McClintock or Buffett: which side wins?

How classy was the recall election? With allegations of sexual boorishness and worse mounting against him, Arnold Schwarzenegger mustered every ounce of Reaganite rhetoric at his command and denounced the controversy as--cue the trumpet fanfare--"puke politics."

In case anyone should miss the point, aides on Schwarzenegger's campaign bus offered reporters air-sickness bags with the phrase printed on the side and stamped with a red "X." Inside each sack was a tub of green slime.

That's how classy.

Now that bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-candidate has been elected, he faces a momentous decision: Does the future lie with Warren Buffett or Tom McClintock?

Buffett signed on in August as an economic adviser to Schwarzenegger, who vows to restore discipline to the state government's wildly unbalanced budget.

The billionaire investor suggested that Californians pay too little in property taxes, thanks to the state's 1978 initiative, Proposition 13, which limited annual increases in those taxes to 2 percent a year. Schwarzenegger, to his credit, immediately recognized the mistake. He rushed to distance himself from Buffett's comments with the first in what looks to be an infinite series of lame Terminator jokes.

No friend of tax cuts as fiscal policy, Buffett left the impression that the state's budget chaos was a consequence of too little revenue rather than too much spending. It was odd to think such a fellow should serve as economic swami to a candidate who had vowed to end "business as usual" in the state capital.

Indeed, the vagueness of Schwarzenegger's rhetoric--he vows to "give California back its future," thanks very much--raises more questions than it answers. His more detailed campaign platform, thrown together in the last few weeks, does suggest a political tendency that might be called "generic Republican"--a set of priorities that tilt away from government interventions in the economy while not being incorrigibly hostile to them.

For a real revolution in the systemic corruption of state government, Schwarzenegger will have to go further--even as far as his rival, State Sen. Tom McClintock, the only other Republican candidate who drew double-digit support. McClintock was an inept candidate, brittle and sanctimonious on the stump, with a mortician's grin. He is also a genuine policy intellectual who's been obsessed with reforming state government since he entered the California Assembly at the age of 26.

The budget crisis, McClintock said in a speech earlier this year, "is not intractable and it's not mysterious. Over the last four years, population and inflation have grown at a combined rate of 21 percent. Revenue has grown 28 percent. Spending has grown 40 percent."

Canceling scheduled spending increases and reducing current expenditures by 9.5 percent for 18 months, says McClintock, would balance the budget without raising taxes or raiding the state's pension funds. He has a long list of systemic reforms, including where to cut.

Schwarzenegger can ignore McClintock, but any fiscal plan less radical than "McClintockism" will look like business as usual. And that would make his political career as short-lived as that of his fellow showman, former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura.

Clamoring for reform, hostile to tax increases, Californians will see the status quo undisturbed and conclude that Governor Arnold, of all people, has succumbed to puke politics.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.