Governor's road to recovery destined to be bumpy
By Jim Boren
The Fresno Bee
(Updated Sunday, February 8, 2004, 5:10 AM)
For Arnold Schwarzenegger, governing California has turned out to be a lot tougher than starring in action movies. It makes you wonder whether he really understood during last year's recall campaign what he was signing on for if he became governor.
It's one thing to be cheered at every campaign stop because of his movie star celebrity but quite another to have to limit access to AIDS drugs, cut college education opportunities for thousands and reduce programs for the disabled. But being governor of California is more than making personal appearances and firing off scripted one-liners.
You must make difficult public policy choices, and political leaders soon discover that criticism of decisions comes at every turn.
Longtime practice
Schwarzenegger, who still acts as if nothing fazes him, is just learning that he's running a state that's at odds with its many parts. Nothing symbolizes that more than California's longtime budget strategy of stealing funding from local governments to make ends meet.
Now Schwarzenegger finds himself trying to solve the state's massive financial problems by gutting cities and counties, reducing other critical programs and pushing a $15 billion bond measure that's essentially already been spent.
If the bond -- Proposition 57 -- doesn't pass on March 2, the alternative seems to many to be even more severe budget cuts. It's a political mess that was complicated by Schwarzenegger digging himself an even bigger budget hole by dumping the car tax without any plan to replace the $4 billion and pledging during the recall campaign not to raise taxes.
That has left him to come up with a creative financing plan that a first-year economics student wouldn't even present in class. This strategy won't pencil out, and it extends the problem by putting everyday expenses on a credit card.
Schwarzenegger is merely deferring the problem with this hocus-pocus plan, somehow hoping that the budget will ultimately become balanced through economic turnaround and wishful thinking.
While the governor is doing his best to sell his proposal, it doesn't pass the smell test. That's one of the many reasons the bond measure continues to trail in the polls despite Schwarzenegger stumping for it across California.
But the budget isn't his only problem. He oversees a corrections department that's been ineptly run going back a couple of governors from both parties. The prison guards union essentially controls the system, and the governor's advisers seem to have persuaded him that it's better to ignore the prison problems.
One broken promise
Schwarzenegger also has found that his personal fortune isn't enough to deal with a political system that throws millions around for lunch. In getting into the recall race, Schwarzenegger said he'd be no one's puppet and had enough money to steer clear of the special interests who regularly buy and sell public policy in California.
But campaign records show the governor raised more than $18 million in political contributions for the recall campaign and added a $4 million personal loan to his campaign treasury. Now Schwarzenegger plans to go after special interests in a big way: a New York dinner for which he's charging Wall Street bankers up to $500,000 each to help pay for the
Proposition 57 bond campaign.
So much for Schwarzenegger's original campaign pledge that he wouldn't take contributions from special interests.
This can't be the way Schwarzenegger originally scripted his governorship. He would ride in on his white horse, solve the state's problems and stand at the podium receiving the cheers that a movie star is accustomed to hearing from adoring fans.
But politics has a way of tripping up even someone like Schwarzenegger. Now he's stumping the state for Proposition 57 and its companion, Proposition 58, which is billed as a spending cap/rainy day reserve. State Controller Steve Westly, a Democrat, is campaigning with Schwarzenegger, giving the effort something of a bipartisan appeal.
But state Treasurer Phil Angelides, a possible gubernatorial candidate in 2006, said the Schwarzenegger package is irresponsible and mortgages California's future. Angelides suggests raising taxes as part of a balanced approach to the problem and pointed out that Republican Govs. Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson raised taxes during tough economic times
in the state.
All for nothing
But this is a different era. The politicians now demagogue the tax question, telling voters that they can have it all -- tax cuts while maintaining the programs that are important to them. The California experience has blown a hole in that philosophy, but it seems that few
are paying attention.
Now Schwarzenegger is proposing no new taxes and delaying the pain by putting current expenses on a credit card. That won't work in household budgets, and it won't work in state budgets.
Jim Boren is The Fresno Bee's editorial page editor. His column appears
Fresno 93786.
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