Politics: Corzines Crash
While it’s become conventional wisdom that pork spending is the root of all budgetary evil, the truth is that public employees’ health-care and retirement costs are the single most pressing economic burden facing cities and states. And yet the situation has somehow become a third rail in politics, utterly untouchable. (This fact is clear to Philadelphians, who elected their own version of a post-political politician in 2007, only to watch Mayor Michael Nutter fold to the city unions.) This is the vicious catch-22 that is contemporary American governance, whether at the local, state or national level. We say we want leaders to make the tough choices, to spear the sacred cows, to put the common good above the special interests. But we then either skewer them when they come up with bold ideas (Corzine’s toll plan) or let them off the hook when they kowtow to those same interests (Corzine, Nutter, and every other politician, when it comes to the public unions). So how can we ever hope for good, honest government?
Which brings us back to Barack Obama. There can be no question that Obama is a far more skilled politician than Corzine. But Obama’s message has been an amorphous series of slogans — Yes, we can! Change we can believe in! — requiring nothing more than hope and optimism. When it comes down to the hard concessions — increased taxes to eventually pay for the federal government’s unprecedented borrowing bender; fewer government services and limited choices for health care so more people can get health care; even, potentially, a more modest way of American life — one can’t help but wonder whether an electorate that acts like a willful child, that says no to cutting public employees’ benefits, no to smaller government, no to increased taxes, no to increased tolls, no to closing a neighborhood pool or a library branch or a fire station, will ultimately get what it’s really asking for: nothing.
