Leadership and Crisis (22 page)

Here in Louisiana, when the storms have come, we have seen the incomparable generosity of the American spirit. I’ll never forget what I saw: people standing on rooftops begging to be rescued. Hospitals meant to save lives, suddenly helpless to preserve them. Families torn apart for all time by the relentless force of the rising waters. A monumental failure of government contributed mightily to what we saw during those grim days in 2005. We will see other storms come to our
state but, as governor, I’ve worked to make sure those tragic events never visit Louisiana again. I’ve also put everyone in the state on notice that all of us, as individuals, must take greater responsibility for preparing for the storms life brings us. All of us must be responsible for meeting the needs of the truly disadvantaged, people with physical or mental limitations. People who can take responsibility for themselves should not expect someone else do so. We will help you when catastrophe comes, but you better not sit there and just wait for someone to pull you out when you could climb out, or pick you up when you could stand on your own two feet.

Today we have taxpayer dollars going to banks, investment houses, and automakers, and financial firms that are judged “too big to fail.” Our government is supposed to be a “partner” with these businesses. As one businessman told me, that’s like an alligator having a chicken as a partner for dinner. I believe big government should not be picking and choosing which companies we will bail out or rescue. That political competition lets the best lobbyists determine the winner.

Government’s role is to serve as an objective referee and make sure companies abide by the rules, compete fairly, and obey the law. We don’t want the referee tilting the football game. But when the federal government starts bailing out individual businesses, that’s exactly what it does. Of course, if you think there aren’t enough backroom deals and corruption in Washington now, then let’s give big government officials the chance to pass out more cash, loans, and contracts.

When you give Washington not hundreds of billions, but trillions of dollars to hand out, you create corruption on steroids. Some will use their power and privilege to enrich themselves. Others will enrich their political allies. Either way, with new trillion dollar pots of gold to lust after, I’m sure corruption is growing, even now, in Washington. Consider the
words of Harry Hopkins, who oversaw both the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the distribution of funds from the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) under FDR during the Great Depression. “I thought at first I could be completely non-political,” Hopkins is quoted by Robert E. Sherwood in the definitive
Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History
. “Then they told me I had to be part non-political and part political. I found out that was impossible, at least for me. I finally realized that there was nothing for it but to be all-political.”
¹⁵
When trillions of dollars are sloshing around the Treasury, awaiting direction from the privileged few, we know what will happen: people who walk into public service with nothing will walk out with the taxpayers’ gold in their pockets. And businessmen who walked in with empty pockets will walk out millionaires because of who they knew, not who they served. Look at the list of the most corrupt countries in the world today and you will see that centralized economies are at the top of the list.

In his 1958 book
The Affluent Society
, John Kenneth Galbraith said that with a home, car, television set, and a family member in college, Americans had reached their economic pinnacle. Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich warned us in the 1970s that the immediate future would bring widespread famine, shortages, and despair. He wrote in his book
The Population Bomb
: “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion. ...” In his book
The End of Affluence
, Ehrlich said Congress would be dissolved “during the food riots of the 1980s.”
¹⁶
In 1977 Jimmy Carter warned, “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.” Of course, there were no food riots in America in the 1980s. Our oil reserves expanded, they did not evaporate, despite our still
growing dependence. And at last count there were approximately 6 billion people on earth, including, surprisingly, Paul Ehrlich.

Yet today there are still some people who want to harp on America’s limits. They still say that our best days are behind us. These big government advocates tell us their failures are the best Americans can do. Forget cooking up anything new—let’s just divide the old American pie into smaller, equally unsatisfying pieces.

That is all bunk. It’s not a sunset, but a sunrise, that still starts America’s day.

As Ronald Reagan said, “I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”
¹⁷

Western European nations did not decide one day to embrace what they now call “democratic Socialism.” It has happened little by little, piece by piece, program by program. I’m certainly not suggesting that this European style socialism willfully pursues the economic rationalization and social interventionism of a completely planned economy. I also would never claim that our European friends do not each have many strengths and positive attributes. I am suggesting that they have in many ways taken a turn for the worse over the past sixty years to the degree they have exchanged the dynamic potential of a free people for the false security of a planned society. Perhaps they are happy with their trajectory and direction? Older, less dynamic societies on the downhill side of their national lifespans might be content with redistributing instead of creating. They might be satisfied managing their declines. That is something our country is still too young and promising to do. Our liberty, like our country, is ever-young and prepared to meet the challenges of a new day.

I do not want to see America follow Europe’s trajectory and I do not believe that most Americans do either. I don’t want to see us pay more in taxes, expand our government, erode our freedoms, or become weaker in the world. Americans don’t need to become more like Europe. But we will if we do not change course.

Big government may be broken, but America isn’t broken. Washington may be unable to solve America’s problems, but if we bring real change to Washington there isn’t any problem America can’t solve, any goal we can’t reach, any frontier we can’t conquer. Whatever Americans can dream, we can achieve.

I believe America should remain the greatest country in the world. When I was a kid, that was safe to say and aspire to. Not so today. There are many political leaders in America today who don’t like the sound of that. They cringe at the thought of American exceptionalism and superiority. It strikes them as unsophisticated, unrefined, kind of “cowboyish.” They think our aspirations of leadership are arrogant evidence of a fundamental intolerance of other nations and their cultures. They believe America should be content to settle into our place as just another country in the family of nations. They are ashamed we would seek to be the greatest country in the world.

