CLUELESS GOVERNOR STILL HASN'T REALIZED WHY WE HAVE STATE GOVERNMENT.

Byline: THOMAS D. ELIAS

AFTER more than three years in office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger clearly understands a lot about politics. He's gotten Democrats to forgive him for calling them names and otherwise denigrating them. He's had the courage to tell the truth and call popular conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh "irrelevant."

He's pushed good ideas like universal health care, clean fuels, reduced greenhouse gases and a ban on fundraising by state officials during the budget-writing season.

Of course, some of this is in the "do as I say, not as I do" category: Schwarzenegger has set records for raising campaign dollars during the budget-writing and bill-signing periods of the last few years, and he drives a fleet of Hummers that certainly don't contribute to cleaner air.

But that's mere hypocrisy of the type many people fall into.

Much more serious is the fact that after all his time in office, Schwarzenegger still doesn't understand why California has a state government. That became clear the other day, after his appointees to the state Board of Chiropractic Examiners -- including two of his old steroid-popping bodybuilding buddies -- pushed the board into utter chaos by firing its executive director and claiming chiropractors can cure earaches when there's no evidence to suggest this is true.

Schwarzenegger's reaction: "What is important is that the board represents chiropractors. And each board represents their profession."

Those two sentences said a lot. Plainly, Schwarzenegger thinks government is meant to encourage business in whatever it wants to do. Taking this approach to the absurd extreme, if garbage collectors ever claim they can cure cancer and there's a board of garbage collection examiners, that board's job should be to encourage them in their quackery if that would help their bottom lines.

For sure, no state government wants to drive businesses away. But state boards and commissions exist at least as much to rein in business excesses as to help business make more money.

Because Schwarzenegger doesn't understand this, he constantly appoints persons from regulated industries -- who will later return to jobs in those industries -- to the boards overseeing them.

His director of housing and community development is a former developer. His agriculture secretary is a farmer. The president of the Public Utilities Commission is the former president of Southern California Edison Co., one of the largest regulated utilities. Last month, he appointed a former lobbyist for the optometric profession as associate secretary of legislative affairs for the state health agency. At the same time, he named the administrator of the California Farm Bureau Federation as undersecretary of the Department of Food and Agriculture. And on and on.

In hundreds of cases, he's got foxes guarding henhouses. At some point, this situation was bound to explode as it did at the chiropractic board.

But in other areas, the damage from his approach has been far worse, if quieter. Take the PUC, for a leading example. Because natural-gas utilities feel they can make more money using liquefied natural gas than ordinary gas piped in from other parts of North America, the PUC approved their plans to give up about one-fourth of the gas that now comes here from Texas and Oklahoma and replace it with far more expensive LNG.

The same Schwarzenegger-appointed PUC rescinded rules that would have forced cell-phone companies to live up to pledges they make when recruiting customers. His commissioners also are now standing back and saying they have virtually no control over the plans of telephone companies to expand into cable or satellite television.

And yet, the PUC was established explicitly to prevent monopoly utility companies from exploiting their captive-audience customers. If commissioners, who serve five-year terms, take the Schwarzenegger approach to government, they are contradicting the very reasons their agency was created.

But Schwarzenegger doesn't care. He talks about "post-partisanship" and his hopes that his approach to politics will spread across the nation. He calls himself "the people's governor," but worries far more about businesses than the people they serve and employ.

So America beware: If the Arnold concept that government exists to help companies make money ever becomes nationally accepted, consumers will have virtually no protections from predatory businesses of all kinds, from pharmaceutical companies to automakers to agriculture.

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no caption (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger)