As California begins a new fiscal year without a budget -- to the utter surprise of no one -- Democrats and Republicans are exchanging rhetorical fusillades over who is to blame and how the deficit-saturated budget can be fixed.

The verbal barrages on the floors of both legislative houses and in the media are strong indications that the stalemate over a budget will continue for weeks, if not months. The various factions -- Democrats seem to be especially fragmented -- are implying that with agreement on a new budget not likely soon, they are concentrating on shifting the political onus to others.

If one sets aside the verbiage, for a moment, and even ignores the arithmetic, what's left is an exercise in pure politics, and in the end, that may be more important than the numbers, ideology or even morality. The politics of this crisis are unlike those that have ever existed in the Capitol before, to wit:
* We've never had a governor as unpopular as Gray Davis, nor one who faced such a serious threat of recall, nor one who is as personally disliked within the Capitol itself.

* We've never had a Legislature so bereft of broad leadership capability, largely due to the advent of legislative term limits.

* We've never had a Legislature that was so insulated from public displeasure, thanks to a bipartisan gerrymander that was enacted two years ago to banish two-party competition for legislative seats.

Thus, we have not only the most immense state budget deficit in national history, but also an apparatus that, by its nature, may be incapable of coming to grips with it. Davis, with his 21 percent approval rating, lacks the credibility to bring public pressure to bear on the Legislature, even if he had a credible plan to sell, which he doesn't. And he lacks the personal standing inside the Capitol to knock heads. Legislative leaders can't do it, either, and individual lawmakers feel little political compulsion to resolve the crisis because no matter what happens, virtually none will be in danger of not being re-elected. Indeed, if the voting public is frustrated at the lack of action on the budget, or any aspect of the crisis, its only outlet is to join the anti-Davis recall. He has much at risk in the outcome but little capacity to affect it, while legislators are in the opposite situation.

The elements of this unique political tangle didn't arise overnight. They were years in the making, with voters and the politicians themselves making a series of single-purpose decisions that ignored other factors and long-term consequences.

When voters approved term limits in 1990, they did so in reaction to a corruption scandal in the Capitol and in hopes that replacing long-term professional politicians with short-term real people would be an improvement. What they didn't know was that something resembling chaos would result.

When leaders of both parties did the bipartisan redistricting deal in 2001, they saw it as the easiest way out of a complex political dilemma stemming from the close division of partisan power in Congress and George W. Bush's election to the White House.

They may also have known that designating the party ownership of each legislative district would widen the ideological gap in the Capitol and thin the ranks of pragmatic moderates, thus making stalemate more likely, but it didn't loom large at the time.

Davis should have known that avoiding difficult decisions on energy and the budget would lower his approval ratings, but he is an endemically short-sighted, risk-averse politician who rarely looks beyond the current situation. Nor was he willing to cultivate personal relationships inside the Capitol.

Typically, Davis refused to engage with lawmakers when budget problems first arose two years ago, pursuing a "pickoff" strategy to acquire a few Republican votes and ignoring GOP leaders. Now that the GOP is more ideologically unified, thanks to redistricting, its leaders can stonewall Davis and the Democrats on new taxes. They can point fingers of blame because they played almost no role in developing the head-in-the-sand budgets of the past two years.

It's the perfect recipe for gridlock, and that's exactly what we have -- and what we will have for weeks to come.