Boondoggle redux: Yesterday the big news out of Sacramento was that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger failed to get his massive public works initiative out of the state legislature, which means it will not appear on the June ballot. The “Rebuilding California” proposition may make it onto the November ballot but even if it does, it will be too late to help the governor’s re-election chances.

After Schwarzenegger’s disastrous performance last year, he came out with the proposal for Rebuilding California in December, intending to get it onto the June primary ballot so that he would have at least one accomplishment to run on.

Without it, all he has to show for his time in office is basically — nothing.

Today we learn that the initiative failed to make it out of the legislature because the Democrats and Republicans quickly learned that the governor was trying to play them off each other. He ticked off his fellow Republicans when they found out that he was privately claiming to Democrats that he had GOP support in the bag:

Schwarzenegger had guided the talks in a Rashomon-like process involving individual meetings with the four leaders of the Legislature. One would depart the governor’s suite only to find that his understanding of the deal on the table differed from that of his colleagues.

Time and again, the governor assured Democrats he could deliver Republican votes that never came….

Privately, some Republicans said they resented the governor for taking them for granted. Democrats saw the new demands — coming after they had cut a deal with Schwarzenegger — as duplicitous.

“My guys said if this was a labor negotiation, we would be on strike a long time ago,” said Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland). “When you are going to do a deal, you come in with deal points. You don’t continuously throw things on the table.

“You don’t try to play one person against another,” he said, “which everyone felt was what was going on.”

McCarthy agreed: That “doesn’t work.”

Still, Schwarzenegger was adamant about a June deal. “If we can’t do this by Friday [March 10], we are all losers,” he told the leaders at a joint meeting last week, according to two participants.

By Tuesday, after further compromises had been offered and rejected, and support began to fall away even from the leaders’ own party members, things came to a head. The fed-up leaders walked together to Schwarzenegger’s office to say they wanted to start over, aiming for a smaller, less-divisive plan for the November ballot.

Schwarzenegger would have none of it. “He said flat out this was not acceptable,” Perata said.

So we have another example of Bush-level incompetence from this movie star, wannabe politician to add to the pile. When will he get the message?

I’ll reiterate my plea to the governor: Arnold, please, do everybody a favor and retire in January. You can be on the set of “Terminator 4″within hours after the inauguration of Gov. Angelides or Gov. Westly.

It’s a win-win-win.