Dan Walters: Governor's valentines unearned

Many in the political media fell in love with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a transcendent political figure when he won the governorship of California in 2003, fell out of love two years later when he failed to persuade voters to change the balance of power in the Capitol, and became enamored once again when he adopted global warming as his cause and proclaimed "postpartisanship" as his new credo.

Schwarzenegger's disciples are still swooning, as a recent spate of newspaper editorials and columns and magazine cover stories attest. The one-time bodybuilder and action movie star, we are being told in authoritative terms, has discovered the magic elixir of politics – ignoring the ideologues who control both major parties and wooing independents and moderates with pragmatic approaches to vexing problems.

Trouble is, many accounts of Schwarzenegger's career stop late in 2007, while he was assuring everyone that a massive scheme to extend health insurance to the working poor was virtually a sure thing and before the gritty reality of the deficit-ridden state budget had hit home.

His health care plan died in the state Senate, and he's now fighting with his erstwhile pals in the Democratic Party over whether to resolve the budget crisis by slashing spending on education, welfare and health care or by raising taxes.

Schwarzenegger's apologists have constructed a rationale for the health plan's demise, something to the effect that it was ground up by the Capitol's petty politicians. There are plenty of those, to be certain, but in fact when the Senate Health Committee executed the plan that had been hastily hustled through the Assembly, it was doing us a big favor because the plan was, to put it mildly, half-baked – full of rosy assumptions and scenarios, and probably illegal under federal law.

Schwarzenegger's not the heroic victim of Lilliputian politics his apostles would have us believe. However sincere his motives on health care may have been, he screwed it up with a scheme that was designed to curry favor with narrow interest groups and, if adopted, probably would have collapsed of its own ponderous weight.

The budget mess – which Schwarzenegger promised to fix when he was elected in 2003 – is another blot on a record which, if truth be known, is no more than mediocre. The governor makes many grandiose promises and keeps very few of them.

Schwarzenegger is blaming everyone and everything but himself for the budget deficit, pegged at $14.5 billion during the rest of this fiscal year and all of the next. But if he really had the guts that the current crew of media admirers tells us he has, he'd shoulder the blame himself.

It's not the economy, even though he insists that flattening economic activity, born of the housing industry's free-fall, is to blame. Before the current downturn, the economy was humming along and generating tens of billions of dollars in new state revenues, giving him and lawmakers an opportunity to bring the state's finances into balance with minimal pain. But they spent every dollar and then some.

Schwarzenegger also blames automatic spending formulas built into the budget, including, presumably, one that he himself championed. All of those formulas could have been suspended or altered if there had been sufficient political leadership.

Schwarzenegger tried to change budget dynamics in a series of ballot measures in 2005, only to fail miserably – thanks in large measure to the embarrassingly inept manner in which he and his advisers conducted the campaign.

Schwarzenegger did, indeed, have an opportunity to become a transcendent and transformational political figure. But he blew it through a deadly combination of ignorance and hubris. That's the real story that the fawning media should be telling.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.