But in January 2008, after a year of intense work, health care reform wasn’t even taken up for a vote in the state senate. The plan simply died in a senate committee. Word was that the senate leader, Democrat Don Perata, couldn’t stomach that this young upstart Democratic speaker, working with a Republican governor, would deliver two of the biggest reform measures in modern California history: climate change and health care reform. Some Democrats complained openly that it was political malpractice to give a Republican governor such a huge victory on “Democratic” issues. (In the early seventies, Teddy Kennedy followed a similar line in blocking President Nixon’s national health care reform.) I couldn’t believe that a major issue for the people of California could be derailed because of what amounted to a political snit between two Democratic leaders in the legislature.
It was a major defeat. But I don’t regret the effort, because it wasn’t a defeat for the cause of health care. Our legislation was studied closely in Washington and was one of the models for national health care reform in 2010. Our plan addressed some of the perceived weaknesses in Mitt Romney’s pioneering health care reform in Massachusetts by strengthening the individual mandate and focusing on prevention—key cost containment measures. In effect, our health care reform became America’s, and California led the way.
The world certainly noticed the contrast between the action in California and the gridlock in DC. Time magazine put a picture of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and me on the cover in June over the headline “Who Needs Washington?” The point of the story was that Bloomberg’s city and my state were doing the big things that Washington failed to do. Washington had rejected the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming, but in California we passed America’s first cap on greenhouse gases. The administration had rejected stem cell research, but in California we’d invested $3 billion to promote it. The administration turned down our request for money to repair our water system’s levees, but we’d pushed through billions of dollars in bonds to protect the levees and start rebuilding our infrastructure. I told Time, “All the great ideas are coming from local governments. We’re not going to wait for Big Daddy to take care of us.”
Bloomberg and I both understood the power of reaching across borders. In May he chaired the second climate summit of mayors of more than thirty of the world’s largest cities, with the aim of slashing carbon emissions. That summer he and I allied with Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, to form Building America’s Future Educational Fund, a nonprofit to promote a new era of US investment in infrastructure. And I was already making a series of pacts with other countries and states in the areas of trade and climate change. After our state passed the greenhouse gas cap in the fall of 2006, which included the toughest-ever fuel-efficiency standards for passenger cars registered in our state, we signed a climate alliance with the province of Ontario, Canada, just across the river from Detroit. This infuriated some of the automakers’ groups, and a Republican congressman in Detroit even put up a billboard that said: “Arnold to Detroit: Drop Dead.” I told the media my response: “Arnold to Detroit: Get off your butt!”
My willingness to work across party lines alienated conservative Republicans. If they thought I wasn’t really a Republican for taking on climate change, they really lost it when I took on health care reform. In September I opened a party conference near Palm Springs by taking another shot at narrow partisanship.
“We are dying at the box office,” I told my fellow Republicans. “We are not filling the seats. Our party has lost the middle, and we will not regain true political power in California until we get it back. I am of the Reagan view that we should not go off the cliff with flags flying.” I noted that I had learned this the hard way in 2005, when the unions rallied voters to crush my ballot initiatives.
“The road to our comeback is clear,” I said. “The California Republican Party should be a right-of-center party that occupies the broad middle of California. That is lush, green, abandoned political space that can be ours.” I closed with a pledge to work hard to help the party achieve this. But the speech went over with a thud. Polite applause, nothing more. They didn’t like the lush, green center; they wanted to be out on the cold, mean fringe.
The next speaker was Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a right-winger. He pooh-poohed climate change, condemned infrastructure projects as runaway government spending, and declared that the Republican Party was on a roll. The audience went wild. With the 2008 presidential election just a year away, I wondered if Ronald Reagan was prophetic: “rolling off the cliff with flags flying” was just where the Republicans were headed.
CHAPTER 28
The Real Life of a Governator
BESIDES BEING GOLDEN AND prosperous, California is disaster prone. Our geography and climate make us unusually vulnerable to fires, floods, mudslides, droughts, and, of course, earthquakes.
Given the frequency of such events, I had to assume that some kind of natural disaster would happen on my watch. Our firefighters, police forces, and other first responders were among the best in the world, but for me it wasn’t enough just to meet their commanders or read the disaster plans. I drove our excellent secretary for Health and Human Services, Kim Belshé, crazy with my questions.
What if we had a pandemic in LA, and ten thousand people needed to be hospitalized? How would the hospitals respond? What was their ability to set up tents, with beds, oxygen tanks, and a clean environment? Where were the tents? Where were the beds? Where would they get doctors and nurses? Did they have lists of retired doctors and nurses who could be called back in? Had we tested these lists ourselves?
After the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005, everyone was painfully aware of the failure of the government’s response, and I was determined that no such thing would happen here. I knew that the action-hero governor would not get away with failure on this front. This meant that we had to step up our drills and exercises. Even when acting in a movie, I would not shoot a stunt if I hadn’t rehearsed it a minimum of ten times. So how could I expect an emergency response to succeed if we haven’t rehearsed the scenarios of fires, floods, and earthquakes? And what if you have an earthquake that triggers a major fire? Now you’re in a situation where people can’t get around, and you have the fires, and the fire station is hit too, and the doors are jammed so the truck can’t come out. The communication systems are disrupted. What now?
