Arnold Schwarzenegger's professed intention to reduce the pay of 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage until there's a new budget doesn't quite fall into the "stop me before I kill again" class, but it comes close.
It's not a strategy, either fiscal or political, but more like a cry of desperation. If they find the suicide's corpse on the floor, they'll say he really didn't mean to do himself in, he was just pleading for help.
Or, if you want to get Shakespearean, it's the now-beaten, once-cocky monarch at Bosworth Field begging to trade "my kingdom for a horse."
You may not wish it on anybody, especially in this case, when most of the damage will be done not to the ruler but to his subjects, meaning us. Still, after nearly five years combining noble ambitions with posturing, clichés and gimmickry, sympathy and compassion come hard.
Of course the state's fiscal mess isn't all his fault. He's inherited a lot of spending requirements the voters have locked into the constitution. He's the nominal leader of a party that won't be led in a system that, because of the state's undemocratic, gridlock-inducing two-thirds majority requirement to enact budgets, gives this insular minority a veto.
But he's been a major contributor to that mess, beginning with his costly (now $6 billion a year) reduction of the vehicle license fee, which Californians had calmly, if not happily, paid for decades until the mischievous Tom McClintock, seeing the traction the issue got in Virginia, turned it into the evil "car tax." Schwarzenegger, who's long complained about auto-pilot spending, himself contributed to it with his sponsorship and/or support of a set of ballot measures that will suck billions more out of the treasury.
But the more fundamental problem, despite the good marks he deserves for his environmental programs and his laudable, albeit naive, universal health care proposal, has been five years of mis-leadership.
It's a long list: the constant reiteration of the argument that the state has a spending problem, not a revenue problem; the pursuit of chimerical budget reforms, many of them yet more auto-pilot programs; the proposed pawning of the state lottery; the broken agreements with major state interest groups; the attempts to intimidate opponents, alternating with invitations to sweet reason; the nearly unending staging of gubernatorial performance art.
The message in this long string of messages has been no message. From the start, Schwarzenegger knew (or at least said he knew) that the state's governmental and fiscal systems were unmanageable, but instead of using his unquestioned popularity to force both the political system and the state's voters to face that, he resorted to those gimmicks.
The state, quite obviously, has both a revenue and a spending problem; if it wants good schools, roads, universities, parks, more of the former than the latter. After 30 years of finagling its finances and spoiling the electorate with the myth that it could all be done on the cheap, delivering a message based on reality, some of it technical and complicated, wouldn't have been easy.
Nor was the problem only California's. For most of two generations, the whole nation lived on the large investments – in infrastructure, education, capital goods – of the postwar era and for the past two decades in an unreal world of cheap imported energy, environmental indifference and the illusion that America would dominate the world for ever and ever.
Schwarzenegger seems to understand the environmental/energy issues and occasionally has focused on California's own infrastructure problems. But for all his Terminator persona, he's been timid about risking much in waking up voters who know the state is heading the wrong way but don't yet understand that it's often their own habits taking it there.
The proposed state employee pay cut and the accompanying layoffs – whether as a bluff or for real – was directed at the wrong targets. The real targets, again as bluff or for real, have to be the voters themselves, put in such a way that there begins to be an understanding that if Californians still want a great state, they have to pay for it.
The governor's gesture last week seems most of all a wish that somebody, presumably the Democrats and maybe state workers, will come forward to provide cover for a retreat from his rhetoric of the past five years. He seems to have given up his attempts to echo fanatic tax cutters like Grover Norquist and his "starve the beast" mantra. But he has not yet found the courage to apply the lofty ambitions of his environmental programs to California's financial mess.
By now the governor must know that more tricks will not solve long-range problems, much less make a legacy. He's tried to go over the heads of the Democrats with his ballot measures. Maybe he should try for a long-term view and go over the heads of the Republicans. They'll never be his friends anyway.
Reach Peter Schrag at P.O. Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852-0779
