Commentary––

Rowland’s Promise And Last Chance Are To Be Hated By The Right People

By Chris Powell

Citing his political adaptability, embittered critics of Governor Rowland like to complain that he has no “core values” and that only his political opponents have any principles. But reaction to the governor’s budget address last week showed that, principled as Rowland’s opponents may be, their principles are all wrong.

Yes, Rowland’s “fiscal responsibility” pose is getting stale. Standing before the joint session of the General Assembly he held up a sheaf of legislative spending proposals as an example of what he called a spendthrift attitude that has to change, as if the near-doubling of state spending during his administration somehow had happened without him. The governor, a Republican, has never tried to restrain spending, never has addressed the structural and policy extravagances in the budget, never has wanted more than to be perceived as favoring just a little less spending than the legislature’s Democratic majority even while arranging for most special interests to go home fat and happy and not inclined to mobilize much against him.

Until, just maybe, now. For at least this time, under the pressure of a declining economy, the governor’s budget message struck boldly at two extravagant spending policies that control as much as a third of government expense in Connecticut –– binding arbitration of public employee union contracts and the failure to require nursing homes to bid competitively for welfare patients.

Rowland proposed to suspend binding arbitration for three years, essentially to freeze public employee compensation throughout the state for that long. His nursing home bidding proposal has yet to be detailed, but however it goes, this hugely expensive function of government is decades overdue for rethinking. These policy changes are worth infinitely more than the 22 proposed agency consolidations and eliminations the governor touted in his address.

While Rowland’s budget would raise state spending by two percent, he proposed modest reductions in state financial grants to towns, which instantly sent Democratic legislators, municipal officials, and the public employee unions into demagogic froth. (Within hours the unions had prepared another round of television commercials condemning the governor.) They all howled that Rowland was passing the state’s financial burdens along to the towns –– as if the towns, receiving so much of their revenue from state government, had any right to expect exemption from state government’s hard times, as if suspending binding arbitration wouldn’t allow towns to exact corresponding savings from their own workforces instead of having to raise property taxes, and as if this would hurt “education,” when, in fact, that smelly old sacred cow of “state aid to education” is just a euphemism for state reimbursement of raises for municipal employees.

No, the only political principle of Rowland’s opponents is to feed the machine of state government and the Democratic political machine that has been assembled by those on the public payroll, all under the cover of good causes that seldom see the money.

Indeed, among the loudest howlers this week was the lead negotiator for the state employee unions, Dan Livingston, who presumed to lecture Connecticut that a state budget should meet “the needs of the people,” as if he could care less about the needs of any people besides those on the public payroll.

Rowland even proposed eliminating the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women and regional tourism districts –– more “vital public services” in Livingston Land.

Of course all this is only a start on accomplishing something with state government besides growth for its own sake. While the governor proposed saving money by sending another 1,000 convicts to out-of-state prisons, the real reform would be to ask how much drug criminalization Connecticut needs and can afford. On a much smaller scale, the real reform of the state Freedom of Information Commission would not be to merge it with the state elections and ethics commissions, as the governor proposed, but to open government entirely by repealing what generates most of the commission’s work, the many exemptions to the law requiring disclosure of public business.

Rowland’s budget has its cruelties. It would end welfare for single adults who are believed to be unemployable, reduce medical insurance for the poor, and ignore the waiting list of hundreds of mentally retarded adults who need housing. But the governor’s proposal to apply an asset test to beneficiaries of the ConnPACE prescription drug program for the elderly is only fair, and the Democrats themselves long have chosen to neglect the retarded in favor of more benefits for people who could afford to pay for their own prescriptions. Far more votes are purchased that way.

Rowland’s critics are hypocritical to complain that he has no “core values,” for if he ever tried to convince them that he had any, their mere resentment of his political success would turn to terror. But the governor’s critics inadvertently have identified what is likely to be the big issue of Connecticut politics this year and very possibly the issue on which the state’s future for many years will depend –– whether Rowland will hold his ground this time, in his third and what he has said will be his final term as governor.

The gubernatorial veto is a powerful thing. Rowland’s predecessor as governor, Lowell P.Weicker Jr, used it to force an income tax on Connecticut –– in the name of fairness, of course, but actually to ensure the triumph of the government class. Rowland could use the veto to put the government class back in its place. As in everything else, money buys love in politics, so anyone in politics can be loved. The only lasting public service is to be hated by the right people.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)