She Can’t Play by the Rules

It was Inauguration Day in Washington, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his top aide bumped into Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld invited the governor to visit him at the Pentagon. Schwarzenegger agreed and even said he wouldn’t trouble the secretary by talking about possible base closings in California.

The aide, Patricia Clarey, jumped in: I’ll talk to you about base closings, she said.

“You must be the chief of staff,” Rumsfeld answered.

A few days later, Clarey got a friendly note from the Pentagon chief along with a copy of “Rumsfeld’s Rules,” a political survival guide based partly on his years as chief of staff for President Ford.

But Schwarzenegger is no Ford. When it comes to working for the most famous governor in America, there is no guidebook. A new set of rules is required, and day by day, Clarey is writing it.

Impulsive to the core, her boss blurts out ideas whether they’re ripe or not. He agrees on a policy direction, then changes course. He sends conflicting messages: At a news conference last year, Schwarzenegger described legislators as his “partners,” then said he wanted them busted down to a part-time body.

Clarey’s main role is to impose order on the operation and keep the movie-star governor focused. In a voice brimming with respect, Schwarzenegger describes her as a “control freak” and says the two complement each other. He casts himself as the sunny outsider, Clarey as the realistic insider who appreciates the limits of what government can do. Both are necessary, he says.

“Having someone who’s really experienced like Pat and then someone like me who sees no limits and no obstacles and is optimistic, together that is a good combination,” Schwarzenegger said.

Sixteen months into the job, Clarey, 51, has been by turns star-struck and exhausted.

“What’s it like? It’s fascinating every day,” she said in an interview. “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done.”

A stray remark by her boss and she’s forced to scramble.

At a fitness seminar in Columbus, Ohio, last month, Schwarzenegger took a question about toning calf muscles. He thanked a woman who told him she was “burning calories” just by seeing him onstage. Someone asked about child obesity, and -- surprise! -- Schwarzenegger said he wanted to ban junk food from school vending machines.

That made national news: Arnold wants to get rid of the candy. It was picked up by cable TV news shows; there was a mention on the Drudge Report website. Reporters began calling.

But government is not so easy. A bill by state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) to rid schools of junk food has passed one committee but is pending before another -- a long way to go before a law is on the books.

Clarey phoned her staff in Sacramento, waking up an aide, for a briefing on the legislation. She worked the phones before boarding a private plane to New York with the governor. That night, she took press calls over dinner at a Manhattan restaurant, explaining that it’s difficult even to define the term “junk food” and that schools may be reluctant to retool vending machines that provide revenue.

Clarey’s work can be grueling.

During budget negotiations, Schwarzenegger routinely stays in the office late into the night closing deals with legislators. He crisscrosses time zones for campaign rallies, fundraising luncheons and bodybuilding tournaments. He blitzes Washington for meetings with congressmen and Cabinet secretaries.

When Schwarzenegger helicoptered from Israel to Jordan last year for lunch with the king, Clarey was with him. And she was part of the entourage that squeezed through the crowds in Columbus, past young women in bikinis selling dietary supplements and shirtless men testing new tanning sprays.

At 5 feet, 4 inches (“But I act much taller”), she was dwarfed by hulking security guards escorting the governor. She gamely kept up, a big bag slung over her shoulder, her wavy brown hair askew. At the end of the day, she kidded her boss, “You’ve totally worn me out.”

Not totally. From the first, rumors have swirled that Clarey, who scarcely knew Schwarzenegger, wouldn’t last long in the job. But she has held on.

“I’m totally committed to her,” Schwarzenegger said in an interview. “ ... Five times a day I see her and she asks me, ‘What can I do for you?’ And ‘Is there anything else?’ She sits here in pretty much every meeting we have, and she absorbs it and takes it in. And when she goes out, she has to turn this -- what we do in here, what we talk about -- into reality.”

Schwarzenegger is the second governor Clarey has served up close. For much of the 1990s, she was deputy chief of staff to Pete Wilson, an ex-Marine who ran a disciplined shop. She vetted the paperwork he read, the briefings he received, the people he saw.

That centralized authority doesn’t work with Schwarzenegger. A few lower-level aides who’ve known Schwarzenegger for years have influence with him, as does a corps of outside advisors. Schwarzenegger talks to them, they talk to him and the open channel can make it easy to bypass Clarey. Rule No. 1: Let Arnold improvise.

