Governors, like dentists, know that you have to make the patient feel good before you start the root canal. That's why the State of the State address, with images of golden California, always gets delivered before the state budget, with its hard and cold numbers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger performed that drill Tuesday night better than any governor in recent memory. He put a hopeful face on what will be the grim task of massacring public services in California if he stands in the way of a tax increase as part of a budget solution.

He reveled in the challenge of blowing up the boxes of an outmoded government structure. He painted an act of fiscal recklessness -- issuing $15 billion of pass-the-buck bonds to finance a car tax cut and ongoing deficit spending -- as a matter of prudence.

Describing himself as a born salesman, he pitched California as "an empire of hope and aspirations" even as the hopes of many young Californians are darkened by the shutting of college classroom doors.

The smile never left his face; he projected the "new spirit and new confidence" out of the Assembly chamber and across the state.

Most Californians will happily join Schwarzenegger in much of the reform agenda he laid out Tuesday. Yes, let's consolidate school categorical programs, returning spending discretion to local school districts. Yes, let's get more dollars to the classroom by letting schools contract-out support services. Yes, let's consolidate or shut down redundant state departments and commissions. Yes, let's reform workers' compensation, squeezing out the middlemen.

But it will be less easy to support a budget that proposes to eliminate a $15 billion structural deficit with a chain saw.

"These cuts will not be easy," the governor said, "but they will not be forever."

In fact, however, they will be. California's deficit is not temporary; it is a permanent imbalance. The measure of a governor, like a dentist, is not the smile but the procedure. It sounds like, when the governor unveils his budget on Friday, California is going to get the works.