Why So Unserious?

In the recent blockbuster The Dark Knight,the by-this-point infamous Joker sidles up to the permanently scarredHarvey Dent and expresses his hope that "There won't be any hardfeelings between us, Harvey." The Joker's reasoning for why Dent shouldnot blame him for the mutilation of Dent's face and the death of Dent'sgirlfriend is that the Joker was "sitting in [Police Commissioner]Gordon's cage" and "didn't rig those charges" at the time it happened.The defense is laughable, and Dent makes as much clear.

But it's no less laughable than any defense that both Gov.Schwarzenegger and California's Democratic lawmakers could levy overtheir conspicuous absencefrom California at the eleventh hour before the budget crisis finallyexplodes into impossibility. According the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alertweb log, Schwarzenegger and the Democratic leaders spentthe weekend up in Washington, either partying it up with newly mintedPresident Obama or being thanked for their devotion to the inestimably important cause of finger-painting and crayons.

If the Joker is famous for asking, "why so serious", thanCalifornia's people should be demanding an answer to the question ofwhy the governor and his Democratic adversaries are so unseriousaboutfixing California's budget crisis as to spend an entire weekenddoing such trivial things. And the person who should be mosthard-pressed to answer this question is the governor. After all, theDemocrats have a political excuse for their flippancy, since thegovernor's loss is most likely their electoral gain. That, and theyprobably think that once they get back, money will start growing ontrees the way it did under FDR and we'll be in the clear.

But in Schwarzenegger's case, there really is no excuse. He of allpeople should know that there are scores of Democrats, not to mention ascandalously over-indulgent presslining up to take his spot away from him using whatever he can givethem as firepower. He should also know, given that he just talked aboutthe need for a "year of political courage" in his State of the Statespeech, that now is hardly the time to go coasting about the countrycollecting awards, smiling for cameras and reliving his glory days asthe Terminator. Now is the time to grab the State, mouth the usualtaciturn line, "Come with me if you want to live" (sounds appropriateright about now) and steamroller it through recovery.

And yet, mysteriously, Schwarzenegger is doing the opposite of whathe should be doing -- getting awards, resting on his laurels and appointing people to jobs with six figure salariesand duties which are so nebulously defined even the job holders don'tknow what they do! Why? Why, after all that heated fighting, wouldSchwarzenegger do this?

The answer will be counter intuitive, and it is this: Democracy. Thegovernor knows he can't pass any sort of budget plan without theDemocrats, since they have a majority in California's assembly, andSchwarzenegger also knows that his own party has no plans of listeningto him, so their votes are not leveraged either.

He is effectivelystuck between a political rock and a hard place, and is doing the onlything he can do - playing along with the people who reallyholdpower. On some level, it's a good thing Schwarzenegger is behaving likethis, since it calls attention to the fact that he might not beif the Democrats (whose majority he needs in order to be effective)weren't doing so. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that politicalincentives have made it such that the Democrats, who apparently thinkthey can pin the crisis on Schwarzenegger, will not put in the seriouseffort necessary to fix this problem because they would rather seeRepublicans lose than California's government win.

And so, much like the traumatized Harvey Dent, I find myselfaccepting that the attempts by these schemers to control things reallyare pathetic.