Education cuts and reform campaigns can be the drinking and driving of California politics. Each carries certain risks when pursued separately. Combined, they can be deadly.
This is a truth that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has found hard to accept. Three years ago, just as he launched his breakneck drive to win voter approval of budget and political reforms, he decided to withhold part of a mandated increase in education funding from his 2005-06 budget proposal. The delay in Proposition 98 funding soon consumed the public attention that Schwarzenegger wanted directed toward his reform proposals. His favorability rating dropped more than 20 points in state polls.
Politically weakened, the governor could not make the case for reforms to limit the rate of the state's budget growth and for new redistricting rules to make legislative elections more competitive. In time, the political poison let loose by the education cuts killed his slate of reform initiatives, which went down to overwhelming defeat in the 2005 special election.
Today, facing a budget crisis that provides him with another opportunity to deliver on his promises of major reform, Schwarzenegger may be repeating the same mistake that doomed his efforts three years ago.
It is difficult to argue with the governor's goals. He is again campaigning for budget reform that includes a bigger rainy-day fund, an idea that is hard to oppose as California suffers through a $16-billion budget shortfall. And in cooperation with good government groups, he has again launched a drive to qualify a redistricting initiative for the November ballot that would end the conflict of interest inherent in legislators drawing their own districts.
But he has been unable to resist mixing the political equivalent of nitroglycerin and gunpowder. As he did in 2005, Schwarzenegger has undercut his reform efforts by proposing across-the-board budget cuts that include education, the most popular government program.
The results have been an echo of three years ago. Partisans who dislike his budget and redistricting reforms are attacking him for cutting education. The education coalition, which includes the powerful California Teachers Assn., opposes him. His approval rating among California residents has fallen to 44%, according to a March poll by the Public Policy Institute of California. That's down 13 points from his rating in December, before he offered up the education cuts. If his numbers continue to decline, as Republican and Democratic pollsters expect, it will be tough for him to sell his budget reform to legislators, who must approve it before the measure goes on the ballot, or to convince voters to support his redistricting initiative.
