On Counting your Chickens
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 By Marc KilmerIn late February Senator Bill Harris made the observation that Governor Strickland shouldn’t base his budget on hypothetical federal aid. Of course, Governor Strickland disregarded that and factored in a huge chunk of federal money when he presented his budget to the General Assembly. Now, with the legislative wrangling in the U.S. Senate, it seems that all that federal money may not materialize. The governor is saying this would have a “devastating impact” on the state.
The changing nature of the stimulus bill should illustrate the wisdom of Senator Harris’s approach. Congress is still putting together the details of the stimulus bill. No one should cout on a certain amount of money from it since the spending allocations are still in flux.
But Governor Strickland is a pretty canny politician. He can see the angles here and he decided to game the system to make himself look good. Governor Strickland based part of his budget on, essentially, numbers he pulled out of thin air. Now that this imaginary money may not show up, he’s trying to shift the blame to others. A lot of his desired spending was based on imaginary federal money. Governor Strickland could look like something of a hero by proposing a budget including that spending. But if the federal government doesn’t come through with the money, Governor Strickland has positioned himself perfectly to blame someone else for any cuts. After all, his budget included funding for these programs, right? He can blame those horrible politicans in DC for taking away your favorite government program. In reality, the governor knew the money wasn’t settled. He knew the actual budget would be different from what he proposed. He’s just playing politics. It’s too bad that voices like Senator Harris’s — which stand up for a realistic budget proposal — aren’t to be found in the governor’s office.
February 10th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
When you say it’s too bad there aren’t voices in the governor’s office such as Harris’s, you don’t quite have it right. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Harris does not have a strategy or a sense of who he is dealing with. He’s probably spent more time showing off an “Ohio Proud” hat that the governor gave him after his ice spill than he has thinking about anything that Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan ever thought about. Strickland, on the other hand, does have a strategy and a sense of who he’s dealing with. This is part and parcel of a strategy of creating political pressure to pass the “stimulus.” It’d be nice to think that the result will be what you say, cuts that Strickland can blame on someone else. What the actual result will be will be passage of the stimulus, in part because of pressure brought to bear on the Voinovich’s of the world by virtue of stories such as this that the governor is helping generate.
So, the governor’s canny all right, just more canny than you give credit for.
And then, the real kick in the pants is that people like Harris (and Voinovich in the U.S. Senate, assuming he follows the usual pattern of little leadership and less understanding) will then go out and say whatever flawed compromise is reached is a good thing and he’ll want to take credit for it. Good ol’ Half-penny Bill. If they have to compromise their principles, okay, sometimes they do, but do they have to then go out and claim the compromise is in fact a principle? They think so, and that’s why they need to go. They’d almost be tolerable, and they’d be showing leadership, if they said, “Look, we got our butts kicked, and this is no good, but we felt we had to do it because of A, B and C. We agree with you it should be different and here’s the harm that will follow, but if you want us to act on that, you’ve got to help us at the ballot and in the funny papers.”
Oh, well. Maybe I’ll start gaming. “Virtual Conservatives” probably has a pretty good market, and we’ll need something to do while DC, LA and everything in between burns.