I am not ashamed. I am proud that America is exceptional. Global leadership is not a responsibility America can discard. It is a responsibility we must cherish. America is the hope of free peoples everywhere. Without American leadership the world around us would be more dangerous and less prosperous. The stronger America is, the safer the world is. We have a moral responsibility to make our country stronger and unashamedly export our ideals of freedom, democracy, and self-determination to all who would fulfill the divinely inspired potential of every living soul on this planet.

And Americans are not victims. When you look in that mirror tomorrow morning, I hope you see what I see: the strength of the greatest country on earth.

CHAPTER 11

REAL CHANGE FOR HEALTHCARE

I magine for a moment you are standing in a quiet hospital room holding your three-month-old son in your arms for what could be the last time.

He is looking up at you with his beautiful, innocent brown eyes. And you stare down into his tiny face and wonder how you, his parent, are so powerless to save him that you need to entrust his life to a complete stranger. Despite having done all you can do, you are scared. And the helplessness you feel doesn’t stop the crushing weight of responsibility that comes with being a parent deeply in love with your new child.

The time has come to hand him over. You are paralyzed; you love him too much to let him go, but your love for him has led you here, to this strange place full of technology and experts—and other scared families. All you want at that moment is for someone to tell you everything will be all right and that your boy is going to be healthy.

But reality sets in. He is in the hospital. He needs help. And there is no other way. You must swallow your fears for the moment—just long enough to gently pass your little boy into the
hands of the anesthesiologist who will prepare him for surgery. No amount of reason can dull the feeling that a part of you is being torn away as she takes your son through the large operating room doors and out of sight.

For me, this was not a hypothetical situation. I was standing in that hospital room in 2004, holding my second child, Shaan, in my arms. And let me tell you—letting him go at that moment was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

We had no reason to suspect there was anything wrong with Shaan when he was born only a few months earlier. The birth had gone smoothly, and he looked like any other healthy baby. But a week later, during a regular checkup, Shaan’s pediatrician detected a heart murmur. Later that morning, we took Shaan to a pediatric cardiologist who diagnosed him with a serious heart defect, which would prevent him from breathing or eating normally without becoming exhausted.

My immediate reaction was that I’d give anything and everything to trade places with Shaan. I was devastated for him, devastated that this innocent little boy had this burden. When we see horrible tragedies happen to other people, we never think it will happen to us or to those we love. Of course, we feel compassion for children afflicted with disease or chronic health problems, and we pray for them and their families. But trust me, it is never truly real until it happens to your own child.

The cardiologist said the problem might fix itself, but if it didn’t—and in Shaan’s case it did not look like it would—he would need life-saving open-heart surgery. The doctor then gave us one of the toughest prescriptions imaginable: waiting. Three grueling months of it. The wait would increase Shaan’s chances of surviving a heart surgery, if he could keep breathing until then. In the meantime, we would have to
watch our son waste away. We watched his strength gradually leave him until he would sleep for hours and it took all his strength just to breathe. We watched his growth slow to a halt as it became harder to get him to eat. We watched him become more and more dependent on medications, and we watched him go into the intensive care unit. Weighed down by the consuming sense that we were failing Shaan, we struggled to accept the reality that there was very little we could do to ease his pain.

I was running for Congress at the time, so I canceled campaign appearances to focus first and foremost on Shaan. We spent weeks of the waiting period trying every medical option short of surgery. Every option failed, but we refused to sit still, even after we had come to terms with the cold, hard truth that heart surgery was the only path. There was no one in Baton Rouge who could perform the procedure, so our pediatrician referred us to Boston Children’s Hospital, one of about half a dozen centers in the country that specialize in these kinds of cases.

From the minute we learned of Shaan’s illness, Supriya left nothing to chance and took nothing for granted. A successful engineer, Supriya has an amazing zeal for data and a logical approach to problem solving. I have to say, as proud as I was of her, she really drove the doctor crazy with technical questions even during one of our first visits. They had been talking for a while before I got there, and when I arrived, the doctor looked at me and said, “Please tell me you are not an engineer. I don’t think I can handle two of you.”

Supriya immersed herself in research on pediatric cardiology, learning about the endless intricacies of the procedure and all possible alternatives. Seeking precise numbers and facts, she would come to the doctor’s office each week with spreadsheets and a new list of questions.
She was highly organized and far more studious than any medical student I had ever seen. I think she probably could have performed the surgery herself.

I focused my time searching for the best surgeon. One thing I learned is that we can know the details of any procedure, and we can pepper the doctors with every technical question. But let’s face it—once the doctor is behind those operating room doors with your child, there is no turning back. The only power you have as a parent at that point is to make sure you chose the right person to trust—the person who will put your child to sleep, hold his tiny heart in his hands, and use the power God gave him to heal.

The Bible says that God loves you, He knows everything about you, and He will take care of you. From knowing every hair on Shaan’s head to providing for even lesser beings than a beautiful human child, I knew, no matter what, God had a plan. I also believe God gives us the tools to help guide our course, and I was determined to use everything He gave me. Yet, with the outcome of Shaan’s illness unclear, and with my layperson’s inability to completely understand the available information, I was shaken to my core.