This was so ingrained in me that even before Katrina, in 2004, I started a statewide exercise we called Golden Guardian. It was a massive preparedness test for every possible disaster and terrorist attack. We tested everything: planning, procedures, communications, evacuation routes, hospital readiness, and federal, state, and local cooperation. Each year we planned for a different type of emergency. The first year, it was a terrorist attack using “dirty” bombs designed to contaminate multiple ports and airports up and down the state with radioactivity. Other years, we tested for massive earthquakes, floods, and more terrorist attacks. These were the largest, most comprehensive emergency response exercises in the country, involving literally thousands of participants statewide. Each took years to plan. Matt Bettenhausen, our emergency services chief, appreciated this fixation of mine. “How great is it to have a boss who says practice, practice, practice?” he said.
One year, I was getting briefed on the next Golden Guardian, which was to focus on a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Southern California. The briefer explained that a California Highway Patrol helicopter was supposed to pick me up and take me to a situation room down in Orange County, where the senior people would converge. “The earthquake will happen at five forty-five, and we’ll pick you up at six,” he said. This got me thinking. I asked, “How do you know that the earthquake is going to happen at five forty-five?”
“That’s the schedule. They want everyone together down south.”
I didn’t say anything more. I thought, “This is bogus. How do I know we’re really prepared, when we ‘prepare’ for a preparedness dri
ll?” So that morning I got up at four o’clock and called the Highway Patrol. “The earthquake just happened,” I said. “The clock is running on this exercise.”
You have no idea what an explosion this caused. The CHP and the US Department of Homeland Security freaked out. Everybody had to scramble. They ended up doing a great job, and the exercise exposed some ways the system could break down, but the senior Homeland Security guy was pretty irritated. “I can’t believe you didn’t give me a heads-up,” he told me later when we had a chance to talk.
“We’re not out to embarrass anybody,” I said. “But we’ve got to know where we fall short when we have no notice.” We agreed in the future to gradually tighten the lead time on exercises and to tell participants, “Last time we gave you twelve hours’ notice; this time we’ll give you six.”
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All our preparation paid off in late 2007, when particularly severe wildfires broke out up and down the state. The worst were in the south, near San Diego, where despite the firefighters’ best efforts, the blazes were spreading, and there were predictions of hurricane-force winds. On the third day of the fires, Monday, October 22, I called my staff for a briefing, as I usually did at six in the morning. They told me that large areas of San Diego were now in danger, and the order had gone out to evacuate a half million people. A half million people! That’s a population the size of New Orleans before Katrina and probably the largest one ever forced out of their homes in California history. Already, thousands were headed toward Qualcomm Stadium, which we’d designated as the main gathering point for evacuees with no place else to stay.
“We’re going down there,” I said. Instead of leaving that morning for Sacramento, I used my office in Santa Monica as a jumping-off point and started making phone calls while my team assembled there. I called San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders, a former police chief, and made plans to meet at the stadium later in the day. Bettenhausen, talking to commanders on the ground, reported that residents were responding to our evacuation message as we’d hoped. The order was designed to convey the two things you needed to know most if your home was in a fire’s path: first, when the police tell you to leave, grab your stuff and go, because a wildfire can spread faster than a person can run; second, not only would we fight to protect your home from the fires, but also the police would patrol your neighborhoods to keep looters away.
We expected ten thousand or more people at Qualcomm Stadium. I figured that under the circumstances, no one would be thinking about things such as diapers and baby formula and dog food. So I made a list and called the head of the California Grocers Association to ask if stores in the region could deliver those items to Qualcomm immediately. He was eager to pitch in.
Then I called the White House and briefed President Bush. Up until this point, we’d had a professional but guarded relationship. President Bush was always available to talk, and while we did not always agree on what the federal government could do for California, I learned quickly that if I raised only one issue at a time, I would get a fair hearing. It wasn’t surprising that I had a warmer relationship with his father. With George H. W. Bush, I was more of an admiring protégé, soaking up everything I could learn. George W. and I were almost exactly the same age, and we both had to represent interests that were sometimes at odds.
But when the fires raged, President Bush was incredibly impressive. He’d learned lessons about emergency responsiveness the hard way during Katrina, and he asked the kinds of questions that only someone who’d been through a disaster would know to ask. He understood that the federal government might not initially move quickly enough, out of a natural need to save responders for other emergencies throughout the country. President Bush told me that his chief of staff would get us everything we needed and that I should call him, the president, directly if there was anything I wanted him to know. I was skeptical, so I called him back forty-five minutes later to ask a question, and he picked up the phone again.
Within three days, President Bush was on the scene. He shook hands with firefighters, visited homes, held press conferences, and peppered me and the fire chiefs with questions. He showed real leadership.
