Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Maria put aside her reluctance and really dove in. When she came into campaign headquarters, you could see she was in her element. She joined in meetings on everything from strategy to slogans. She offered insights and suggestions, sometimes to the staff and sometimes to me privately.

She made one basic suggestion that somehow we’d managed to overlook: she advised us to open a campaign office on street level, so people could actually stop in. “You can’t just stay up here on the third floor,” she said. “People like to be able to walk by and see things are happening. They like to talk and drink coffee and get leaflets that they can go hand out.” We found a large vacant storefront nearby, and the landlord was willing to lend it to us for the campaign. We decorated it with flags, posters, and balloons. Then we held a grand opening party, which was packed. I’d seen movie crowds and bodybuilding crowds and after-school crowds—but there was a different kind of excitement in this scene. This was a real political campaign.

In September Maria and I flew to Chicago to go on the season premiere of The Oprah Winfrey Show . I was delighted to appear because Republicans had stupidly been alienating women, and it was crucial to get them on board. I especially needed to court women because my movie audiences had always skewed heavily male. I had progressive views on issues that are particularly important to female voters—education reform, health care reform, the environment, raising the minimum wage—and Oprah was the perfect vehicle for making my case.

Meanwhile, big-time Democrats were campaigning for Gray Davis. Bill Clinton spent a whole day with him in Watts and South Central LA. Senator John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton all showed up. The only key Democrat who didn’t appear was Teddy.

Both President Bush and his father offered to campaign with me, but I declined graciously. I wanted to be the little guy taking on the Gray Davis machine.

Maria followed the polls like a pro. She tracked very closely, for example, how the ultraconservative Tom McClintock, a California state senator, kept chipping away at my support among Republicans. We had staff members constantly slicing and dicing the data too, of course. But Maria picked up on factors that didn’t show up in the numbers. She startled me at one point by saying, “There’s nobody major attacking you. That’s a good sign.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. How could the absence of attacks mean anything?

She explained that if people thought I was crazy, or so bogus that my getting elected would hurt the state, the opposition would be much broader and fiercer. “You’re only getting attacked by the far left and far right,” she pointed out. “That means you’re accepted as a viable candidate.”

What the polls did show by mid-September was that Gray Davis was toast; voters were leaning almost two to one in favor of booting him out.

But the number one contender to replace him wasn’t me, it was Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante. He was the choice of 32 percent of the voters surveyed. I was at 28 percent, Tom McClintock was at 18 percent, and the remaining 22 percent of voters surveyed were either undecided or splintered among our 132 rivals in the circus.

Bustamante was a tricky opponent for me—not because he had great charisma but because he appealed to Democrats who didn’t like Gray Davis. He promoted himself as the safest, most experienced alternative, with the not-very-catchy campaign slogan “No on the recall, Yes on Bustamante.” In other words, I’m not here to undermine my fellow Democrat Gray Davis, but in case you kick him out, pick me!

By now our campaign was in full swing. With my private jet, I could cover a lot of ground in one day. We would travel from airport to airport, and sometimes the rally would be right there, with a thousand people in a hangar. We’d fly in, park the plane, I’d walk to the hangar, pump up the crowd, and then fly to the next city. We also did crazy stunts, like driving around in a campaign bus named “Running Man” and dropping a wrecking ball onto a car to symbolize what I would do to Gray Davis’s vehicle registration fee if I were elected.

Every day, I learned more about policy and government. My press conferences went better: I learned how to compress my preparation for big speeches from a week to one night, and I was faster on my feet, too. Our TV ads were playing really well. My favorite one started with a slot machine labeled “California Indian Casinos,” where you see the number 120,000,000 come up on the slots—$120 million was the amount the tribes had contributed to political campaigns in the Gray Davis administration. Then I come on camera and say, “All the other major candidates take their money and pander to them. I don’t play that game. Give me your vote, and I guarantee you things will change.” People were shocked that I was taking on the gaming tribes. They thought, “He’s the real Terminator.”

Rather than try to sway Bustamante’s partisans, we wanted to attract the millions of independents and undecided voters. The best opportunity to do that was the September 24 debate, just two weeks before the election. For the first and only time, all five of the major candidates to replace Gray Davis were going to mix it up on stage: me, Cruz Bustamante, State Senator Tom McClintock, Peter Camejo of the Green Party, and the TV pundit Arianna Huffington.

The prep for the debate was funny. We cast people from our staff to play my opponents. All the candidates were given the questions in advance, but the debate itself would be open, with participants allowed to speak up when they wished. We worked on policy, every possible attack or rebuttal:

“How can you be for the environment if you fly a private plane?”

“You make thirty million dollars for a movie. How can you be in touch with the poor?”

“Your movies are violent. How can you say you support law enforcement?”

I also had to be ready to attack. I knew I couldn’t beat McClintock at policy—he was a wonk—and I couldn’t outjabber Arianna. Humor was my chance to eliminate them. So we made up one-liners and commissioned jokes from John Max, who writes for Leno, and rehearsed so they’d be at my fingertips. I had a line ready if Arianna challenged me on taxes. If she got overly dramatic, I could say, “I know you’re Greek” or “Switch to decaf.”

We rented a studio and practiced, sitting in a V formation facing where the audience would be. It was reps, reps, reps for three days. I reminded myself: don’t get caught up on detail. Be likable, be humorous. Let the others hang themselves. Lure them into saying stupid things.

The event attracted a huge amount of media. When I arrived, the entire parking lot was full. It looked like a Lakers game. There was a sea of media vans and trailers, and satellite dishes from Japanese, French, and British TV, as well as from all the US networks. It was scary and wild to have so much attention focused on one event.

We were not allowed to bring notes as we took our places onstage. Sixty seconds before we started, I did a mental spot check. “Health care: what would you change?” I quizzed myself. But all of a sudden I could remember absolutely nothing about health care! “Okay,” I thought, “let’s go with the pension issue.” But my mind was a blank. Totally frozen. Once or twice in movies I’d experienced a brain lock like this, but it was very rare. And in movies, you can always ask for your lines. Luckily, I still had my sense of humor. “This will be interesting,” I thought.

The debate started with each candidate addressing the question of whether the recall should be held in the first place. We all agreed that it should, except for Bustamante, who called it “a terrible idea,” which emphasized his awkward position of opposing the recall while promoting his own “just in case” campaign.