Arnold Rewrites History on Meet the Press

George Skelton, in the LAT (Feb. 26, 2004):

It was a terrific performance by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on NBC's"Meet the Press" Sunday. He was witty, entertaining, upbeat, creative…. Really creative — to the point of trying to re-create history.

Schwarzenegger does have this tendency — let's put it gently — to stretch the truth, to not let the facts get in the way of a good sales pitch. That is not so terrific, even if it makes for a terrific performance.

America's new political star told"Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert that, in governing,"the most important thing is honesty, to be honest … with the people."

But he also engaged in some history revision — and not just trivial history, but history directly relevant to the current budget mess. This is history that offers a lesson for today's inexperienced Sacramento politicians, especially the novice governor, but not as he contorted it.

Schwarzenegger was asked about former Govs. Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson raising taxes"when it came down to the crunch" to balance their budgets. Wouldn't he do the same?

What followed wasn't as much political spinning as outright truth-twisting:

"If we have an emergency and something unexpected happens, absolutely, I will raise the taxes. But I am not faced with those kind of emergencies at this point because, as you know, Pete Wilson, who was a great governor … had a terrible time in the beginning.

"I mean, here this poor guy went in there with great enthusiasm trying to fix the state, and here the $14-billion debt — right? — that he inherited. And all of a sudden he's hit with riots, with fires, with floods, with mudslides, with earthquakes, with one disaster after the other.

"So this is why he had to raise the taxes because here all of a sudden the bridges and freeways were collapsing, buildings were collapsing. So he had to come up quickly with the money to make up for those kind of damages.

"So, otherwise, he would have never raised the taxes."

Schwarzenegger did get one thing right. Wilson faced a $14-billion deficit his first year as governor, 1991.

But if Schwarzenegger had the deficit figure pegged correctly, why is it that he had the rest of the story so wrong? The best that can be said for him is that he was just sloppy, maybe making it up as he spoke.

Wilson imposed the tax increases to help wipe out the budget deficit. Nothing else. No disasters. No collapsing bridges or buildings. No riot rations.

The Republican governor faced a devastating crop freeze and a lingering drought in his early months, but neither required huge reservoirs of state money. He signed the tax increase in July 1991 — a $7-billion hit on practically everything taxable. (The other half of the deficit was eliminated with cuts and gimmicks.)

The first big disaster on Wilson's watch — the Oakland Hills firestorm — didn't occur until October 1991. The L.A. riots erupted in May 1992. Orange County had terrible mudslides in 1993. The Northridge earthquake hit in 1994. Killer floods came in 1997.