Advertise Here

Deliver your message to thousands of readers every day.

Our readers are influential opinion makers - politicians, journalists and activists.

Learn more about ads.

Our latest headlines

Want more? Dive into the archives.

About Us

David Greenwald, Editor. (Contact David.)
CFC Education Foundation, Publisher. (Contact us.)

Got a news tip? Want to write a guest column?
Contact David here.

About California Progress Report.

Founded by Frank D. Russo (Publisher and Editor, 2006-08).

Books

Four Years Into the Arnold Era: Building Monuments in California with Borrowed Money

By Peter Schrag

There are eerie echoes here, a strange familiarity. It will be four years Saturday that Arnold Schwarzenegger, our very own Proteus, was inaugurated as California's 39th governor.

Those years feel like a lot more than the equivalent of one full gubernatorial term – four years of tearing up credit cards, blowing up boxes, five statewide elections, tough talk about girlie men and the three stooges; sweet talk about post-partisanship.

Whose echoes are those? There are the ghosts of governors past: Hiram Johnson and populist uprisings; Pat Brown and build, build, build; even Jerry Brown, ca. 1975, with his high-decibel environmentalism, a California space program, a string of new governmental agencies, contempt for civil servants and not much Sitzfleisch for the daily chores of governing.

The Arnold era began with a huge deficit and is headed for another – maybe not of Gov. Gray Davis proportions, but immense enough. Departments have again been notified to prepare hefty cuts, the once loudly promised year of education threatens to shrivel to a whimper; the grand scheme for universal health care shows the shaky premises on which it was built.

It would indeed be ironic if, 28 years after leaving the office, Jerry Brown, who, despite his extragubernatorial ambitions, announced an era of limits and counseled Californians to lower expectations, succeeded Schwarzenegger and became governor again.

Like Jerry, most of Arnold's predecessors, including even Davis, whose recall led to Schwarzenegger's election, seem to sympathize with Arnold's struggle to tame this unruly and, in the view of some, ungovernable, state. If Schwarzenegger can't do it, no shame on them that they couldn't do it, either.

The short-hand version of the normal governmental business of the past four years is that Schwarzenegger, faced with that enormous fiscal deficit, reduced it with some cutting and a lot of deferrals and borrowing, then hacked wildly and disastrously at the legislative politicians, the unions and the auto-pilot spending mechanisms that he blamed for the deficits.

Having gotten creamed in the 2005 special election in which he vowed to join the people in punishing the special interests and putting a rope around spending and the Legislature's self-serving redistricting system, he walked away from the state's fiscal and governmental dysfunction, and began his 2006 re-election year with (in his terms) an entirely new movie.

Through it all, he understood one thing better than his critics: The voters will never build a monument to a governor for raising taxes and/or cutting spending, both of which he probably needed to do to if he was to get the state's finances under control. But his whole career made clear that it's monuments he wants.

And so he turned to the matters that would get them: global warming, health care, bonds for water projects, schools, highways – all of them advertised as free money that no one in the room would ever have to pay for. The fact that he wasn't born in this country liberated him from presidential ambitions and allowed him to play on a world stage and shoot for even larger targets.

Along the way he got to stick his thumb in the eye of an increasingly unpopular president, unpopular especially in California, and take on trendy issues that President Bush walked away from or that, like stem cell research and control of greenhouse gas emissions, Bush stubbornly opposed.

There is something wonderfully apt about Brown, currently California's attorney general, joining Schwarzenegger to sue Bush's EPA to force it to clear the way for California to impose the tight auto emissions regulations it's enacted. Beyond the politics of it, it's so California.

But on the governmental mess that he inherited from his predecessors, Schwarzenegger's first four-year "term" ends pretty much where it began, stuck with an ongoing gap between revenues and spending.

It's a gap that Schwarzenegger helped perpetuate with the $4 billion cut in the vehicle license fee that was virtually his first act in office and with the borrowing and deferrals that were always the chief accomplishments of California's latter-day bipartisanship.

