In today's Sacramento Bee, columnist Dan Walters corrects some misunderstandings about Prop 13. Bottom line: Prop 13 underlies California's problems, but its limits on property taxes are not the fundamental problem--it's the way that the initiative changed governance in the state.

Here's a funny little exchange between Gov. Schwarzenegger and Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters during a budget press conference in a Capitol hallway yesterday.

GOVERNOR:...I think that Democrats and Republicans are working together on this. And the key thing is now to just really make sure they don't come up with one-time solutions, because even if you go and withhold your taxes, it's a one-time solution. Or if you go and move the date of paying your paychecks from June 30th to July 1st, to kick it over to the next fiscal year, that's a one-time solution. It doesn't help you in the out years. And so what we have to think about is, how do we make sure that we get rid of the structural deficit once and for all? I think this is what the people expect us to do, to solve this crisis, to solve these problems. Then our credit rating will be good again, people will want to do business with us, people will get money to us. So all good things will happen if we solve this problem and solve it, solve the entire $24 billion.
WALTERS: Governor, don't you have one-time solutions yourself? You have the accelerated withholding. Isn't that a one-time solution?
GOVERNOR: Absolutely correct. And what we don't want to do is add to those, because we make --
WALTERS: So it's all right if you do it but no all right if they do it?
GOVERNOR: No, not to add onto it. Very good point, Daniel. (Laughter) I mean, we don't want to add onto the problem.

Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters draws a picture Sunday of the reform landscape in California. He puts Leon Panetta's California Forward as the incrementalist side of the reform movement and the Bay Area Council (which wants a constitutional convention) and the New America Foundation (your blogger's employer, which has been talking about changing the make-up of the legislature) as the big-thinking, "aggressive" side. More on this subject later--after I go out and aggressively hunt big game for dinner.

More than a week ago, the Public Policy Institute of California put out a report looking at redistricting and legislative behavior. But it didn't get the attention it deserved. The recall attempt against Gov. Schwarzenegger, the calls for a constitutional convention, and -- most of all -- the end of the budget drama consumed air time and newspaper space. The report also was the subject of a dismissive column by Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters.

The Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters says so in this column that is being talked about this week. But Walters offers no actual evidence or examples of this tendency, other than a quote from Schwarzenegger about the virtues of changing one's mind and a comparison to Jerry Brown that's pretty meaningless.

Walters' analysis is conventional wisdom in Sacramento. The problem is it doesn't fit the facts--at least on matters of policy. In reporting a book on Schwarzenegger, a massive briefing binder with all of Schwarzenegger's intended policies from the 2003 recall campaign fell into my possession. To flip back through the book today is to be struck by how utterly consistent Schwarzenegger has been. He's still pursuing the policies he promised: an enlightened environmental centrism, regulation that favors business, infrastructure investment, protection of local government funds, redistricting that takes the legislature out of the process, and a spending limit and rainy day fund.

Dan Walters, on the Sacramento Bee web site, argues that the Census Bureau's numbers on California voter turnout don't match up with the state's numbers. The bureau appears to have relied on a survey asking people whether they voted, rather than the state's actual count of the number of people who voted.