Arnold vs. Arnold

Education cuts and reform campaigns can be the drinking and driving of California politics. Each carries certain risks when pursued separately. Combined, they can be deadly.

This is a truth that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has found hard to accept. Three years ago, just as he launched his breakneck drive to win voter approval of budget and political reforms, he decided to withhold part of a mandated increase in education funding from his 2005-06 budget proposal. The delay in Proposition 98 funding soon consumed the public attention that Schwarzenegger wanted directed toward his reform proposals. His favorability rating dropped more than 20 points in state polls.

Politically weakened, the governor could not make the case for reforms to limit the rate of the state’s budget growth and for new redistricting rules to make legislative elections more competitive. In time, the political poison let loose by the education cuts killed his slate of reform initiatives, which went down to overwhelming defeat in the 2005 special election.

Today, facing a budget crisis that provides him with another opportunity to deliver on his promises of major reform, Schwarzenegger may be repeating the same mistake that doomed his efforts three years ago.

It is difficult to argue with the governor’s goals. He is again campaigning for budget reform that includes a bigger rainy-day fund, an idea that is hard to oppose as California suffers through a $16-billion budget shortfall. And in cooperation with good government groups, he has again launched a drive to qualify a redistricting initiative for the November ballot that would end the conflict of interest inherent in legislators drawing their own districts.

But he has been unable to resist mixing the political equivalent of nitroglycerin and gunpowder. As he did in 2005, Schwarzenegger has undercut his reform efforts by proposing across-the-board budget cuts that include education, the most popular government program.

The results have been an echo of three years ago. Partisans who dislike his budget and redistricting reforms are attacking him for cutting education. The education coalition, which includes the powerful California Teachers Assn., opposes him. His approval rating among California residents has fallen to 44%, according to a March poll by the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s down 13 points from his rating in December, before he offered up the education cuts. If his numbers continue to decline, as Republican and Democratic pollsters expect, it will be tough for him to sell his budget reform to legislators, who must approve it before the measure goes on the ballot, or to convince voters to support his redistricting initiative.

Why is the governor again pursuing education cuts and major reforms at the same time?

Schwarzenegger appears to be calculating that the unpopularity of such cuts will help him make the case for budget reform. “I always feel that when there is an urgency -- like this year we have a real problem financially in our state -- I think that will wake everyone up,” he said Thursday at a budget-reform town hall in Modesto.

But there may be less calculation in the strategy than one imagines. When I asked Schwarzenegger in a 2006 interview why he had decided to withhold education funds even as he launched his reform initiatives in 2005, he explained that he had wanted to make the budget decision on the policy merits, not the political consequences.

“I didn’t want to make a decision based on politics,” he said.

The governor also has a reverence for repetition that borders on the religious, a tendency that served him well when he was lifting barbells and making movie sequels. And in politics, despite his reputation as a political shape-shifter, he has pushed for budget and redistricting reform with a consistency for which he gets little credit.

To Schwarzenegger, the current budget crisis must feel like a Catch-22. He can’t fix the state’s annual budget problems without broader reform of the budget process. But he can’t seem to get anyone to agree to broader reform when everyone is unhappy with his efforts to fix the annual budgets. Stuck, he stands his ground and keeps proposing what he thinks is right: immediate cuts and long-term reform to avoid future cuts.

In some ways, Schwarzenegger has made his 2008 reform effort more attractive than its 2005 predecessor. He’s dropped the bombastic rhetoric -- he called legislators “spending addicts” -- and has more aggressively preached the value of bipartisan solutions. His redistricting measure is more carefully drafted and has more bipartisan support than the reapportionment plan embodied in Proposition 77 ever did. And he has done a better job of focusing his agenda, basically limiting his campaigning to budget reform and redistricting. In 2005, he sought voter approval for additional initiatives on teacher tenure, pensions and union dues that gave his opponents more targets to attack.

But, as in 2005, Schwarzenegger’s education cuts are drawing media and public attention away from his reform efforts. Typical was a Modesto Bee account of his budget-reform event -- the story turned to questions about his education cuts and why local educators didn’t attend. Early financial support of his redistricting initiative has come from Republicans, allowing Democrats to paint it as a power grab. And in raising budget and redistricting yet again, his agenda may feel too familiar and narrow to attract public interest.

Schwarzenegger needs to choose -- either drop his proposed education cuts or his reform effort. And even if he drops the former to pursue the latter, his battle would still be uphill. He would need a new way to get the public to think about the reforms he’s long advocated.

One way to do that might be to talk more about taxes. That would make sense because taxes are at the heart of the state’s budget and political stalemates. Indeed, a top-to-bottom review of state taxes is overdue. California needs less volatile, more predictable revenue streams to cover all the services its citizens demand. There’s no more appropriate time for a tax debate than during a budget crisis and recession.

Framing his reform effort around taxes would allow Schwarzenegger to dominate public debate and command far more attention than he’s generated with his public appearances on behalf of redistricting and a rainy-day fund. Certainly, the governor might fail, as he did in 2005. But his chances would be better if he tried a fresher script.