Suppose you’re elected, then re-elected, governor of a big Midwestern state. Your party dominates both houses of the legislature and holds every constitutional office. You know it would be difficult to parlay this golden moment into abject failure. But be careful, because it can happen. If you emulate Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, you’ll preside over a dead-end legislative session, you’ll accomplish next to nothing for your 12 million citizens — and you won’t have to remind them that you’re lost in the short weeds between ineptitude and irrelevance. They’ll know.
How could you squander this unique opportunity to craft the lavish political legacy you crave?
First, you unfurl something you didn’t mention during your campaign — your plan for the biggest tax increase in your state’s history. But you don’t do the hard groundwork of building constituencies in advance. You just toss this out in your budget address — itself a peculiar, populist rant that tries to pit your state’s people against one another.
You demonize your state’s biggest employers. Sure, you know that businesses pay as much as half of all state and local taxes — the personal property replacement tax, the public utilities tax, the insurance industry taxes and fees, the corporate franchise tax, business property taxes, state unemployment and workers compensation taxes, sales taxes, use taxes, excise taxes, personal income taxes from partnerships, and so on. But you instead focus on one tax, the corporate income tax, that many companies don’t have to pay. You say that “80 percent” of your state’s businesses “paid little or nothing” in that tax. And you hope no one remembers that misleading assertion a few weeks later when you boast that your supposedly fairer tax plan in fact exempts … 85 percent of your state’s businesses.
* * *
You wrap your attack in self-righteousness. You’re a messianic visionary. Your plan is “a moral imperative.” You go right over the top, declaring in one speech that, “This is more than a fight. … This is a crusade.” You start invoking the biblical promise of a climactic battle between good (that’s you) and evil (people who dare challenge you) by paraphrasing the famous couplet Teddy Roosevelt roared in 1912: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”
When labor, business and government groups suggest that what your state really needs is a transportation program, you issue an ultimatum. You’re determined to fund health insurance coverage and education. You declare, “That’s the priority, and unless we do that, as far as I’m concerned nothing else is on the table.”
For all your talk about programs you want to fund, you don’t push for reforms in how the state and its school districts spend the billions they have. You don’t, for example, demand fixes to your state’s Medicaid program before enlarging it dramatically. No legacy there, either.
Truth be told, you don’t want to ruffle the public employee unions that can taste all the new tax money you want to raise. Your administration instead muscles non-profit agencies that rely on state funding. Reporters across your state start uncovering e-mails with a thinly veiled threat: If you want to keep getting money from Springfield, support our tax plan.
When your lieutenant governor, comptroller and treasurer back away from your expanding grandiosity, you put out the word that they’re just toadies, caving to pressure from fat cats.
And when your state House schedules a vote on your massive tax plan, you see the inevitable defeat and … urge your few supporters to vote no, in order to send a message that your big ideas are too important to suffer a rush to judgment.
Whatever that means. When House members do crush your tax scheme, by a vote of 107-0, you utter a line sure to live forever — yes, forever — in your state’s political history: “Today, I think, was basically an up. … I feel good about it.”
* * *
Then you graciously offer to tweak your plan. Yes, the plan your House unanimously rejected, and your Senate also would reject if given a chance. You’re, um, willing to tweak it.
When the legislative session ends with a whimper, and your party has nothing to show for all the expenses legislators have rung up in the state capital while doing zip, you might want to lie low. There’ll be plenty of opportunities in an overtime session to demand that your agenda prevail. Plenty of time to posture as the victim.
At this point, of course, you have nothing. Nothing except speaking points for the day your state government finally adopts a budget.
On that day, you’ll think you’re the hero.
Just don’t try peddling that image to those 12 million citizens. They’ll know the truth.
