Arnold Schwarzenegger soiled his marriage and smeared his image, but he did it on his own time. What he did as governor was mess up the state, and that was while working for us.
Out of office, Schwarzenegger harmed his family and himself. His philandering may be entertaining to people, but it's not their problem.
However, Schwarzenegger's missteps as California's top elected official badly screwed up the state's finances. It affects us all — school kids, the needy, ordinary taxpayers. And that is very much our problem.
I'm trying to keep the man's sins in perspective: Some merely are injurious to those he purports to love. Many are damaging to the state he was entrusted to lead.
Gov. Jerry Brown now is tackling one of the toughest political jobs imaginable: trying to clean up the clutter of borrowing left behind by Schwarzenegger.
Brown called it "a wall of debt" Monday in unveiling his revised budget proposal for the fiscal year starting July 1.
"I don't want to continue the games and the gimmicks of the past," the governor told reporters, calculating the accumulated budget borrowing at $35 billion. That debt alone will eat up $2.5 billion of the general fund.
He pegged the general-fund deficit at $10.8 billion, down from $25.4 billion when Schwarzenegger left office.
"When I say 'gimmick,' it's a form of borrowing from the future," Brown continued. "And you keep piling that up and you weaken our finances. You take money away from solid programs because you don't face the music....
"There's something infantile about the idea that we spend and then we borrow."
Granted, Schwarzenegger had plenty of help in running up the credit card — from his predecessor Gray Davis, from the Legislature and from the voters.
The borrowing began with Davis in 2003, the year the Democrat was recalled and replaced with the Hollywood action hero. The new Republican governor promised to "end the crazy deficit spending" and "live within our means."
Instead, he went on a borrowing binge, joined by legislators of both parties and the California electorate.
Schwarzenegger's first mistake was to cut the vehicle license fee, leaving a $4-billion budget hole that gradually grew to $6 billion annually.
To pay for the tax cut, he borrowed, persuading the Legislature and voters to sign off on a $15-billion bond issue to meet daily expenses. That's like taking out a second mortgage to buy food and gas.