It's not surprising that California Republicans, having swallowed Grover Norquist's no-new-taxes Kool-Aid, and intimidated by a couple of Southern California radio talkers, would try to block any version of Gov. Jerry Brown's split-the-difference budget solutions.

What is a little surprising is that Brown, surely aware of what the Republican minority in Congress did to Barack Obama in the first year of his presidency in 2009, would allow himself to be played in very much the same way.

Yes, Brown is up against the constitutional requirement, enacted with Proposition 13 in 1978, that tax increases may be enacted only with two-thirds majorities in each house of the Legislature. He thus needs a couple of GOP votes in each house. But by now it should have been clear that all the talking with the five Senate "traitors" who've sat down with the governor was going nowhere.

The other day, Brown began to be a little more open about his exasperation.

"If you're not going to vote to extend taxes," he said, referring to the state's Republicans, "if you're not going to vote to cut, you're not going to vote to do anything to redevelopment, so, what the hell are you going to do? … By the way, if you're not going to do anything, why do you take a paycheck?"

But those remarks came at a friendly labor convention, not at a venue directed to the voters at large. In Brown's three-minute "report to the people" on YouTube, it was still the old theme: Much progress, hard work by the Legislature, giving the people a chance to express what they want, etc.

The behind-closed-doors courtesy strategy obviously wasn't working. Even as the governor was negotiating with the five, lately become two, or maybe even one, the newest poll from the Public Policy Institute of California showed that, like Obama in 2009, Brown was losing ground with the voters.

At the same time the GOP negotiators, having been challenged to present a list of terms, didn't narrow their demands to an essential few. They expanded it to a wish list composed of anything that could be swept off the floor.

Yes, there are differences between Washington in 2009 and Sacramento in 2011. Washington doesn't have to balance its budgets; Sacramento – in theory – does. Obama can't become as confrontational with Congress as, say, Harry Truman could with the "do-nothing" Republican Congress in 1947-48. He can't become Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton and survive politically.

Still, there are eerie similarities between Brown '11 and Obama '09: the unreasoning faith in the conciliatory, collaborative approach; the expectation that the appeal to reason, compromise and bipartisanship would be reciprocated; the unabashed exercise of disproportionate power by a rigid political minority against a newly elected chief executive; the unembarrassed willingness to use supermajority requirements – by way of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate; the two-thirds constitutional tax-vote provision in California – to block the majority.

In the past week or two, the most fashionable explanation for Brown's problems is that, for all his experience, he simply wasn't prepared for the latter-day nastiness in Capitol politics.

That has some plausibility. But it's just as plausible to argue that the old era-of-limits Jerry Brown of his last governorship – call him austere Brown – sometimes still takes command. Put another way, one side of Brown, while trying to preserve a modicum of decent public services, may be perfectly prepared, if necessary, to teach us to build character, self-reliance, acceptance of hair-shirt discomfort and compassion for Third World pain with bare-bones public services.

Meg Whitman didn't become governor, but in maneuvering Brown into his campaign pledge not to raise – or extend? – taxes without a vote of the electorate she got him to give away his biggest bargaining chip before he ever took office. The popular vote on the tax extensions he wants would have been a nice compromise: OK, you guys refuse to vote for taxes. So let's agree to let the people decide.

Another mistake – à la Obama – was not ending the negotiating games sooner and going to the state to make clear that the Republicans wanted everything and even then weren't promising the votes.

Obama, to be sure, got something – a fragile, imperfect national health care plan; a nuclear test ban treaty with Russia; extension of unemployment insurance, which should never have been an issue at a time like this. But he lost more than he gained and is likely to lose a lot more in the 18 months ahead.

So far Brown and the Democrats have slashed billions in vital programs, many of them serving the neediest among us, and so far they've gotten nothing.

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Peter Schrag, a retired editorial page editor of The Bee, writes frequently on California issues.

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