Far too few people seem to want to think about the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger won't just be able to go around making rousing speeches with the word "terminate" in every sentence -- he'll actually have to, you know, govern, i.e., engage in a tedious, unsexy bureaucratic process involving long, dull documents that bring changes, many of them unpleasant, to ordinary people's lives. Mark Paul of The Sacramento Bee is a grown-up and hasn't forgotten this non-entertaining fact. On Sunday he tried to imagine Governor S's first year in office:

...The camera crews sent to the Capitol to record the doings of California's new celebrity governor had largely occupied themselves broadcasting pictures of angry crowds of police, firefighters and librarians protesting the impending loss of their jobs from Schwarzenegger's elimination of the car tax, a local revenue source.

...[Schwarzenegger] soon grew grumpier as his audit committee delivered the bad news. The structural deficit for the coming year was $8 billion. Backfilling the loss of the car tax, as Schwarzenegger had quickly promised in order to get the police protests out of the news, would cost another $6 billion over a year and a half. The recent court decision throwing out pension obligation bonds added $2 billion more. And the governor's promise to shift property taxes from schools back to cities and counties, if implemented, would widen the budget gap by another $2 billion.

The state's fiscal situation was "serious indeed," the audit group reported. With a gap of $18 billion there was no way to balance the budget without breaking Schwarzenegger's campaign vows to protect education and to not raise taxes, they told him.

Faced with the inexorable arithmetic, the governor at first stalled. With no time left to write his own budget, in January he offered the version left by the departed administration, filling the deficit with dubious assumptions borrowed from Sacramento's handy inventory of wishful thinking: $6 billion from a tax amnesty; $2 billion from Indian gaming tribes; $5 billion from the federal government, $3 billion in spending cuts. Fiscal experts and pundits howled. From Washington, where the Bush deficits were mounting to astronomical heights, there came only gales of laughter. Perhaps California could get assistance, Washington wags said, from a new federal entitlement program: ASDC, or Aid to States with Defective Constitutions....

I'm not sure I buy the part where he realizes he has to "bypass the unyieldingly anti-tax conservatives in his own party" -- but read it to the end, because I do think something's going to happen to make it end the way Paul thinks it's going to end.

(Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link.)