My own chief of staff, meanwhile, reported that the National Guard was on its way. Susan was staying in Sacramento to coordinate the governor’s office response with Dan Dunmoyer, the cabinet secretary, and I’d directed her to have one thousand National Guard troops pulled off a border-security operation and sent to Qualcomm Stadium. She called the adjutant general to say we needed the troops. The guy had obviously never encountered Susan in commando mode before, and he made the mistake of insisting on paperwork. “Okay,” he told her. “We need a mission order.”
“The mission order is to get one thousand men off the border and get them to Qualcomm stat,” she repeated.
“But I need a mission order. It has to say—”
“Here’s your fucking mission order!” she exploded. “Get a thousand troops to Qualcomm. I want them on the move within the hour.” The general got us the troops.
Then she turned to the cots that people would obviously need that night. Thousands of cots, pillows, and blankets had been stockpiled in the region for emergencies. “They’re on their way,” officials kept saying. But she and Dan kept calling and discovered the supplies hadn’t arrived.
“That’s not good enough,” she said, “We need to know they are on the trucks. I want to know exactly where they are en route right now. Give me the cell phone numbers for the drivers.” Hours went by, and the cots couldn’t be found. Rather than wait, we called Walmart and other giant retailers in the state. Later that day, a California National Guard C-130 cargo plane crammed with thousands of donated cots flew out of Moffett Field in Mountain View to San Diego.
Moves like these are not in any disaster response manuals. I saw what happened during Katrina when officials at every level waited for someone else to take action—because that’s what the manuals say you’re supposed to do. “Every disaster is local,” the experts told me. State officials are supposed to wait until local officials ask for assistance; federal officials wait until state officials ask for help, and so on. “Bullshit,” I said. “That’s how thousands of people were left stranded on rooftops in New Orleans. That is not going to happen here.” My rule was simple: “I want action. If you need to do something that’s not in the manual, throw the manual out. Do whatever you have to do. Just get it done.”
Once my team was assembled, we headed for San Diego. We could see the gray haze from the fires over one hundred miles away as soon as the plane took off. That afternoon, I would fly in a helicopter to visit the fire bases and see the blazes firsthand. But communicating with the public was the first concern. I met Mayor Sanders and other local leaders outside Qualcomm, and we went around as a team: first, walking through the hallways and the parking lot to greet the evacuees, emergency workers, and volunteers streaming in, and then talking to the media.
Fortunately, I’d been well prepared on how to communicate during a fire emergency by my predecessor. During the transition period, Gray Davis had graciously contacted me in the midst of a significant but much smaller fire. He asked if I wanted to accompany him while he met firefighters, visited homes, talked to families, and addressed the media. I saw how he absorbed a briefing, and the way he thanked firefighters for their service, while trying not to distract them from their mission. He even served them breakfast as they were coming off the night shift. He would go from home to home, comforting victims, asking them if there was anything the state needed to do. He was a source of strength.
That time we spent together smoothed the transition and proved that we could work together, even though we had battled during the campaign. More importantly, Gray showed me how a governor takes action rather than just phoning in from Sacramento.
In San Diego we started holding regular press conferences so that people would understand that there were no secrets. We spelled out everything step-by-step, saying things like, “We have si
xty-mile-per-hour winds, and the flames can jump a mile and a half at a time. But we are going to get this under control.” We sent a clear signal that federal, state, and local responders were all working together, but we were also quick to admit mistakes. Our rule was, “Never bullshit.” When cots got lost, we acknowledged it. It was great to have a guy with Bettenhausen’s experience and sense of humor on hand. He stayed glued by my side, keeping us in touch with the fire chiefs and commanders at the fires. Although the news often wasn’t good, their voices were never frantic, only disciplined and firm: “Governor, we have a major problem. We just lost fifty more homes. We’ve got three firefighters injured, and we’re repositioning our men. We’re evacuating this other area, and CHP and the sheriff are involved, to close off the roads and protect people’s homes . . .”
We kept open communications with the commanders and always asked what more they needed, and we used their information to give regular public updates.
We heard that the winds had shifted and that the residents of a nursing home in the fire’s path were being evacuated to a makeshift shelter at the Del Mar racetrack. Del Mar was set up as a shelter for horses, not people. It was already evening, but my instincts told me to see it for myself; that it could be a particularly dangerous situation for the elderly residents.
It was sunset by the time we arrived. Close to three hundred patients had been evacuated. I hated what we found there: old folks parked in wheelchairs with IV bags, propped up against walls, lying on mats on cold cement. A few people were crying, but most were silent and still. I felt like I was walking through a morgue. I put a blanket on one old fellow and folded up a jacket to use as a pillow under a lady’s head. None of these people had their medication; some needed kidney dialysis. A nurse-practitioner and Navy Reserve commander named Paul Russo had bravely taken charge of the scene and, with the help of fellow volunteers, was struggling to find hospital beds. It was clear we had to get help or some of the elderly people weren’t going to make it. Immediately, Daniel Zingale and I and a couple of others got on the phone and started calling ambulance companies and hospitals to move the sickest people right away. We stayed a few hours until we were sure progress was being made, and that night we came back twice to check on Paul and his volunteers and the patients who remained. By the next day, we were able to get the National Guard to set up a military field hospital nearby.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 61