Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will need to use all his charm and powers of persuasion to persuade voters to pass the $15 billion deficit-recovery bond on the March 2 ballot. Two polls released Thursday show voters are dead set against it.

That's bad news for California. Failure to pass this bond would lead to immediate and catastrophic program cuts and tax increases.

The bond is not a solution: It's a way to get us through June, when $14 billion of the state's short-term debt comes due. The bond, which will appear as Proposition 57 on the ballot, will refinance this debt and stave off disaster.

Without it, Californians will face "severe cuts, severe tax increases very likely to affect nearly everything the state does, from education to public safety to transportation," said Jack Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. "At that point, it would be even harder to avoid tax hikes."

Just 35 percent of state voters favor Prop. 57 and 44 oppose it, while 21 percent are undecided, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California. A Field Poll turned up similar numbers: 33 percent in favor of Prop. 57, 40 percent opposed and 27 percent undecided. Both polls were conducted in the week after Schwarzenegger gave his Jan. 6 State of the State address.

Also troubling is that veteran pollsters say Californians' support for ballot propositions generally falls off as election day approaches.

If the polls are accurate, Schwarzenegger will have to win over two-thirds to three-fourths of the undecided voters. We think he can do it. He'll have to do it. But how?

Voters like a companion ballot measure, Prop. 58, which would establish a mandatory budget reserve and restrict borrowing in the future. Prop. 58 was favored by a 57 percent to 28 percent margin in the Public Policy Institute poll. So the governor should link the two propositions whenever he can.

And voters like Schwarzenegger. Respondents to the PPI poll were twice as likely to trust the governor's budget solutions than solutions offered by Republicans in the Legislature ---- the margin was 33 percent to 17 percent. And Schwarzenegger outpolled Democrats in the Legislature by 6 percent in this Democratic state, 33 percent to 27 percent.

There is no organized opposition to Prop. 57 and there is likely to be none. State Treasurer Phil Angelides, who would like to run against Schwarzenegger in 2006, has criticized the borrowing plan and said the state should raise taxes to pay off its debt. But neither Angelides nor anyone else is talking about getting up a campaign to defeat Prop. 57.

"Anyone coming out against this would have to offer a plausible alternative," Pitney said, "and I can't think of any. Borrowing all this money is not good, but all the alternatives are actually worse."

The unsettling news is that Schwarzenegger has no alternative either. If Prop. 57 fails, California will have just three months to come up with $14 billion, and that means virtually shutting down state government and sudden and enormous tax increases.

The debt for all the years of inattention, profligate spending and tax cuts have come due. If voters reject Prop. 57 on March 2, all the consequences will fall on our heads at once. We recommend a Yes vote on Prop. 57 because at this point, California really has no other choice.