The governor has pushed lawmakers to move with urgency, but he has also made clear that his two priorities are ensuring that the state will not raise taxes, as it did in February, and that it closes the whole deficit in one shot.
The Assembly approved measures totaling $5 billion Thursday that would have cut education funding and deferred some expenses, extending the timeline before the state would run out of money. But the Senate rejected the proposal before it reached the governor's desk, so he did not have to exercise a veto, as he had promised to do.
Even if he had, said Bruce Cain, professor of political science at UC Berkeley, the time is ripe for Schwarzenegger to take a gamble: The governor has no obvious designs on future office that might require him to be cautious, and voters who rejected tax hikes in May's election appear to support his approach. In any case, Cain said, most Californians will see those to be hurt by IOUs as vendors and "overpaid state employees," not themselves.
"The reality of what these cuts he is pushing for will mean hasn't hit home with the public yet," Cain said. "They see him standing up to unions and trying to cut all the waste and fraud. . . . Until the middle class bleeds in a way they care about, Arnold has the upper hand."
In this final year before he becomes a lame duck, the governor has attempted to use the budget standoff to burnish the kind of legacy he originally sought, as a populist change agent who promised to control California's finances, "blow up the boxes" of Sacramento's bureaucracy and attack the Capitol's sacred cows.
"We must use this crisis as an opportunity to make government more efficient, which is a much better option than raising your taxes," Schwarzenegger said in a radio address this weekend.
In past years, his plans ran into opposition organized largely by well-funded labor groups and Democrats, who say his proposals are really meant to strangle government. Now he is newly armed with negotiating power over Democratic lawmakers desperate to preserve state programs.
Back on the governor's demand list is a plan to cut the pensions received by state workers, which unions have stymied before but which he thinks may gain traction with a cash-strapped public. Schwarzenegger also views this as an ideal time to once again target growth and fraud in the state's multibillion-dollar in-home healthcare program, which employs 300,000 unionized workers.
