The State : Risk-Wary California Voters Look for Security in a ‘No’ Vote : Polls: A deep-seated distrust of politicians threatens to undermine any sense of the common good. Governance will get ever more difficult.

Californians were simply not in the mood to take any chances in last Tuesday’s special election.

When voters have doubts, when they don’t know or understand much about the issues on their ballot, if they have little emotional investment in the outcome, they tend to vote no. That’s part of what happened.

But not all. The undercurrents of the vote--the dominance of self-interest over common values, the mean-spiritedness of the rhetoric, the negativism of the electorate--are unsettling for the future of politics and governance in California.

The defeat of five of the seven ballot propositions was not simply a status-quo vote. Changing the faces who govern is one thing; radical shifts in public policy during unsettled times are something else. Californians didn’t embrace the status quo; they cast a loud anti-risk vote.

Anything that smelled as though it might cost voters money, without showing a direct benefit, went down. And when it suited their agenda, voters snubbed their noses at Establishment-backed proposals opposed by anti-tax and anti-government interests.

The resounding defeats of Propositions 168 and 169 underscore the deep-seated voter frustration with, and suspicion of, elected officials. No, voters said on 168, we won’t hand over to politicians our right to decide on public-housing projects. No, they said on 169, we’re not going to let politicians hide their budget shenanigans behind one, big implementation bill. Californians appear unwilling to give politicians any slack. And that makes it difficult for elected leaders to govern.

Even nominally non-controversial issues got caught in the cross-fire between a surly electorate and the punitive politics of the 1990s. It used to be that state housing bonds passed with relative ease. Not this year. Proposition 173 would have reauthorized the state treasurer to sell $185 million in housing bonds, originally approved by voters in 1982, to help first-time homeowners qualify for loans. It went down, the putative victim of possible taxpayer costs. Older, high-propensity voters--especially predominant in special elections--don’t tend to be among first-time homeowners, and they saw little in it for them.

Proposition 170, which would have lowered the vote needed to pass local school bonds from two-thirds to a simple majority, fell prey to a similar shortsightedness. It lost because it contains those super-charged words property taxes and mentions raising their 1% limit. Opponents successfully positioned the proposal as a tax increase and an assault on the sacred protections of Proposition 13.

People tend to vote their pocketbooks or their fears. On Tuesday, voters held tightly to their purse strings--with one glaring exception. On Proposition 172, they voted their fears. They made permanent a temporary half-cent sales tax whose revenue will be spent for more police and fire protection. In those counties affected by the recent series of firestorms, the measure easily passed.

Bucking the Republican Party’s formal opposition, Gov. Pete Wilson endorsed and campaigned for 172--and, after the stinging defeat he suffered on his welfare initiative last year, it must have felt good to win one. More important, without the $1.4 billion in revenues the tax is estimated to bring into state coffers, an already sizable budget deficit would have been made worse.

Hard decisions on program cuts can now be deferred. But only for a while. There is no reason to believe that the budget shortfall will be erased by the half-cent sales tax. There are no guarantees that law enforcement, social programs or both are out of harm’s way come the next budget battle.

That reality can turn around and bite Wilson, and Democratic legislators, in an election year.

Wilson may breathe a little easier, too, with the defeat of Proposition 174, the school-voucher initiative. He’s ducked the necessity of implementing a program he opposed and one that could add to the difficulty of closing the budget gap.

But the issue of school choice--and Wilson’s opposition to 174--will continue to dog him among conservative Republicans. And it could become a litmus test in the races for governor and for the now-vacant post of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Voter dissatisfaction with public schools or the need for reasoned--and reasonable--reform of California’s dysfunctional education system remains strong. The vote against 174 was not a rejection of change; nor did the voucher defeat constitute a mandate in favor of public education. Rather, it was a vote against a flawed proposal that offered Californians little in the way of accountability or oversight, and threatened to spend inestimable amounts of public money on private schools.

It would be tragic--and the height of arrogance and irresponsibility--if the state’s teachers think they’ve won the war over school reform and things can go on as usual in California education--just as long as the California Teachers’ Assn. continues to raise and spend obscene amounts of money to guarantee its clout and protect its stake in the status quo.

It would be equally tragic--and mean-spirited--if the proponents of 174 thought that the grudge match over ideology played out in Tuesday’s election can continue. “We’re going to come back 10 times as well-financed and meaner than ever, and that’s a warning to the other side,” threatened the head of the Yes on 174 campaign.

Enough. What both sides need to do is to turn the energy, organization and resources used to trash each other over 174 to improving California’s schools. A public-policy issue as complex and as delicate as school choice has to be deliberated in an arena where rational compromise can be reached. In a perfect world, that would be the Legislature.

But California is not a perfect world. What went on last week was not merely about grudge matches or meting out punishment; it was about the future of the state, the education of its children and the mending of its frayed social fabric. And, as several of the ballot outcomes tend to reflect, it was about what might happen if California’s people reject any stake in governance for the common good. Any commitment to the whole.

By refusing to take individual risks, California voters may have placed their state at the greatest risk of all.