The Schwarzenegger Years: Are We Any Better?

Peter Schrag asks today, are we back were we came in with regards to the four years Governor Schwarzengger has served in office. The answer is not much, other than landmark global warming legislation. SacBee

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.

His plan for universal care certainly, but that is not true of other plans that have been considered by the legislators. Here is the real nut of it:

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.

He does not care about details. He wants headlines, or as Schrag says, monuments.

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.

What is missing here is our state's fiscal health, something all of these grand plans have a consequence on. There are plenty of other non-sexy issues he has ignored along the way, but none is bigger than the fact that the state is facing huge deficits.

What will come from the next three years? Will he leave us with a state in shambles but monuments to the great Arnold? Or will he actually put in the hard work. Will he walk away this year from the incredible work that has been done on health care? Or will he put in the hard work it takes to get a deal done and then campaign over the objections of the legislators in his own party?