For example, when the governor wanted to promote Terry Tamminen from environmental protection chief to Cabinet secretary, Clarey was skeptical, according to people familiar with the matter. A self-described “tree hugger,” Tamminen has written a manuscript calling for an end to the oil age. Clarey has worked for Chevron and Ashland Oil. Tamminen’s resume included stints as a pool cleaner and sheep rancher; and he had never held a job with responsibilities of the scale that Schwarzenegger wanted to give him.

But the governor liked him and made the promotion.

“He has so many universes of his own life that he knows a lot of people I don’t know,” said Clarey.

She adds: “In this job, you have to have a comfort zone where you can say, ‘I don’t agree with you.’ He ultimately makes every decision. But I feel very comfortable telling him when I agree. Or telling him, ‘Listen to this person. Have one more conversation.’

“And I’m very comfortable when he tells me, ‘I’ve decided. It’s over,’ ” she said.

Looming over the entire operation is First Lady Maria Shriver. Assertive and protective, she has entree to every corner of government. Rule No. 2: Don’t neglect Maria.

George P. Shultz, a Schwarzenegger advisor and secretary of state under President Reagan, said that when he wanted the governor to hire Tom Campbell as finance director last year, one of the calls he made was to Shriver.

When Shriver wasn’t happy about the way aides were depicting cuts in health and human services, she held a meeting to talk about how to better explain the issue to the public.

Clarey regularly briefs Shriver. “I don’t like her surprised by something we’re doing,” Clarey said.

Clarey’s office is prime real estate. Through an oversized window she can see into the quarters of some of the senior staff and peer directly into the smoking tent where Schwarzenegger conducts many of his private meetings, cigar in hand. His office is right across the hall.

When the staff piles into the governor’s Cabinet room for a meeting, one seat is left empty: the one directly opposite Schwarzenegger at the other end of the long mahogany conference table. That’s reserved for Clarey.

The geography keeps her in constant eye contact with Schwarzenegger so that Clarey, who majored in psychology at Union College in New York, can watch his expression and pick up any subtle message he might want to send her way.

Perhaps her most important task is serving as a back channel to the Legislature. Democratic leaders like her and approach her for insight into whether a governor who is publicly deriding them as “girlie men” might be privately willing to bargain.

Last year, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) was frustrated because the governor vetoed six of the seven major bills he filed. He and Schwarzenegger had been engaged in an escalating rhetorical fight that continues to this day.

There was one Nunez bill left that the governor hadn’t yet acted on -- a measure that provided tenant protections to homeless people and others staying at residential hotels. Nunez went to Clarey to see if she could get him to sign just one.

“I called her and said, ‘Pat, what’s going on? He’s vetoing all my bills.’ ” Nunez recalls. “She said, ‘Let me get back to you.’ Then she called to say, ‘He’s going to be fine with the bill.’ ”

“He can put on a good poker face,” Nunez said of Schwarzenegger. “Sometimes you go to Pat to get the full scoop.

” ... And Pat is honest. Sometimes she’ll say, ‘I have no idea what the governor is going to do.’ ”

“In many ways,” said state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), “she is everything that Arnold isn’t, which is a strength she brings to the job. There isn’t flash. She’s not flippant. She’s unflappable and serious and has a good rapport with a lot of Democrats.”

Even the most irascible Democrat.

“When Arnold gets off his dumb lines, I would call Pat and say, ‘Has the man totally lost his senses?’ ” said John Burton, the former Senate president pro tem who retired last year. “And she would say, ‘Welcome to my world. Go ask him.’ ”

Clarey and the governor were mostly strangers when he jumped into the 2003 recall campaign. They’d met during the Wilson era, when Schwarzenegger would occasionally drop in at the governor’s office.

At the start of the recall campaign, Clarey, who is divorced, was making a good living at the Woodland Hills managed care firm Health Net -- a company the Schwarzenegger administration fined $250,000 this year for underpaying doctors by $7 million. Clarey’s 2003 financial disclosure statement shows she earned more than $100,000 in salary as vice president for government relations and the same amounts in stock options and bonus.

