Swamped

The state of California is wallowing in the fiscal swamp one day before a constitutional budget deadline that cannot be met, but everything is just swell with Gov. George Deukmejian, who says, “I’m perfectly pleased with where we are right now.” That is the same attitude that George Custer took down the trail to the Little Big Horn.

A week ago California had a reasonable solution to a sudden budget emergency, the discovery that the state is running about $1 billion short in anticipated tax revenues. The governor proposed some budget cuts and a modest tax adjustment, which was incorporated by the Democratic-controlled legislative committees into their versions of the fiscal 1989 budget. There were some differences over just what services would be cut, but by and large the budget for the year beginning July 1 was settled and easily could have been enacted by the Wednesday-midnight deadline.

But Deukmejian suddenly junked his tax plan. It had become doomed, he claimed, because the media insisted on calling his “temporary minimal revenue adjustment” a tax increase. In fact, the media only repeated what other politicians in Sacramento, primarily alarmed Republican legislators, were calling it. Then a defiant Deukmejian went a step further and said that if the Legislature approved his tax plan, or anything slightly resembling a tax increase, he would veto it.

In offering the tax package he was trying to advance responsible good government, Deukmejian said, while others were more interested in turning it into a political game. But at least two things happened that apparently soured the governor on his own tax plan.

First, Republicans expressed alarm about Deukmejian’s being perceived as seeking a tax increase at the very time that Vice President George Bush is trying to persuade voters that Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis is a bungling fiscal manager who has to resort to tax increases to cover his mistakes.

Second, Deukmejian read the results of the California primary in which voters very narrowly rejected a modest relaxation of the Gann spending limits and seemed to defeat the governor’s $1-billion highway-construction bond issue by fewer than 3,000 votes. The results proved, he said, that Californians will not stand for any tax increases. They “will be pleased that we’re still addressing essential services, but we’ll be living within our means,” he said.

But even the budget that the governor submitted last January did not adequately address essential services. It certainly will not do so after he vetoes as much as $1 billion in spending to bring it into balance. And it is not at all clear that voters would rebel at a very modest tax increase in the event of a true fiscal emergency.

Leadership is the ability to persuade reluctant legislators, including those of the same political party, that the times and unforeseen circumstances demand just a little bad-tasting medicine. Leadership is the ability to make people understand the need for a minor sacrifice so that the state can fulfill its responsibilities. Leadership does not flee at the first slight breeze of opposition. Leadership recognizes the long-range damage to services that can be caused by such severe budget reductions.

The governor, however, is perfectly pleased with where he is right now. Back in the swamp. With the water rising ever higher. And trying to paddle with a veto pencil.