‘Duck and Run’ Olympics: Budget Politics-as-Unusual in Sacramento : Deficit: At the heart of this year’s battle is the fact that Californians who vote are <i> not </i> the ones who need the services whose fate are at stake.

Walk in the shadows of the skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles and you come face-to-face with the brutal reality of what columnist Richard Reeves described as the two Californias.

One is “a pleasant and orderly nation of white people living well in Mediterranean climates along the Pacific Ocean.” The other is “an unruly and rather wary conglomeration of peoples of many colors, many incomes, many cultures.”

The first California votes. The second--largely non-white, poorer, less highly educated--tends not to.

This is at the heart of this year’s battle over the state budget. By and large, the Californians who vote--and organize and contribute to political campaigns--are not those who need the services whose fate and funding are at stake in Sacramento.

The state is growing by an estimated 750,000 people a year. Many new residents are children--poor, lacking in education, in need of health or welfare services. That increases demands on the state budget.

For the last seven years, however, Gov. George Deukmejian has virtually ignored these pressures, crafting a budget that reflects the middle-class priorities of his constituency and his own conservative spending philosophy. And each year the Democratic majority in the Legislature has drawn their battle lines around the health and welfare programs that serve their traditional constituencies.

This year’s budget battle is different. The ritual of staking out political turf remains the same. But two powerful forces have dominated the process: the sheer magnitude of the projected budget shortfall--$3 billion-plus, and a “double whammy” election--the governor’s office is up for grabs and control over reapportionment is at stake.

The deficit can’t be papered over with gimmicks--delaying payments or shifting spending to next year’s budget. An honest budget solution requires slashing basic services, or finding “revenue enhancements” to cover the shortfall, or combining both with Solomon-like wisdom.

That means making hard political choices--something Sacramento has artfully avoided. In an election year. When careers are at stake. The drill had all the earmarks of a “duck and run” Olympics.

“This is an awful budget and the worst kind of year,” moaned one budget watcher. “That makes cowards of people up here.”

This means partisan bickering on a scale impressive even for a normally fractious California Legislature. It means careening headlong into a new fiscal year without a sound revenue plan. And toying with the lives of Californians most dependent on state programs and least capable of exercising political clout to protect themselves.

So who--or what--is to blame for this awful mess?

The governor would say that, among other things, it’s the times we live in and the people who use--and overuse--the system. “When my parents came to this country,” he said, “it would be frowned upon to have to go and seek assistance from the government. The more these programs were expanded, greater numbers of people immediately began to go looking for that kind of help rather than trying to find other ways of supporting themselves and dealing with it.”

Balderdash! Children don’t choose to be abused or abandoned. Poor and elderly people don’t choose to be sick. It’s not enough to say fiscal miscalculations and an economic downturn were responsible for the budget crisis--although lower-than-expected tax receipts are part of the problem.

It is also not enough to argue, as Deukmejian repeatedly has, that the state’s budget process is hamstrung by a barrage of restricting initiatives, laws and court decisions. Certainly, there’s no ignoring the straitjacket that these developments have placed on funding sources and priorities. And let’s give California voters, and their penchant for “ballot-box budgeting,” some credit for the budget woes.

But it makes little policy sense to suspend educational funding guarantees approved by voters under Proposition 98. And it is heartless to tinker with mandated cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for the poor, sick and elderly. None of this fiddling can eliminate--or prevent--massive budget deficits. That requires more taxes, in addition to rational cuts.

In the end, the real villain is not economic uncertainty or legal strictures--it is political reality.

It is the political reality that a two-thirds vote of both houses of the Legislature is required to pass a budget and to increase taxes. But since Deukmejian, throughout his tenure, has been singularly unwilling to compromise, it’s always been hard to get that two-thirds. No wonder the road to getting a budget adopted by the Legislature and signed by the governor is so long and bumpy.

Even on a good legislative day, it’s difficult to get Democrats and Republicans to agree on an issue as controversial as the budget. In an election year, it’s nearly impossible.

Indeed, Deukmejian has had problems keeping his own partisans in line. There is no lock-step loyalty among legislative Republicans for a lame-duck governor who has never exerted strong party leadership, or offered any political coattails.

Many legislators, particularly in the Assembly Republican caucus, genuinely fear the issue of a tax increase--because opposition to taxes elected them. Because the “Proposition 13 babies” were swept into office at the height of the tax revolt, they have never even met a general tax increase, let alone one they liked.

Even so, Deukmejian’s biggest political obstacle may be his legacy. He staked his place in history on sound fiscal management without a general tax increase. When the fiscal “floor falls in, to fix it,” said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), “the governor will face a combination of revenue and cuts, or deep cuts in programs he’s always cared about--like prisons and the University of California. That has paralyzed Deukmejian.”

The over-arching political reality for everybody else is the November elections.

Political leaders in both parties promised California’s voters that the passage of Proposition 111, raising the gas tax and the Gann spending limit, would not result in an orgy of tax increases. If that promise isn’t kept, what kind of backlash might politicians expect?

Gubernatorial candidates Pete Wilson and Dianne Feinstein have tried to keep well away from the state budget fracas. What kind of leadership is that? Hiding may be politically wise, but it’s government-foolish. No matter how low Feinstein and Wilson try to keep their profile on the budget issue, it will affect their candidacies.

The budget may be too bloody and tattered ever to help Feinstein. She’s already suffered the backlash of her Democratic constituency as a result of her willingness to negotiate COLAs for social welfare programs. And the severity of the fiscal crisis may heighten her vulnerability to charges that she left San Francisco with a deficit and can’t be trusted to balance a budget without a tax hike.

In early advertising, Wilson is already hammering home his fiscal track record. He may ultimately want to position himself as the last line of defense against “high-taxing, big-spending” Democrats. “I won’t cave in,” the litany would go, “Just think of how taxes would skyrocket under a Democratic Legislature and a Democratic governor.”

So far, neither Wilson nor Feinstein have made a “no new taxes” pledge. But everybody knows--knew--that when push comes to shove, you could trust Republicans more than Democrats to keep taxes down. That might have been the one clear issue to separate Wilson from Feinstein.

Not any more. George Bush has thrown that potential breakout right back in Wilson’s face. And last week, Senate GOP leader Ken Maddy moved to break the Sacramento stalemate by moving to raise taxes and fees by $729 million. Taxes are no longer a curse visited on the electorate solely by demon Democrats.

Politicians will generally do anything, say anything to get elected. Then they can either face reality or continue the charade. But to continue the charade is to destroy the quality of life in this state. That hurts everybody. When enough voters are hurt, it makes facing reality more attractive politically.

Bush got it right when he explained his “thinking anew” about taxes to reporters. “Ultimately,” he said, “good politics is rooted in good government.”

Yo, Sacramento! Read his lips.