Sacramento Bee
September 21, 2008
Having conquered bodybuilding and the movies by magnetic presence, Arnold Schwarzenegger thought that governing California would be a breeze.
As he was running for governor five years ago, Schwarzenegger talked about using his celebrity to cajole legislators into seeing things his way on the chronically imbalanced state budget and other issues. He would visit their districts, invite them into his smoking tent and allow them to bask in his glow. And if personal persuasion didn't work, he would apply public pressure.
Boy, was he wrong.
His expectations were based on a fallacy that he either assumed or resulted from bad advice – that legislators were free agents and open to persuasion. In fact, term limits and gerrymandered districts largely make them pawns for rigid ideological and economic interest groups that are immune to charm.
The Capitol didn't change one whit, and Schwarzenegger's dipsy-doodles on issues – even while pontificating about reform and uttering such nonsense as "post-partisanship" – made him the Capitol's odd man out, lacking allies even in his own party and mistrusted by everyone, as this year's budget battle showed anew.
Although Schwarzenegger showed a little courage last week on the budget, within hours he accepted a plan that does little to truly address chronic fiscal problems. The promise he made five years ago to end "crazy deficit spending" seems laughable now. Deficits will still be with us when the next governor takes the oath.
Are California's voters, who tossed out predecessor Gray Davis on Schwarzenegger's promises, disappointed? A new Field Poll of voters finds that his approval rating, which once approached 70 percent, is now just 38 percent, five points lower than what a Public Policy Institute of California poll recorded in July.
The only bits of good news for the governor are that his popularity has not sunk to the 24 percent level that doomed Davis – at least not yet – and that a threatened recall campaign by the prison guards union has just token support at 17 percent.
Schwarzenegger's failure to close the budget gap joins an extensive list of failures, which include health care, education reform and water supply. And chances are fairly good that in November voters will reject his overhaul of legislative redistricting for the second time.
The most charitable view of Schwarzenegger's governorship is that he at least tried to govern, albeit often ineptly, and that he raised long-ignored issues, such as water.
The sad truth is that he was doomed the moment he took office. California's crisis of governance isn't rooted in who occupies the governor's office or which party controls the Legislature. It results from a fundamental conflict between the state's cultural, ethnic, economic and geographic diversity and a political structure that demands stakeholder unanimity on every issue.
Until we reconcile that conflict, no one can govern effectively. |
