Here is another recent column by Jill.
Bitter Lesson for Arnold
Hey Guv, Your Word is Your Bond
(Jan 24, 2005)
~ By Jill Stewart
I hope it’s dawning on the governor that the great, big, complicated reform plan he wants to sell to Californians won't come as easily as his major wins last year, in which he forced thousands of cheaters off the workers comp rolls and slashed the nation’s highest car tax.
Truly big reform---broad, complex changes in the way the state governs itself and in the way Sacramento spends our taxes---has never been an easy sell. California voters prefer glitzy, one-hit wonders over broad policy. We‘re a Proposition 13, term limits, three strikes, gubernatorial recall kind of state.
But Schwarzenegger is taking a page from the playbook of former Gov. Ronald Reagan, who in the 1970s tried to fix the broken system of rising property taxes and legislative overspending. Reagan went to voters with a sweeping plan to trim government and fix the tax structure.
Reagan was a popular, telegenic governor---not unlike Schwarzenegger. Yet his broad fix-it plan was fought by all sorts of entrenched interests, and went down to defeat. For all of its reformist content, Reagan’s proposal was big, hard-to-grasp change. It wasn‘t the one-shot fix Californians so love.
Yet Reagan proved prescient. Just a few years later, California was in a pitched uproar over skyrocketing property taxes and blatant overspending by politicians who didn’t give a damn. Voters embraced the powerful, one-hit wonder of Prop. 13.
Like Reagan, Schwarzenegger also sees Sacramento as a bloated bureaucracy that often works against the citizenry. He's also pushing an agenda of sweeping change. But he’s dragging an albatross that Reagan didn’t have: a self-inflicted veracity problem that the powerful status quo Democrats can bludgeon him with.
Schwarzenegger promises the moon, then backs out. We saw some of this last year, for example, when Schwarzenegger promised that his workers comp reforms would lead to quick reductions in insurance costs for small businesses and others.
As Schwarzenegger must have known (after all, I myself knew this in early 2004), whenever a state government adopts major reform of workers comp, insurance companies don’t lower rates until they fully judge whether the reforms are honest and are resulting in lasting cost-cutting. There’s nothing quick about it.
Although the media love to claim that insurers are just foot-dragging, the truth is that any decent insurer requires a verifiable, lengthy history of lowered costs before they cut their own rates. It takes months. It can take a year or more.
Today, months later, Schwarzenegger’s reforms are working. Insurers see lasting reductions in medical costs because cheating workers and sleazy doctors are being drummed out. Gradually---never quickly---insurers are responding with lower rates.
Schwarzenegger also promised he would wring vast sums of money out of Washington D.C And he promised that in 2005-06 he'd heap public schools with about $4 billion in extra money.
These were impossible promises. They reveal a bewildering side of Schwarzenegger: his habit of tarnishing his own word. If Arnold attended a class in Fundamental Rules of Governing 101, he'd learn that political leaders break virtually every rule of decent conduct in Sacramento. But at the end of the day, there’s one rule the warring sides expect not to be broken: a person's word.
Predictably, Schwarzenegger is being hammered by Democrats for failing to get the promised big money from Washington. Now he’s stuck in the pathetic position of trying to prove he’s really turning that situation around.
The other day, for example, at a Southern California press conference, the governor accepted a fat check from Washington to fight homelessness. That’s nice, but voters did not elect Arnold to participate in ceremonial window-dressing hyping the occasional goodies tossed to California, ala Gray Davis. They elected him to get real results.
As one Republican analyst involved in the Davis recall told me, “Arnold is not vulnerable to convention political attacks like he’s unkind, or motivated by greed, or a tool of special interests. His record will be measured on achievement and accomplishments. So if the Democrats attack him on what he has delivered---this is his zone of vulnerability.”
According to some analysts, for every $1 a California taxpayer sends to Washington, California gets just 77 cents back. We simply get cheated. That’s what Schwarzenegger said he would fix.
Yet as the governor surely must know, they hate us in Washington. That’s been the case for years. Powerful Congressional committee chairmen who hail from Southern and Midwestern states grab far more money from Washington than their states ever pay in. These states get more than they deserve--and have for years--by milking California and other disliked, big states.
