A FAILURE AND A MEDIOCRITY.

The budget mess - which Schwarzenegger promised to fix when he was elected in 2003 - is another blot on a record which, if truth be known, is no more than mediocre. The governor makes many grandiose promises and keeps very few of them.

Schwarzenegger is blaming everyone and everything but himself for the budget deficit, pegged at $14.5 billion during the rest of this fiscal year and all of the next. But if he really had the guts that the current crew of media admirers tells us he has, he'd shoulder the blame himself.

It's not the economy, even though he insists that flattening economic activity, born of the housing industry's free-fall, is to blame. Before the current downturn, the economy was humming along and generating tens of billions of dollars in new state revenues, giving him and lawmakers an opportunity to bring the state's finances into balance with minimal pain. But they spent every dollar and then some.

Schwarzenegger also blames automatic spending formulas built into the budget, including, presumably, one that he himself championed. All of those formulas could have been suspended or altered if there had been sufficient political leadership.

Schwarzenegger tried to change budget dynamics in a series of ballot measures in 2005, only to fail miserably - thanks in large measure to the embarrassingly inept manner in which he and his advisers conducted the campaign.

Schwarzenegger did, indeed, have an opportunity to become a transcendent and transformational political figure. But he blew it through a deadly combination of ignorance and hubris. That's the real story that the fawning media should be telling.