If anyone still doubted that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not just another chiseled face, but is serious about governing -- and about repairing the state's disastrous fiscal condition -- his presentation of a new state budget on Friday should be the clincher.

Faced with a $14 billion deficit in next year's budget -- about half of which stemmed from his unilateral decision to reinstate a two-thirds cut in taxes on cars -- Schwarzenegger laid out a plan that, while not entirely gimmick-free, is refreshingly straightforward. It leaves virtually no major state spending category untouched, and dips a bit into the coffers of local governments.

The governor may be a political novice, but so far he's dealing with the budget like a professional pol, making deals with major interest groups such as the California Teachers Association that fragment and isolate the opposition, while maintaining his Republican support with a pledge to reject new taxes.

Whether there should, in fact, be new taxes to offset some of the reductions, especially in health and welfare services, is a legitimate issue for debate, and Democrats certainly would prefer that alternative. And it's possible that Schwarzenegger, for all his anti-tax rhetoric, will cut a tax deal with the Democrats next summer. But as an opening move in the fiscal chess game, the Schwarzenegger approach is a strong one. He's taken control of the board, forcing other players to react.

The analogy to chess is not accidental. Schwarzenegger is a devotee of the board game who kept a table in his dressing room while shooting movies, and considers himself to be a strong player who can think several moves in advance and lure opponents into making mistakes that lose pieces and, finally, the end game.

Schwarzenegger, in fact, appears to be playing a three-dimensional game on the budget -- maintaining the friendly, we're-all-in-this-together face to the public, directly bargaining with major interest groups on specifics, and confounding both Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature.

Publicly, Schwarzenegger remains the man Californians chose to replace a discredited Gray Davis and clean up the mess in Sacramento. "In the past two budgets, the easy choices were made," Schwarzenegger said Friday. "Those budgets were shell games, using tricks and gimmicks to put off the hard decisions until after the next election cycle." But he tempers the harsh rhetoric with a promise that if everyone accepts austerity for a couple of years, the budget will be balanced and the spending reins can be loosened. "It's for a short period of time, for the next two years," he said.

The deal he cut with education groups on school finance exemplifies how he's operating on more than one level. The deal applies $2 billion toward closing the budget gap next year, but makes the "Education Coalition" happy enough that it won't become an irritating opponent, as it was to Schwarzenegger mentor Pete Wilson in the early 1990s. And it also divides the powerful CTA from the unions that represent non-faculty school workers as Schwarzenegger tries to undo a new law that largely prevents school districts from using private contractors for non-teaching services.

Schwarzenegger may be employing the same kind of chess-like strategy on prisons, whose costs have ballooned. The administration hints that it may reduce prison populations, and therefore the ranks of guards, with more liberal parole policies. The budget would whack the prisons budget, in fact, by about $400 million but leaves the details to be decided later -- a message, it would seem, to the hitherto omnipotent California Correctional Peace Officers Association that it should choose between renegotiating its lucrative contract and losing dues-paying members. And the governor seems to be giving Indian tribes the same deal-or-else message, albeit indirectly, as he seeks a $500 million cut for the state from their expanding casino operations.

Schwarzenegger's deal-making may prevent unions and other major spending groups from coalescing into an impregnable opposition coalition, and thus weaken the hand of Democrats as they press him to renege on his no-new-taxes pledge. Thus, even if he did finally accede to some sort of tax package, he could minimize its size and make it more palatable to voters.