Dear Governor: Time to Exercise Leadership : State reels from bad economy--and gridlocked government

There’s a time to hold ‘em and there’s a time to fold ‘em, but for Gov. Pete Wilson it’s time now to show ‘em.

The governor and his Democratic poker mates in Sacramento have got to call it a night and put all their cards on the table. The party’s over--and a good time has not been had by all.

For outside that Sacramento poker parlor known as the state Capitol, life gets grittier by the day. The battered state bond rating remains under the flinty scrutiny of fearsome and powerful East Coast rating agencies whose increasingly negative judgments make the cost of state borrowing ever dearer. Local banks have grown sick of those IOUs, and soon Medi-Cal checks may be held up. State vendors increasingly refuse to sell because the state can’t pay them. The gnawing panic of economic uncertainty hangs heavy over the once-only-sunny California skies.

And in Sacramento the politicians are still playing political poker.

All this is happening in the middle of a stubbornly persistent state recession. Remember the day then-Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. woke up and found unexpected billions in cash piled in the state coffers? Forget about it, folks--those days of plenty are history.

Some months back it was understandable that Pete Wilson was underwhelmed by the Legislature’s capacity to cope with scarcity. For this was a representative body born and nurtured in the age of milk and honey--a gang best organized for the bloat and the float; it was a Legislature that scarcely ever met an interest group it didn’t like--a goodies dispensary that seemed to have every word in its vocabulary save one: “No.” Not surprising, then, that the governor’s instinct was not to play ball with legislative leaders because at first they seemed to him to be playing the same old game--stand and deliver--and in this recession the real job was to slice and burn.

But the institutional infirmities of this Legislature notwithstanding, it’s time for the governor to deal. This may not be a Legislature to his liking but it’s the only one we’ve got. Some in Sacramento now fear that Wilson may have lost sight of the Big Picture and may have forgotten that his job as governor is to govern. Let’s hope that’s a scurrilous falsehood.

What to do? In the Legislature this weekend, one compromise budget bill, pushed by Republican Sen. Frank Hill of Whittier and Democratic Assemblyman Richard Katz of Sylmar, is moving out of conference committee and onto both floors of the Legislature. It’s a miserable, ugly beast of a budget, no question. If it were a new movie, Hollywood would leave it on the shelf; if it were a new perfume, people would hold their noses.

But it is also something else--perhaps the closest thing to a compromise state budget plan that Sacramento has yet seen. What does it do? It tries to minimize the damage to the state’s cities and especially to the public schools, where the bloodletting is put at less than $1 billion. It also tries to get Democrats and Republicans on the same wavelength, because it is a budget that all decent Democrats and Republicans can loathe--partisan politics has nothing to do with it.

And so it well deserves the attention of the governor. Yes, this dog of a budget just might hunt. Yes, Gov. Wilson--it is time to make a deal. All sides must show their cards--especially you. The game is done, the party’s over--turn the lights out, give the people of California a budget. And--Legislature as well as governor--go home for a good rest.