me. I declared that this passion was genetic. “Cuban, Puerto-Rican, they are all very hot,” I said. She reminded me of Sergio Oliva, the Cuban weight-lifting champion I battled for the Mr. Olympia title back in the 1970s. He was a fierce competitor, a hot-blooded, passionate guy.
Adam, my communications director, was used to hearing me say wild things. But this time his shop accidentally put the unedited transcript on the server that held our public press releases. It didn’t take long for Phil Angelides’s people to find it and release the politically incorrect part to the Los Angeles Times.
My campaign staff scrambled to do damage control. They found Bonnie, who was not only gracious and helpful but also really funny in accepting my apology. (The papers reported her wisecracking later, “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.”) I called every Latino and Black leader I knew, starting with Fabian Núñez and Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, both of whom dismissed my comments as Arnold being Arnold and not the least bit offensive. Rather than let Angelides leak out sections at a time to keep the negative stories going, Adam simply released the entire two hours of unedited transcript to the public. In the end the media credited us with handling “Tapegate” very effectively, and we went back to campaigning.
To my mind Angelides was too negative. He criticized me, but never offered a clear alternative vision of what California’s future should be. Without that, he just didn’t catch fire with the voters. For me, talking convincingly about the future was easy: all I had to do was point to what we’d achieved since I came into office.
On November 7, 2006, the people of California chose me in a landslide: a 17-percentage point margin of victory. And they passed all of the bond propositions too—the Strategic Growth Plan provided $42 billion we could use to start building the twenty-first-century Golden State.
CHAPTER 27
Who Needs Washington?
I WAS IN A fantastic mood when I headed off to Sun Valley in late December with Maria and the kids. After working really hard in Sacramento and on my reelection campaign, I was eager for a break. Two days before Christmas, we were at the ski area near our house, where we ski so much that there is even a trail called Arnold’s Run. I’m a good skier, and Arnold’s Run is a black diamond, or expert, trail full of moguls. But when I broke my leg that afternoon, I have to admit it was on a bunny slope—and I simply tripped over one of my poles. I was going too slowly for my skis even to pop off. As I went down on the pole, it applied so much leverage to my leg that the thigh bone broke. I felt a snap.
We had a makeshift Christmas in Sun Valley, and then I flew back for surgery in LA. Maria came with me, but she flew right back to host a big party we gave up there every year. Being laid up in a hospital, missing my family and the party—not to mention the excruciating pain—made me miserable. The surgeons had to insert a metal rod with a wire around the bone. According to the doctors, I’d need eight weeks to recover. Late one night, Sylvester Stallone dropped by to cheer me up. He gave me a pair of boxing gloves to remind me to fight. Others like Tom Arnold and our pastor Reverend Monsignor Lloyd Torgerson, came to the hospital, and during one visit, I burst into tears. “This must be the medications talking,” I told my friends. “I’m really not the crying type.”
I was depressed not only because the injury put a damper on the holidays but also because it threatened to wreck the inauguration and keep me from starting my second term with a bang. I was scheduled to deliver the inaugural address on January 5, 2007, and my State of the State address four days later. I had prepared landmark statements of what I wanted to accomplish in the next four years. But if I was distracted by pain or doped up on painkillers, it was hard to see how I’d deliver them. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, once got shot by a would-be assassin while making a speech and calmly finished his remarks before seeing a doctor. I wondered how he’d pulled that off.
I was preparing for my speech as best as I could, but as the date drew closer, Maria assessed the severity of my condition. Finally she said, “This is not going to happen.” I was still recovering from complex surgery, wearing a brace on my thigh, and in no condition for an inaugural event. We agreed to postpone it.
The next morning I was fuming at myself. I had visions of my visits with injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, veterans who’d been operated on the day before. They wanted to heal, get back to the battlefield, and continue the fight. I thought to myself, “Those guys want to go back into battle, but I want to cancel a speech?” I felt like a total wimp.
I had to go forward with the inaugural, even if I had to crawl on all fours up the steps of the capitol. I called Maria and told her we had to resume our original plans. She recognized that I was in machine mode and that no one was going to stop me, and she went all out to make the inauguration a success. Besides boosting my morale, she personally supervised the construction and arrangement of the inaugural stage in Sacramento so that I could get on and off easily with crutches.
The gathering in Sacramento was packed and festive, with members of both parties, leaders from business and labor, press, friends, and family. Willie Brown, one of the longest-serving Democrats and the former speaker of the state assembly, was the emcee of the event, a gesture to sell the idea of postpartisanship. I felt proud to be there.
