Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Eunice and Sarge, who had watched it on TV, joined Maria and me for breakfast at the hotel the next morning. Eunice had really gotten a kick out of my inclusiveness theme. “The way you made it sound, I’m a Republican!” she wisecracked.

Back in California, my political opponents tried to portray me as a bully in part because of my popularity. But I went to great lengths to charm the legislators during that first year and encourage them to work with me. I’d call their mothers on their birthdays. I’d invite them to schmooze in my smoking tent in the atrium outside my office. The tent was the size of a cozy living room, furnished with comfortable rattan chairs, a glass-topped conference table with a beautiful humidor, lamps, and an Astroturf floor. Photographs hung along the walls, suspended by wires from the metal framework. I’d set up the tent so that I would have a place to smoke my stogies (since smoking is forbidden in California’s public buildings), but people nicknamed it my deal-making tent.

I paid special attention to leaders like John Burton, the president pro tempore of the state senate, and Herb Wesson, the assembly speaker. John was a crusty San Francisco Democrat who had actually boycotted my inauguration. He wore round wire-rim glasses and had a bushy white moustache. The first time we met, he was barely willing to shake hands. So I sent flowers. Once we got to know each other a bit, it turned out that we had things in common. He knew a little German because he’d been stationed in Europe in the army. (He was fascinated by the great nineteenth-century Austrian diplomat Metternich.) Often we disagreed, especially in the beginning. But eventually we found that our views were similar on major social issues like health insurance and foster care, and we got to a place where we could say, “Forget the big fighting in public; let’s find things we can work on.” We became effective collaborators and even friends; he’d drop by the tent sometimes just to bring me apple strudel and Schlag for my espresso.

Herb Wesson, the assembly speaker, was an easygoing five-foot-five guy from LA who would tease me about whether I was actually six foot two, like my bio says. I teased him back by calling him my Danny De-Vito and sending him a pillow so he could sit taller in a chair. I didn’t get to know him as well as I got to know John, because he was nearing his term limit. His successor, a smart ex-union leader named Fabian Núñez, also from LA, would in time become one of my closest allies among the Democrats.

I also formed a solid relationship with the new minority leader of the assembly, Kevin McCarthy. He was a high-energy thirty-nine-year-old from Bakersfield whose district included Antelope Valley, where my supersonic airport would have been. Kevin got his start as an entrepreneur who opened his first business, a sandwich shop, at age nineteen to help pay for college, and we clicked as fellow businessmen. He’s now the majority whip of the US House of Representatives.

Turning on the charm with the lawmakers helped get my reform ideas into the legislative debate and produced some agreements that were an important start. But after trying a bunch of different maneuvers, I found that what gave me by far the greatest leverage was the ballot-initiative process. Because of my big approval ratings, I could threaten to go directly to the voters and thus pressure the legislature to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.

That was how we ended the abuse of workers’ comp. I’d made it one of the top issues in my campaign, because it was poisoning our economy and driving businesses out of state. As in every state, employers in California are required to carry insurance that pays medical expenses and lost wages for workers who are injured on the job. But in California, premiums had doubled to twice the national average. How did that happen? Mainly because the laws had been written so loosely by the Democrats that it was easy for people to abuse the system. I knew a guy who’d hurt his leg skiing one weekend. He waited to go to the doctor until after work on Monday and said, “I hurt my leg working.” When businesses challenged bogus claims like these, the worker always won. I also knew a guy at the gym who was squatting four hundred pounds. He told me, “I’m on workers’ comp leave.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You’re squatting more weight than me!”

“I needed to take care of my family,” he said.

Unions, lawyers, and doctors had prevailed on the legislature to relax the rules so much that an employee could play the system and get treatment for just about any ailment—not only work-related injuries—and be fully reimbursed with no cap or even a copay. This amounted to free, unlimited health care and sick leave with pay, all paid for by the private sector. It was a backdoor way for the Democrats to get what they wanted. John Burton once came straight out and told me, “Workers’ comp is our version of universal health care.” Which is another way of saying that the law was written to be abused.

I became something of an expert on the subject because Warren Buffett was in insurance, and he told me long before I ran for governor how screwed up California was. I had allies in the business community draft a ballot initiative that would put an end to this. The initiative was much tougher than parallel legislation that I supported in the legislature—it took more away from workers. But that was the strategy. If workers, attorneys, and doctors feared the initiative, they might be willing to give more ground in a legislative deal.

I sold the initiative hard. Whenever negotiations with the legislature bogged down, I’d leave Sacramento and travel the state to help gather signatures on the initiative in Costco stores.

The public found this very entertaining, and it succeeded. The Democrats and workers’ groups did get scared, and they struck a deal on legislation that would save employers big money on their premiums. The Democrats hated being threatened with an initiative, though, and they dragged out negotiations, offering a few more reforms each time I showed them a new stack of signatures we’d collected. We reached the agreement just as the number of signatures on the initiative hit the one million mark—which would have been enough to qualify it for the ballot. Applying leverage had worked. Because of our reform, within the next few years, premiums dropped by 66 percent, and a total of $70 billion went back to California businesses in the first four years.

Still, the budget itself remained badly broken. And when I sent the legislature a $103 billion proposal for the fiscal year beginning on July 1, 2004, they stalled for more than a month of pointless negotiations so that the budget was late. July 1 came and went, and then a week, and then another week. This was exactly what I’d promised the voters we’d avoid, and I suddenly remembered what those previous governors had warned me about the day I was inaugurated: you’re going to spend a lot of summers solo and sweating in Sacramento. That didn’t seem to have worked too well for them, so I took my great poll numbers and went out to the people. Speaking to hundreds of shoppers in a Southern California megamall, I made the case that our lawmakers were part of a political system that was “out of shape, that is out of date, that is out of touch, and that is definitely out of control. They cannot have the guts to come out there in front of you and say, ‘I don’t want to represent you. I want to represent those special interests: the unions, the trial lawyers.’ ”

I don’t regret having said any of that. But in the next breath, I went over the top: “I call them ‘girlie men.’ They should get back to the table, and they should finish the budget.”