When Schwarzenegger announced he was running, Bob White, who had been chief of staff to Wilson, called and invited her to dinner in Brentwood.

“By the way,” White told her during the meal, “we’re going to drive down the street.”

The destination turned out to be the Schwarzenegger mansion. Waiting were the candidate and Shriver. As the group sat on couches and chairs outside, Schwarzenegger told of trying to get a commitment from Shultz to support his candidacy. Shultz asked Schwarzenegger to explain in 30 seconds why he should back him.

“Because I won’t spend more than we have,” Schwarzenegger said.

“I’m in,” Shultz said.

So was Clarey.

After the election, some advisors wanted Schwarzenegger to find an outsized personality for the chief of staff job. Soft-spoken and with no public profile, Clarey wasn’t an obvious fit.

Other candidates came with a formidable political base: Bob Hertzberg, who recently ran for mayor of Los Angeles, was a former speaker of the Assembly. Jim Brulte was then the Senate Republican leader, but he was legally barred from serving until his term expired.

Schwarzenegger called a former governor for advice.

“He was asking for suggestions,” said Wilson. “I think she had clearly been in his mind. And he was thinking of some other people as well.... And I recommended Pat. I said, ‘You’re not going to do any better.’ ”

Politically, Clarey’s appointment proved valuable. After his victory, Schwarzenegger was still coping with allegations that he had mistreated or groped women over a period of decades. The Clarey appointment showed that women would assume senior roles in his government.

She came to the job with a long Republican pedigree. A native New Yorker, Clarey worked in the Department of the Interior under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Her older brother, Donald Clarey, works for New York Gov. George Pataki as a housing official.

Leon Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff under President Clinton and now co-chairs a panel Schwarzenegger created to prevent military base closings, said Clarey’s job “can be at moments a real high, because you’re seeing someone who has a lot of star power.... You can really ride a wave of enthusiasm that is rare in politics.

“At the same time,” Panetta said, “ ... the chief of staff’s job is to keep both feet on the ground and make sure that someone is asking the questions: Are we doing the right thing? Are we in fact telling him what he might not want to hear?”

Plenty of opportunity for that of late. Nurses, teachers, firefighters and a host of consumer and labor groups are furious with Schwarzenegger over his plans to privatize pensions and scale back a promised increase in education funding. They’re mounting protests wherever Schwarzenegger goes.

The governor’s once-buoyant approval ratings have dipped precipitously. And an ambitious agenda that Schwarzenegger unveiled in his state-of-the-state speech in January has run into trouble.

Last week, he abandoned a major piece of it -- a proposal to convert the state’s pension system to 401(k)-style accounts.

Does Clarey tell him what’s going wrong?

“Yes, I do that,” Clarey says.

At the same time, Clarey has struggled to understand her boss.

Jack Coffey, who manages state relations for ChevronTexaco, says there have been times when he would talk to her and other aides before going in to see Schwarzenegger and it was clear “they didn’t really have a feel for” what position he might take.

So she’s become something of a student of Schwarzenegger, trying to read his moods and plumb the roots of his celebrity.

“The more I understand him, the better it is for both of us,” she said. The governor says she’s succeeded. “She has figured me out,” Schwarzenegger said. “That’s the key thing in this job.”

They’ve developed a routine. The governor is the impetuous one; she’s the straight arrow, entertained by his antics.

There was a moment at the White House last month when it looked as if Schwarzenegger might be swiping a bust of Abe Lincoln.

The governor, Clarey and the rest of his entourage were leaving after a session with President Bush’s political advisor, Karl Rove. Before reaching the door, Schwarzenegger grabbed the statue off a credenza and started walking off with it.

“When you don’t get a gift, you take a gift,” Schwarzenegger deadpanned.

Secret Service agents looked startled. What should they do? Wrestle the 16th president from the governor of California?

“It was a stunning moment for people who live in a serious environment,” said Clarey.

Watching the scene unfold, she laughed until she was near tears. Schwarzenegger, smiling broadly, returned the artwork. Together they left the West Wing and drove off. Rule No. 3: Let Arnold be Arnold.

“We moved on to the next thing,” Clarey said, “which in the world of Arnold could be anything. You walk out the door and you don’t know where you’re going next.”