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I had big ambitions heading into my second term. I was determined to keep my reelection promises and take on big, tough issues that would position California as a leader in health care, the environment, and political reform. We’d already launched major programs on climate change and infrastructure. The recession was past, the economy was growing again, and thanks to that and a lot of discipline, we’d narrowed the budget deficit from $16 billion in 2004 to $4 billion in the current fiscal year. In the budget for the year starting July 2007, which I was about to submit to the legislature, the deficit would be zero for the first time in years. So the stage was set for dramatic action.
I planned to use my inaugural speech to challenge partisanship itself. I was dismayed by the crazy polarization of our political system and the waste, paralysis, and damage it caused. Despite bipartisan deals in 2006 on infrastructure, the environment, and the budget, California had become deeply divided. Republicans and Democrats could no longer meet in the middle and compromise on shared interests as they had during the great boom of the postwar years. Now California politics was this big centrifuge that forced voters, policies, and parties away from the center. Election districts had been drawn to eliminate competition; conservative Republicans ran some, liberal Democrats ran others. The late congressman Phil Burton was so proud of the gerrymandering he did for California’s Democrats in drawing the congressional lines in 1981 that he called it his contribution to modern art. I said in my 2007 State of the State speech that because of gerrymandering, the California legislature had less turnover than in Austria’s Hapsburg monarchy.
There had been a really appalling example of this in the two days after 9/11. While the nation was reeling from the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, the legislature pushed through a redistricting bill that further entrenched incumbents and hard-liners of both parties. This was a worldview that put parties ahead of people, and I thought it needed to change.
So when I got out of bed, picked up my crutches, and went to give my inaugural speech, I challenged Californians to stop yielding to the far left and the far right and return to the center. To the politicians, I said, “Centrist does not mean weak. It does not
mean watered down or warmed over. It means well balanced and well grounded. The American people are instinctively centrist. So should be our government. America’s political parties should return to the center, where the people are.”
And I reminded the voters, “The left and the right don’t have a monopoly on conscience. We should not let them get way with that. You can be centrist and be principled. You can seek a consensus and retain your convictions. What is more principled than giving up some part of your position to advance the greater good? That is how we arrived at a Constitution in this country. Our Founding Fathers would still be meeting at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia if they hadn’t compromised.”
Four days later, I delivered the State of the State speech to the legislature. I was able to compliment them despite the ways we’d often tortured each other during my first term. I didn’t even have to lie; all I had to do was contrast them with the politicians in Washington. “Last year the federal government was paralyzed by gridlock and games,” I said. “But you here in this chamber acted on infrastructure, the minimum wage, prescription drug costs, and the reduction of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. What this said to the people is that we are not waiting for politics. We are not waiting for our problems to get worse. We are not waiting for the federal government. Because the future does not wait.”
Then I painted a vision for the state. “Not only can we lead California into the future, we can show the nation and the world how to get there. We can do this because we have the economic strength, the population, and the technological force of a nation-state. We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta.” And I laid out a half dozen ambitious ways for California to set national and international examples, from building classrooms to combating global warming.
The average politician doesn’t give a shit about Athens or Sparta, of course, or any kind of vision. But I’d just won an election, so for the moment, they had to listen to me. I was willing to bet that at least some would rise to the challenge of doing even more than we’d achieved in 2006.
Before I was off my crutches, my staff and I were back in high gear. Between the goals I’d laid out in my speeches and the budget initiatives that year, we launched the most ambitious reform agenda of any state administration in modern history: the most sweeping health care reform legislation in America; carrying out the most comprehensive climate change regulations in the country, including the world’s first low-carbon fuel standard; parole reform and new prison construction; and the massive, most controversial project in California’s legendary water wars: the canal to finish what Governor Pat Brown had started thirty years earlier.
We continued pushing budget reform and political reform: strengthening the rainy-day fund and banning fund-raising during the budget approval process. We launched the second attempt at a redistricting ballot measure aimed at forming an independent, nonpartisan committee. And I spent long hours trying to help ordinary people deal with extraordinary problems. We met for weeks with mortgage companies like Countrywide, GMAC, Litton, and HomEq to fast-track help to keep subprime borrowers who were underwater from losing their homes. We met with local law enforcement leaders in the Central Valley and the Salinas Valley to help them come up with a better approach to fight gang violence.
The workdays often ran to sixteen hours, and most nights I simply stayed in Sacramento. I liked the weight and the complexity of the challenges and being constantly on the move. But I missed Maria and the kids, and I still made sure to try to spend Friday plus every weekend in LA.
This schedule had worked in my first term, mainly, I thought, because of Maria’s skill as a mom. But one evening in spring when I came back from Sacramento, and we were all sitting around the kitchen table, Christina started to cry. “Daddy, you’re never home,” she said. “You’re always in Sacramento. You didn’t show up at school when I had my recital.” Another one said, “You didn’t show up for parents’ day. It was just Mommy there.” The next one started crying and said, “Yeah, me too. You missed my soccer game.” All of a sudden, there was this chain reaction. All of them were crying, and they all had a complaint.