All this California-hating was mentioned recently by new state Dept. of Finance chief Tom Campbell, at a budget committee hearing in Sacramento. As Campbell, a former member of Congress for California, told the hearing, "Believe me, California has this problem in Congress, getting the rest of country to care about its problems.“ Members of Congress from the Midwest felt: “Why should I care about your problem?”
Do they hate us because we're beautiful? Because we have cool jobs at hip technology firms? Because California adults surf, and hang-glide, and otherwise behave like kids? Yes, yes and yes. Schwarzenegger can't change that, so why make such a promise?
He made some fitful attempts, initially calling together the deeply ineffective California Congressional delegation in hopes of getting these 53 useless Democratic and Republican U.S. Representatives to work together. What a fantasy. A recent study reported that California‘s huge Congressional delegation is just about the most partisan (i.e., the most internally warring and ineffective) of any state’s delegation.
Since California’s 53 representatives won’t fight to stop the draining of California by the Midwest/Southern crowd, there’s little chance we’ll get our taxes back.
Lately, these 53 members and Schwarzenegger have touted how they’ll fight to keep open California military facilities threatened by federal cuts. Frankly, we expect them to fight that battle as a bare minimum. It’s nothing to crow about.
The governor even campaigned for President George W. Bush in Ohio. But sadly, U.S. presidents usually stay out of regional funding squabbles. There’ll be no help there. The governor conceded as much to a newspaper the other day.
Schwarzenegger almost certainly understood all these impossibilities before making his gushing promises. At least former Gov. Pete Wilson tried something truly dramatic, suing the feds to be reimbursed for the billions of dollars a year California taxpayers spend on non-taxpaying illegal aliens who stream here because of the fed's border policies and Mexico's refusal to adopt modern economic rules that create real jobs.
But Arnold isn’t suing. Just promising. Then not promising.
His most controversial broken promise stems from a deal he struck in 2004 to give extra monies to schools this year---under a formula that, due to unexpectedly higher state tax revenues, means schools now expect $4 billion extra. Arnold promised that if the schools would just forgo a couple billion extra back in 2004, he'd lay on the extra money in 2005.
But now Schwarzenegger is offering the schools an extra $2.5 billion---not an extra $4 billion, because costs exploded elsewhere and there‘s no money. The powerful school lobby is using that broken promise to severely hammer the governor.
When a political leader breaks his word, he hands tremendous power to his opponents. Furious school leaders will try to convince voters that Schwarzenegger’s $2.5 billion increase---a very nice 7 percent boost---is actually a fat cut.
Only in Sacramento would $2.5 billion extra be passed off as a cut. But that’s what happens when you break your word---people will say anything, and they’ll lash out like mad.
A spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer somewhat humorously declared to a reporter that the extra $2.5 billion for schools “writes off a whole generation of California schoolchildren.“ Wow, an extra $2.5 billion does that kind of damage? And elected state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell told an audience he didn‘t think “the citizens of California are willing to sacrifice the future of their children.”
Some journalists got sucked into the hyperbole, describing the extra $2.5 billion as a “cut.” You know you're in trouble when the media buys into such wanton spin.
I don’t really blame the gaseous Lockyer and O’Connell. Arnold did this to himself. Sure, Lockyer and O’Connell are fibbing---in response to Arnold’s fibbing. Schwarzenegger reneged, so they are making him pay.
There's a lot to like in the governor’s four-pronged agenda, which targets many of Sacramento’s most indefensible practices by trying to reform the budget, government pensions, teacher pay, and political gerrymandering.
But Schwarzenegger’s ideas are bound for a nasty special election. The consistently anti-reform Democratic legislature will fight all change. In this, the governor can perhaps take heart from a Jan. 26 poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, finding that 68 percent of voters want a say over how to reform the budget.
Voters don’t want to leave this fight to the governor and legislature---they want a crack at budget reform.
If anyone is capable of persuading Californians to ratify sweeping reforms and not one-hit wonders, it’s probably Schwarzenegger. But to beat the entrenched interests, he must be believable. And right now, having tarnishing his veracity, he’s being taken with a grain of salt. |
