Is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looking to crawl out of the not-so-little political box he put himself in - the campaign promise that the state's budget gap can be closed without any new taxes? "That does not mean that later on someday you cannot go there," Schwarzenegger recently told The Sacramento Bee. In other recent interviews with other newspapers, the governor has similarly gone from a fast-and-firm no to a fudging maybe.

Give Schwarzenegger this - as somebody new to politics, he has quickly learned the value of keeping everyone guessing. Either because of his muscles or celebrity status, he can get away with this without looking like just another wishy-washy politician (like, say, former Gov. Gray Davis). At least he can for now. Come late spring or early summer, however, the guessing game will have to end. The state will need a real plan to close a budget gap of approximately $14 billion.

The choices are pretty straightforward. Schwarzenegger can stick with his cuts-only approach and try to sell Californians that it is in their long-term interest to deny thousands of kids access to college and deny thousands of low-income children access to health insurance and delay necessary road construction projects for millions of commuters. Or he can conclude that the cuts are just too deep, and that a balanced solution of revenues and cuts would do less damage to the economy. He could target the taxes that hurt the least, such as asking the tippy top of the income bracket to pay the taxes they did under Gov. Pete Wilson. Thanks to the federal tax breaks, on average they would still be paying less taxes than before.

The polarized Legislature can't get to a balanced budget approach in those hearing rooms upstairs in the Capitol until the governor downstairs gives them the green light. Expert decipherers of Schwarzenology we are not. But perhaps these quotes of equivocation are the green light that the budget realists have been waiting for.