The California follies

As a San Francisco resident, I have a front-row seat to the extravaganza that passes for liberal politics in this huge and astonishing state. The general attitude of its Democratic Party was summed up a few years ago when one of its members in the Assembly was reproached by a Republican colleague. "Don't you realize," the Republican said, "that passing anti-business legislation just drives businesses out of the state?" The Democrat giggled, "What do we care? It's Republicans who are leaving."

Using such strategies, the Democrats recently achieved something close to Nirvana in Sacramento. They hold all of the statewide offices from governor down, as well as both U.S. senatorships, a majority of congressional seats, and control both the State Senate and the Assembly by comfortable margins. The last Republican governor, Pete Wilson, had left the state with a tidy budget surplus when he stepped down in 1998. Then came the high-tech bubble, and tax revenues poured in from Silicon Valley.

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It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess what Democratic legislators did. They spent it – all of it. Even more than all of it. No "rainy-day" funds for these open-handed politicians. In the elections of 2002, Gov. Gray Davis and virtually the whole Democratic state ticket were triumphantly re-elected, and Californians sat back to see what these wonder-workers would do next.

What Davis did next, because he had to, was break the news to the voters that the state's deficit wasn't a modest $8 billion, as he had estimated during his re-election campaign, but $38 billion – by far the largest deficit ever racked up by an individual state in the entire history of the Republic.

The state constitution requires that the budget be balanced. Since two-thirds of each house of the legislature must approve it, there ensued a long and ugly struggle between Republican and Democratic legislators. Republicans refused to increase taxes and the Democrats – naturally – refused to cut expenditures. Finally a compromise was reached, and the budget was "balanced" with the help of $8 billion in additional borrowing. California's credit rating promptly sank to just above junk-bond status.

At this point, a few inspired observers dusted off a "reform" that had been shoved down Californian's throats a century ago by that great liberal, Gov. Hiram Johnson: a move to recall the governor. It had never been used successfully in the state's entire history, but suddenly seemed the perfect expression for the gorge that was rising in a lot of voters' throats. Instead of settling down to three more years in Sacramento, Davis found himself staring at disaster.

So, now it appears that, on Oct. 7, Davis will be thrown out on his ear by a voter rebellion almost unprecedented in American history. What's more, a lot of political maneuvering has ensured that, on the list of candidates that will be offered to succeed him, the only prominent Democrat will be Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, a hack whose only asset is his Latino name, and who has been complicit in every Democratic boondoggle in Sacramento for decades.

This is the Democratic train wreck that has opened the door for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the muscular actor who is leading a short list of Republican alternatives. There is nothing wrong with his being a newcomer to politics – quite the contrary, in the current mood of California voters. But he has less than two months to convince them that he has reasonable positions on all the key issues. Thus far, he has confined himself to promising to be "the governor of all the people," and brushes off questions about specific thorny problems with, "I'll get to that later."

Fair enough, but he'd better get to them pretty soon.