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Mark
Warner leaves the Governor’s Office with high
public approval. He
deserves credit. In
general, he has performed competently, improved
governmental management, preserved the
Commonwealth’s financial position, and avoided
scandal and corruption.
This is not meant as faint praise.
At
the same time, Warner has exaggerated his
accomplishments, just as many of his predecessors
have. He has
claimed, for example, to have presented the
first-ever six-year financial plan for the state,
ignoring that such six year plans had been presented
in the 1970s and 1980s as a 1976 statute required
until it was repealed.
He also says he was responsible for the most
sweeping reorganization of state government since
the cabinet system was established in 1972.
That claim doesn’t withstand close
scrutiny. But
these are minor criticisms.
He
can be faulted for other actions that have the
potential to harm the Commonwealth if his successors
consider them as precedents. One
was his resort to a form of extortion that enabled
him to win legislative approval of the huge state
tax increase in 2004.
Another was his repudiation of a campaign
pledge not to raise taxes as governor.
The
extortion tactic involved the inclusion of the tax
hike in his proposed state budget for 2004-2006.
Putting the two measures in the same
legislation presented legislators with the choice of
approving the budget along with the tax increase or
rejecting the budget and shutting down state
government. Because
Warner refused to sign the appropriations act
without a tax increase, he managed to get votes for
the tax increase from legislators who insisted that
they would have rejected it as a freestanding bill.
Virginia has avoided the fiscal profligacy of
other states by not allowing this kind of tactic in
the past.
Warner’s
extortion tactic was not just bad public policy.
It was a violation of the state constitution.
The legislation that Warner supported in 2001
which put two tax measures on the ballot for
regional referendums in Hampton Roads and Northern
Virginia was also unconstitutional.
Too often, Warner and members of the General
Assembly have treated constitutional requirements as
annoyances to be circumvented.
This disregard for Virginia’s fundamental
law is corrosive.
A
rebounding state economy and an enormous state
budget surplus allowed Warner to finish his term in
very strong shape. Ironically,
these interrelated developments are largely the
result of the sharp increases in government
contracting in Northern Virginia, which has been fed
by federal spending approved by a
Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican
President.
Unlike
Governor L. Douglas Wilder, who left office before
the state’s economy had fully recovered from an
economic downturn, Warner enjoys a powerful recovery
that has pumped lots of tax revenues into the state
treasury. There
is no explaining good luck in politics.
The
public holds politicians responsible when the
economy turns sour, as it did during Wilder’s
term, even though politicians may have had nothing
to do with the downturn.
On the flip side, the public gives credit to
incumbent politicians when the economy’s
performance is strong, whether or not they have
anything to do with that performance.
Politicians
have an incurable compulsion to claim credit for
good conditions they don’t cause and to disclaim
responsibility for bad conditions whether they
contributed to them or not. It
is hardly surprising that Warner basks in the glow
of a healthy state economy and trumpets the
recognition Virginia recently received as the
nation’s best managed state.
But a fair and objective assessment of his
performance also requires acknowledgment of his
cavalier treatment of the Constitution and his
violation of the no-new-tax campaign pledge that
undoubtedly assured his election.
--
January 16, 2005
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