Good news. We finally have a bipartisan consensus on what
ails California. Everything, absolutely everything, is Gov. Schwarzenegger’s
fault.
Even
when the governor is right.
His current effort to extract more
money from Washington DC – a righteous cause that has gone over like a lead
Goodyear Blimp – has brought the crazy glue governor’s problem (everything
sticks to him) into sharp relief.
Exhibit 1 of the problem: The folks
at the progressive Calitics blog, in a post denouncing Arnold as the "worst governor ever," agree with him: that
California, not to mention other states, need more money from the feds. Now to
be fair, they don’t like the way Arnold has gone about seeking the money, which
involves the radically straightforward strategy of pressuring our
representatives in Congress to come up with more money.
This kind of tough-minded advocacy
is always in favor at Calitics, except when it comes to our crazy glue
governor, who has singlehandedly destroyed California. When Schwarzenegger
advocates for his state, he is engaged in bullying (apparently, because when
famous, musclebound people ask for something, it’s bullying) or is "biting the
hand that feeds."
Which brings me to Exhibit 2:
My friend Sherry Bebitch Jeffe,
writing in this space last week, claims that Schwarzenegger is foolish to "bite
the hand that feeds" by demanding more from the feds.
One problem with that logic: in
publicly pressuring the federal government and the Congressional California
delegation, Schwarzenegger isn’t biting the hand that feeds. He’s biting the
hand that takes away. California, excepting the current shot of stimulus money,
is a longtime donor state.
And in the case of the delegation,
he’s biting the hands of a group that can barely be bothered to meet all
together to advance the interests of the state they represent. California’s
delegation is so bad at playing together that the Annenberg Foundation once had
to fund a special retreat just to get them to talk to each other.
Jeffe seems to think it’s rude and
counterproductive for the governor to point out Congress’ record. He should
play nice, she suggests. Except that he has been playing nice, asking politely
for more money for six years. Democrats in Congress liked getting these
requests, which they used to craft press statements blasting President Bush for
not doing more for California. But this doesn’t produce more money. In fact,
Schwarzenegger’s polite appeals produced very little. A tougher stand with
Congress is both overdue.
Exhibit
3: Michael Hiltzik writes in today’s LA Times:
"The biggest cause of the state deficit, currently about $20 billion, is
Schwarzenegger…" That is not a misprint. Hiltzik explains that Schwarzenegger’s
first-day cut in the vehicle license fee is the biggest single contributor to
the budget problem.
The way Hiltzik writes, you’d think
the "car tax" cut was something Schwarzenegger railroaded through without
popular support; in truth, it was the centerpiece promise of the populist
recall campaign. That said, rolling back the car tax was a bad move. What Hiltzik
leaves out is that Schwarzenegger, at political cost, recognized this error and
sought to undo it and restore much of the cut. For all Schwarzenegger’s
shortcomings (and they are too numerous to recount here), the car tax story
points out what is truly rare and good about the governor. When conditions and
facts change, he changes. When the state faces an emergency, he acts like it.
What he’s asking from Washington is for our representatives to behave in a
similar fashion.
One more thing: Under Hiltzik’s
warped logic, the person most responsible for the current budget problems is…
Michael Hiltzik, and those who voted like he did in the May 19 special
election. You remember that election? Schwarzenegger, along with 2/3 of the
legislature, fashioned a package that included billions in much needed revenue
for the state, including $16 billion in additional tax increases. What did
Hiltzik think of those packages and measures? He called them "shams and
frauds.".
But in voting them down, Californians like Hiltzik left more money on the table
than Schwarzenegger did with the car tax.
It’s not clear that there’s anything
Schwarzenegger could do, short of dying, to satisfy his critics. They simply
see him as illegitimate, and have adopted a view of him that is based more on
his public persona than the real human being.
But it’s worth remembering a few
things about his governorship.
Schwarzenegger, at considerable
personal expense (he donated his own money) and political cost, has twice
offered California voters an opportunity to make the budget picture a much
brighter one – with Prop 76 in 2005 and with Props 1A-1E in 2009. Now, I had
plenty of problems with the details of both measures (they locked in too much
of the existing budget structure, which should be unwound instead), but these measures would have made our
current budget situation much, much better.
The California press panned his
2005 and 2009 measures, and voters shot them down. That was fine. But those
decisions also mean that we are currently living the budget reality chosen by
the voters, not the one Schwarzenegger urged us to choose.
Over the past three weeks, it’s
been amazing – in a disheartening way — to watch California’s press corps
rally to the defense of their Congressional sources. The excuses offered up in
defense of Congress are many. It’s the wrong time to ask Congress for more
money. California’s budget and political crisis isn’t the responsibility of the
federal government. It’s the damn funding formulas and the demographics that
make it impossible to do much more for California.
Schwarzenegger shouldn’t even be
asking, is the press consensus.
Fine, but what else is he supposed
to do? He’s tried everything – tax increases, spending cuts, bigger budget
reforms. No one likes any of the options.
Nevertheless, Schwarzenegger
continues to serve – with impossibly good humor (if it were me in his shoes,
I’d be going Terminator on these critics)
— as punching bag and scapegoat for 38 million people who simply refuse
to recognize that they can’t have something for nothing, and that they
themselves are the cause of their systemic troubles.
So here’s my lonely cheer for Gov.
Crazy Glue. Thank you for letting this be all your fault.