Schwarzenegger's sometime mentor, former Gov. Pete Wilson, had the courage – he might now say the bad judgment – to deal with the large deficit he inherited in 1991 by agreeing to a split-the-difference combination of tax increases and spending cuts. But it cost him dearly and he's made it clear – no doubt to Schwarzenegger most of all – that he's regretted it ever since.

In his forthcoming book on the governor, Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub calls Schwarzenegger a "Party of One." That's a reflection of both the classic politics of his state and an ego too large to fit into any one party.

"My dream," Schwarzenegger said in his second inaugural last January, "is that California, the nation-state, the harmonious state, the prosperous state, the cutting-edge state, becomes a model, not just for the 21st century American society, but for the larger world."

Next to that, what's a little governmental dysfunction and an ongoing $10 billion deficit?

Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.

Posted on November 14, 2007

Comments

The key here is the car-tax cut, which put a structural hole in the budget that simply can't be recovered. Almost all spending in this state is protected by various initiatives and can't be touched, so the legislature can't really be expected to wipe out all discretionary spending. Wilson, it is true, did show "courage" (though he has regretted it ever since), but we must remember that there were strong legislative leaders (Willie Brown and David Roberti) to help him show some manhood (or womanhood, or whatever you want to call it). There is no one to help Schwarzenegger show the same spine.

The central problem is the 2/3rd's vote. Democrats should use the redistricting in 2011 to create enough competitive seats that, combined with the power of the recall, can overcome that impossible structural barrier. Any plan drawn by the court or its equivalent will not have enough seats to force the Republicans to actually negotiate and the losers will be poor and middle class Californians.

Posted by: publius at November 14, 2007 06:55 PM

Californians need to stop voting for legislation that has huge price tags. People want things that someone else is paying for and it's just plain ridiculous.

Crime bills are a huge drain on our budget and many of them are just black holes that money disappears into and do nothing to keep us safe. I doubt that most Californians have any idea how abusive the sentences are in California nor what they cost.

We send people to prison for decades and for life for minor offenses. There are 175,000 people in prison right now at $45,000 each per year. Thats 8 billion dollars a year. 70% of these people are in for parole violations or possession charges. They need rehab. not prison.

If we start to educate, rehabilitate and provide job skills for these people they will stop going back to prison and stop being a drain on our budget. We are creating thousands of criminals every year because we fail to recognize and deal with the problems that turn our kids to drugs and the street.

We need a sentencing commission to govern the sentences we hand out. Legislators use crime as their personal soap box to gain popularity by telling us they can keep us safer if we vote for their initiatives. It's all nonsense. We have a 1000 crime laws and over 100 sentencing enhancements (years added for certain circumstances) to those sentences already. We don't need anymore crime laws. Jessicas law and 3 strikes are a disaster that do very little to protect anyone but add hundreds of millions to our yearly budget. The wrong targets are being caught up in these enhanced laws.

Give our legislators a little more time and we all will be wearing GPS devices. They of course will need to hire more law enforcement and huge salaries added to the budget to track us all. Californians need to wake up and pay attention. We need to stop expensive legislation and fix things that are broken. Throwing money at everything doesn't fix it.

Many of the voter initiatives that have been passed in past years need to be overturned. We can't afford them and they do not do what was intended. Many voters just don't understand simple economics. They figure someone else will pay for it.

Look at us now!

Posted by: Morris1 at November 15, 2007 09:26 AM

MORRIS 1
thank you i loved your comment ! and you are so right about the voters and taxs payers of calif they passed all the laws with a huge price tags on calif ..if the taxs payer and the voters dont fixs this soon calif will be broke ..ang again taxs will go up again

Posted by: delang at November 16, 2007 09:11 AM

Get Email Updates

Want the California Progress Report by email? Once a week, we'll send you the latest and greatest headlines.

Stat tracker