By DAN WALTERS, Sacramento Bee

Campaigns to overhaul a self-evidently dysfunctional state government -- particularly California's first constitutional convention in 120 years -- have drawn much attention in civic and media circles.

Three months ago, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California Legislature enacted a much-revised state budget, this column pointed out that the state was seemingly operating on a five-month budget cycle.

With recession rampant, it would take about three months for new holes to appear in a revised budget and two more months for the politicians to make still another adjustment.

As Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders were staging their comic opera showdown over water policy and the fate of 707 bills last week, the venerable Field Institute was conducting its latest poll on their standing among California voters.

As the 2009 legislative session in California entered its final days, the president pro tem of the state Senate, Darrell Steinberg, lamented the Capitol's "culture of failure."

Mike Duvall's sudden departure from the California legislature after a videotape surfaced in which he graphically described his sexual escapades with two women, one of them a utility lobbyist, has enlivened an otherwise dreary final week of the 2009 legislative session.

After months of institutional sluggishness, brief meetings and extra-long weekends, California's legislators, their staffers and hundreds of lobbyists are acting as if they're snorting meth, frantically trying to write and enact hundreds of bills in the 2009 session's final hours.

California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi is virtually certain to survive a runoff with a token Republican opponent and extend his 35-year-long political career, which began with election to the Assembly in 1974, into the indefinite future as a congressman.

California is mired in one of its worst economic recessions, with unemployment approaching 12 percent and likely to rise, but even those with jobs are often pinched by wage freezes and reductions, furloughs and cuts in fringe benefits.

Darrell Steinberg, the rookie leader of the California Senate, sees the final days of the 2009 legislative session as "a window of opportunity" to crack the decades-long political stalemate on water.

"Water is the best opportunity we have right now to show that we can do something big," Steinberg said.

Crime and punishment. Water and power. Dollars and cents. And perhaps life and death.

The final days of the 2009 legislative session in California don't lack for high-concept issues, many of which are also high profile, such as the cross-Capitol wrangle over prison reform, or the Hail Mary effort to resolve decades of bitter political war over water.