Christina must have seen the shock on my face. I was having such a great time being governor that I’d completely missed what was boiling at home. She said, “Sorry, Daddy, but I had to say it.”
“No, Christina,” said Maria. “That’s okay. I think it’s important that you tell your daddy what you think and what you feel. So just tell him everything.” She was unhappy too that I was away so much, and encouraged them all to speak up.
I can be such a locomotive sometimes. Now I worried about how long they’d felt this way and how long it had taken them to have the courage to say it. I’d always told them that in a family everyone has to make sacrifices. Whenever you have six people together, no one can go off and do everything he or she wants 100 percent of the time. Well, now it was my turn. I promised that from that moment, I would spend only one night a week in Sacramento. “I might have to leave some mornings before you get up, and I might get home just as you’re going to sleep,” I said. “But from now on, I’ll be here.”
They always say that politics erodes marriages. You get so immersed in the job that there are side effects on the people you love. Even if you succeed in partly protecting your wife and kids from the public spotlight, they feel they’re sharing you and losing you. Maria, of course, was strong and had her own career. When she saw that my passion for being governor was causing us to drift apart, she did the best she could do under the circumstances: took great care of the kids, stepped up to the opportunities and responsibilities of being First Lady, was there for me when I needed her. And waited.
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Just before a press conference the previous spring while we starting the reelection campaign, my top staff had begged me not to take on health care reform. Susan Kennedy and Daniel Zingale brought it up specifically: “Please don’t say you’re going to do it.” Daniel was our health care guru. Before becoming Maria’s chief of staff, he’d founded California’s Department of Managed Health Care for Governor Davis.
But I was feeling my oats, and I went out and told the media, “I’m going to do health care reform in my second term.” Afterward, Susan and Daniel were saying, “Oh, shit, he just grabbed the third rail.” They begged me not to promise we’d have a plan ready in time for the State of the State address; they said it couldn’t be done. So the next time I saw a reporter, I said, “and I will have a plan by the State of the State address.” Susan joked later that she had to hold a paper bag over Daniel’s mouth to stop him hyperventilating when he heard. He couldn’t believe we were going to have to develop a comprehensive health care reform plan in eight months for the state of California; they said it took two years in Massachusetts, a state smaller than Los Angeles County. I had to calm everyone down.
Their fear was easy to understand. Trying to reform health care had almost destroyed Bill Clinton’s presidency. And the same health care demons that confronted America also confronted us as a state: soaring costs, inefficiency, fraud, rising burdens for employers and policyholders, and millions of people uninsured. But I’d always thought it was a disgrace that the greatest country in the world did not provide a health care system for all of its people, as many European countries do. That said, I believe in the private sector and was opposed to any government-run system like single payer. We framed the idea differently than anybody before or since.
I didn’t try to guilt-trip businesses and people who already had health insurance into taking on the huge extra costs of the uninsured and the underinsured. Instead, I argued that they were already paying these bills through a big hidden tax: their own rising health care costs. So by covering the uninsured directly, they would be paying no more than they were now, and health care could be managed more efficiently. I also spotlighted that most Californians without health insurance—three-quarters of them, in fa
ct—had jobs. This was the core of California: young working families who weren’t adequately covered.
Daniel Zingale led a team that did a brilliant job of creating our plan. Universal coverage was going to require sacrifice from all the players—hospitals, insurers, employers, doctors—and he brought them all to the table and got them involved. The plan had three components. Coverage for all. A requirement that every Californian buy insurance. And a requirement that insurers guarantee coverage for everyone, regardless of age and including those with pre-existing conditions. There were also subsidies for people who couldn’t afford insurance on their own, as well as aggressive measures to control costs and to focus on prevention.
So instead of avoiding health care, I made it a top priority in 2007, which I talked up as the year of health care. Public events and private meetings on the issue were on my schedule every day. I traveled the state meeting patients, doctors, nurses, and hospital CEOs. I went to roundtables mostly just to sit and listen. In May I actually got Jay Leno to let me talk about health care finance on The Tonight Show; Jay gave an example of a relative who had spent three months in a hospital in England and paid only $4,500.
Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez worked his tail off corralling the big labor unions to support health care reform, while I worked the major business groups. Together we negotiated every major detail with hospitals, doctors’ groups, and patient advocates on a comprehensive plan that would pay for itself, require everyone to have health insurance, and reduce the cost shift to taxpayers. By December, the California Health Care Security and Cost Reduction Act had won the support of the assembly, despite opposition from the nurses’ union and liberal Democrats who were holding out for a government-run single-payer plan to cover everybody.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 60