Earl Long was a special case. Less gifted or brazen governors worry obsessively about the costs of fiscal deception, and what it might do to their careers. But they practice it anyway. And they usually get away with it. In Illinois, where Governor Richard Ogilvie was voted out in 1972 for instituting an income tax, every governor since has won the office on a solemn pledge that no new taxes would be needed. Most of them have violated that pledge, some within a matter of weeks or months. None has been unseated on that issue.
Some are less fortunate. Jim Florio won the governorship of New Jersey in 1989 while insisting there was no need for a significant tax increase of any sort. His subsequent decision to push through the largest tax increase in the state's history ultimately cost him a second term (although by a very small margin). In any case, Florio's experience did not deter Democratic candidate Jim McGreevey from making an even stronger anti-tax statement 12 years later, nor did it deter McGreevey from proposing a big tax increase of his own upon taking office.
When it comes to fiscal policy, the American electorate reminds me of a flock of ostriches I once saw at a wildlife park in Florida. They kept coming up to our bus and sucking on the metal railing, hoping it might be a tasty treat. When it turned out to taste like metal, they ran away. But soon they were back and trying again. They weren't smart enough to remember the flavor of cold aluminum for more than a few minutes at a time.
Americans are a little brighter than ostriches, but they can behave in roughly the same way. Candidates run for governor promising low taxes and an undiminished menu of needed services. Once in office, they look for ways to backtrack. Usually the voters forget about the duplicity and reelect them anyway. Occasionally, they get angry and turn the governor out of office. But in either case, they are nearly always willing to succumb to the blandishments of the next candidate who comes along and says that he--unlike all those sleazy politicians who preceded him--will keep the promises they so blithely repudiated.
I don't mean this the way it probably sounds. I admire governors and legislators who are willing to raise the money it takes to support the level of service that the public expects. I think that Ogilvie's Illinois income tax helped generate two decades of fiscal solvency and capital investment, that Florio made a principled change of policy under intense pressure from court mandates, and that McGreevey offered an eminently sensible tax reform program aimed at closing a passel of corporate tax loopholes that should have been closed a long time ago.
What bothers me is the dance we do every time an election rolls around, all but demanding that candidates make pledges and commitments they will be unable to keep, paying only limited attention to what actually happens when the new administration takes office, and then returning to start the whole process over again, a few degrees more cynical but no smarter than when the whole cycle began. When it comes to fiscal policy, we might as well be a bunch of ostriches sucking on aluminum.
This brings us to Arnold Schwarzenegger, which I figured would happen sooner rather than later. To be fair to California's new governor, his campaign this fall was far from the most duplicitous or demagogic of recent times. Schwarzenegger didn't make any blatantly implausible promises about how he would deal with the state's multibillion-dollar shortfall--he barely promised anything at all. He merely suggested that, given a new infusion of common sense, goodwill and some star quality, the problem could be solved without causing any serious pain to the state's citizens.
Why voters believe this sort of thing, in California or anywhere else, is a puzzle I have never come close to solving despite decades of effort. You'd think that somewhere in the country, in the midst of a gubernatorial campaign during a recession, somebody would notice that all but a handful of the other 49 states in the country also are experiencing virtually the same fiscal crisis.
If the problem were sleazy hacks clinging to power, or a shortage of new ideas, or even a culture of waste, fraud and abuse, you'd expect some variety from one state capitol to another. You'd have some states rolling in money despite the recession, and you'd have others needing a bailout from the I.M.F. to make up for their executive incompetence. But that's not the situation. For the past couple of years, just about every state government has been in the same boat, stuck with tax systems unable to generate the revenue to balance their budgets.
Given this rather simple reality, it's extremely implausible--not to say preposterous--to argue California is short $50 billion because Gray Davis was a mediocre governor. Nevertheless, this is exactly the argument Schwarzenegger managed to sell to the state's electorate, just as candidates have been able to sell similar arguments without much effort all over the country in recent years. If it is not quite a deception worthy of Earl Long, it is a deception nevertheless.
While generally avoiding any sort of specifics about how he planned to deal with California's budget problems, Schwarzenegger did make a couple of firm promises over the course of his recall campaign. One was that any reductions in education spending would have to be made "over my dead body." That commitment lasted three weeks into the new administration. By mid-December, his body still seemingly warm, the new governor declared that he might need to suspend the state constitutional formula that guarantees California schools about 40 percent of state general fund revenues.
Then there was the vow Schwarzenegger made to cities and counties: In repealing the car-tax increase he had campaigned impassionately against, he promised to see that they didn't lose a penny of the $4 billion in public funds the tax would have brought them. That commitment unraveled almost immediately. In a TV interview before Christmas, the governor told local officials to go see the legislature if they wanted their money back. It wasn't his problem, even if he had said a month earlier that it was.
When Schwarzenegger released his first budget in mid-January, school systems and local governments learned that the new governor did indeed plan to renege on his campaign promises. He told the local governments that a large portion of the $4 billion they stood to lose with the car-tax repeal would have to remain lost. And the schools would be asked to forgo about half of the money the state formula was supposed to guarantee them. Earlier state budgets, Schwarzenegger said, had been "shell games, using tricks and gimmicks to put off the hard decisions." In fact, the Los Angeles Times reported, the new budget "relies on some of the same techniques he has criticized."
The point of all this is not that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a monster. In many ways, he has had a successful first few weeks in office. He promised to repeal the car tax, and while that may have been foolish, at least he delivered on that one. He won the right to ask voters for permission to borrow $15 billion in the bond market to meet immediate deficit problems, and it is possible that they will give it to him (although it won't do anything to help with the state's long-term structural budget problems). All in all, Californians seem to perceive Arnold as a man of action unwilling to settle for defeatism and red tape.
As long as that perception remains intact, Schwarzenegger has a chance to be a successful governor--even, perhaps, an honest governor willing to make painful sacrifices in time of need. But if he does pull that off, it will be in spite of virtually everything he said (and didn't say) from the time he launched his campaign until the day he took office.
The bottom line is that there is a dangerous disconnect between the ever-more simplistic tone of modern campaigns for governor and the subtle trade-offs the winners have to face when they take over the job. It's hard to get elected these days talking realistically about the difficult choices any state faces. It's even harder to govern without reneging very quickly on something you promised in the heat of a partisan debate.
I have a modest proposal to solve the problem: Let's just sequester the candidates--lock them in a room as soon as they are nominated, sealing them off from communication with the outside world, and let the media and the voters calmly examine their life histories and past records and try to make an intelligent guess about what they might do upon taking office. The winner wouldn't be able to claim much of a mandate, but he wouldn't have to worry about breaking a promise every time he made a difficult decision.
I'm not certain this would give us better government than we have now. But I doubt it would make the situation any worse.
