Reality more than bites. Sometimes it mauls.

The economy did turn fairly quickly, but it didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't without warning.

Gov. Linda Lingle's press conference this week ordering state employee furloughs and slashing programs made it seem like the budget crisis is an emergency that just came up. It isn't.

A little more than a year ago, Lingle gave a speech at the Hawaii Economic Association annual conference that basically brushed off any doom and gloom and blamed the news media for making everything sound so bad. She assured the audience that nothing like the crisis on the Mainland was going to hurt us here.

"The latest forecast from the University of Hawai'i Economic Research Organization predicts that our state will not slip into a recession," Lingle said in April 2008.

She talked about California cutting education funding and raising taxes and said, "Because our state government will continue to be disciplined in its spending, Hawai'i's business and citizens should not suffer similar economic hardships."

The happy talk is over. Reality can no longer be denied. On Monday, Lingle gave a grim forecast of the state's next two years, calling for state worker furloughs and cuts to medical coverage for the poor.

Though the announcement was pegged on the most recent forecast by the state Council on Revenues, it's not like things turned on a dime. Instead of spending the past year talking about the wonders of robotics and the "Recreational Renaissance," she should have been laying the foundation for dealing with the hard times to come.

But if Lingle was in denial, she wasn't alone there in that happy place. The Legislature didn't treat the financial crisis with much urgency and came up with few workable ideas for survival. The Hawaii Government Employees Association is enraged at the suggestion that government workers might actually be affected by the fact that the state is hopelessly in the hole.

Leadership is about seeing the road ahead and preparing for the worst. The state budget crisis wasn't a tornado that touched down in the middle of blue skies; it was a slow-moving hurricane that was on the radar and heading our way by the end of 2007. Now that we're in it, we have to do the best we can, but we should have been better prepared.