Governor Schwarzenegger has beaten Phil Angelides by an approximately 60-36% margin with about a third of all precincts reporting. About an hour ago, Schwarzenegger struck a pronounced bipartisan note in his victory speech, and Angelides conceded the race.

Both the KQED Capitol Notes blog and Daniel Weintraub on his blog at the Sacramento Bee make a hugely important point. While Governor Schwarzenegger is assiduously stumping for the four 1B-1E bond measures, including at a stop at the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland today, he has said virtually nothing about the state budget during the course of the race.

In fact, KQED’s John Myers notes, the governor has avoided answering questions about the budget. During the October 7 debate, the governor said, when asked a question about the budget, “This is not my style to talk about hypotheticals. Myers notes that Phil Angelides has offered some specifics about what he would do to balance the budget, including eliminating state government inefficiencies, but according to Myers, it’s unclear whether his numbers add up.

Myers, Weintraub, and other writers note that no matter what else happens, the state will almost certainly face at the minimum, a $4 billion budget shortfall in the 2007-2008 fiscal year. What Schwarzenegger and Angelides would do to address that shortfall is a question that is going almost completely undiscussed in the race. That’s an untouched question that will ultimately affect all Californians.

Some information resources:

• Yesterday’s edition of KQED’s “The California Report” has a John Myers news report about the budget from the gubernatorial race. The report (which lasts 8 minutes) can be downloaded in mp3 format here (scroll down to October 23).

• The state Legislative Analyst’s Office has a report on the 2006-07 budget that briefly discusses the impact of the budget shortfall projected out to the fiscal years 2007-08 and 2008-09.

Many of the major California political blogs seem to have already written Phil Angelides’ political obituary.

Some are still writing about his flubs in campaign appearances, or are observing that Arnold Schwarzenegger is making fewer and fewer campaign appearances these days, the governor’s campaign apparently believing that he’s been all but re-elected.

Just a few of the recent blog observations out there about Angelides: Karen Hanretty writes on her blog that Angelides is at serious risk of losing as badly to Schwarzenegger as Dan Lungren lost to Gray Davis in 1998 (Lungren lost by a 19-point margin) … Bill Bradley links to an article from the Hayward Daily Review that paints a portrait of Democratic Party activists having a hard time finding volunteers in Alameda County to work for Democratic candidates. Bradley also notes that the massive infusion of public employee union cash that was supposed to arrive to revitalize Angelides’ campaign in the final weeks has not materialized … The San José Mercury News politics blog observes that Angelides has picked up the endorsements of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, La Opinión, the state’s leading Spanish-language newspaper, and — that’s all.

The San Francisco Chronicle today became the latest major newspaper to endorse the governor for re-election, saying in its endorsement editorial, “Overall, he’s on the right course.” Of his opponent, the Chronicle observed:

Angelides … has not demonstrated the leadership traits required to build coalitions that can overcome the egos, ambition and partisan rivalries that stand in the way of progress in Sacramento … In his meeting with us, many of his answers gave no indication that he either heard or cared about the question — time after time, he defaulted to his wind-up stump monologues about education or closing tax loopholes.

The Chronicle’s endorsement follows on endorsements of the governor by the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee this weekend. Opinion columnists and bloggers for both papers wrote after the Chronicle’s endorsement that the Times and the Bee found Angelides unworthy of endorsement for reasons similar to those outlined in the Chronicle editorial.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has also endorsed Schwarzenegger.

The biggest fireworks in the governor’s race today: Phil Angelides spoke at St. Andrews African Methodist Episcopal Church in Sacramento and dropped the following bombshell in his remarks: “There have been news reports that have indicated the governor might have made comments defending apartheid. Now, you can make a judgment about those.”

Robert Salladay, who covers the story on the Los Angeles Times Political Muscle blog, surmises that Angelides was making a reference to a controversial remark that the governor was alleged to have made in an informal conversation with an acquaintance about the apartheid regime in South Africa. The governor’s office retorted that the Angelides campaign had become “untethered from reality.”

This suddenly aggressive Angelides posture is the subject of debate in numerous newspaper columns and in the California political blogopshere. Is Angelides being newly aggressive, or has he been this way all along and just been lying dormant for the past couple of months?

If that wasn’t enough, Angelides was also roundly ridiculed in blogs and news articles for saying in an Associated Press interview published yesterday, “I mean, thank God I’m in this race. It’s the only reason we’ve gotten three months of any kind of action from this governor that makes sense for Californians.”

Interesting that the questions that reporters posed to Phil Angelides during the candidate forum sponsored by the Chronicle editorial board and CBS5.com were often to the effect of, “Why are you giving Schwarzenegger such a hard time? He gets along with the legislature, doesn’t he? He’s gotten a lot done. Aren’t those positive attributes in a governor?”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger is coming under fire, believe it or not, for making an appearance on “Tonight with Jay Leno” last night.

Schwarzenegger has appeared five times on the late-night talk show since he announced his candidacy for governor on the show on 6 August 2003. The governor talked mostly about seeing supermodel Heidi Klum in the green room, but the Democratic Party responded indignantly today, saying that the governor was violating the equal-time rule.

Phil Angelides’ campaign manager wrote to California NBC affiliates insisting that Angelides get equal time on the Leno show. Unfortunately for Angelides, the FCC has already ruled indirectly in favor of Schwarzenegger. In a September 2003 declaratory ruling, the FCC declared that “The Howard Stern Show,” which wanted to have Schwarzenegger as a guest but was concerned that Stern would then have to give equal time to all of the other gubernatorial candidates, was an instance of “exempt bona fide news interview programming.”

There’s much more on the equal time rule at The Museum of Broadcast Communications website, including suggestions for further reading.

The two best quotes out there about Saturday’s gubernatorial debate at Cal State Sacramento are from George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times columnist, who wrote in today’s column:

Anybody tuning in to the only debate of the gubernatorial campaign got a close-up glimpse of how these two pretty much conduct themselves in small groups or even one-on-one. Schwarzenegger: relaxed, confident, jovial. A better command of complex issues than one might expect of someone in public office for only three years. Angelides: Intense, wound up. A policy wonk seemingly trying to cover every subject in one long sentence.

Then there was Barbara O’Connor, the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Cal State Sacramento, also from Skelton’s column. Of Angelides, she said:

Phil’s better than he used to be. But he still tends to get shrill. His eyes dart. He gets that Cheshire cat grin. And he acts like the kid in school who knows a lot more than anyone else.

Skelton also pointed out that the format of the debate was awful. The debate’s moderator, Stan Statham, tried to keep the candidates on track with the “format” of the debate, which was meant to be conversational and did away with the normal routine of opening and closing statements and rebuttals.

However, the candidates ignored Statham and grandstanded with opening statements anyway. They interrupted and talked over each other. They answered almost none of the questions as they were posed, which was just as well, because many of the questions were piped through earphones to Statham via a real-time focus group whose composition and size were not, for whatever reason, revealed.

In the end, neither candidate did much to convince undecided voters that he was the candidate to vote for. Not that Schwarzenegger has any real cause for concern. A San José State University poll released late last week showed Schwarzenegger ahead of Angelides by a margin of 46-33%.