It's a poorly kept secret that government is growing not only at
the federal but also at the state and local levels. Especially in some
of the biggest states, public employee unions have successfully pressed
for higher pay and lavish pensions (one Illinois school
superintendent's pension is valued at $26 million) to the point that
public employees' salaries and benefits are higher than those of the
private-sector taxpayers who pay for them.
So while 8 million private-sector jobs have disappeared, the
number of public-sector job losses is near zero.
Barack Obama's solution is to send borrowed federal dollars --
one-third of the $862 billion stimulus package last year and now a
proposal for another $23 billion for teachers -- to states and
localities to prop up the pay of unionized public employees. One
reason: Unions gave Obama and the Democrats $400 million in the 2008
cycle.
State governors can't resort to deficit spending without risky
gimmicks, and what's more, as Andrew Cuomo's platform suggests, voters
don't want them to.
As a result, Republicans are leading or running even in governor
races in seven of the eight largest states. In California, Democrat
Jerry Brown -- at 72, seeking the office he first won at 36 -- is below
50 percent against eBay billionaire Meg Whitman. In Texas, Rick Perry
leads Democrat Bill White, who had a moderate record as mayor of
Houston.
In Florida, all polls have shown Republicans leading the one
Democrat in statewide office.
In Pennsylvania, Republican Tom Corbett seems likely to regain the
governorship for his party in a state where party control has shifted
every eight years since 1950.
In Illinois, would-be tax-raiser Pat Quinn, elevated to the
governorship when Rod Blagojevich resigned, trails a little-known
downstate Republican legislator.
In Ohio, Democrat Ted Strickland, popular for his first
two-and-a-half years, is only even with John Kasich, former chairman of
the U.S. House Budget Committee.
Perhaps most surprisingly, in the nation's No. 1 unemployment
state, Michigan, voters are leaning toward replacing tax-raising
Democrat Jennifer Granholm with one of the four Republicans running in
the August primary over either of the two Democrats.
That's pretty good proof that in times of economic distress voters
don't want to keep feeding the government beast, but believe it needs
to cinch the belt a little tighter, as most Americans have been doing.
It's not only in America's big states that we're seeing this
phenomenon. As former Economist editor Bill Emmott notes in London's
Times, parties of the left have been getting shellacked all over
Europe, most recently in Britain.
You might wonder whether spending cuts will prove as unpopular as
big spending programs. That's unclear -- but there's an interesting
test case in the nation's 16th largest state, Indiana.
In 2008, even while Indiana voters went 50 percent to 49 percent
for Barack Obama, they re-elected spending-cutting Republican Gov.
Mitch Daniels by a 58 percent to 40 percent margin. Daniels carried
young voters 51 percent to 42 percent and college-educated voters 62
percent to 34 percent. He ran ahead of Ronald Reagan's 1984 showing in
Indiana's most affluent county while winning 25 percent from blacks and
37 percent from Latinos. Among all these groups, he ran ahead of John
McCain by double digits.
Daniels' skinflint instincts were unpopular with Republican as
well as Democratic members of Congress when he headed the Office of
Management and Budget in George W. Bush's first term. But they seem to
have struck a chord with Hoosiers of all stripes.
His performance is evidence that the polls showing voters in our
biggest states favoring smaller government may not just be a passing
fancy. Congress may vote more money for the public employee unions. But
in New York, Andrew Cuomo seems to have gotten the message.
