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The
best argument for letting
Virginia
governors succeed themselves in office is this:
We’ve got too many living ex-governors.
Once you get ’em, you’re stuck with them.
What’re you going to do?
You can’t trade ’em off.
Who wants an ex-governor hanging around all
the time? Everybody
raise your hands on that one.
What would you do with one?
All
you really need is two or three good ex-governors at
a time—you know, to show up at the serious events,
to give a few speeches about the good ol’ days and
interviews about how we’re headed down the road to
ruination, stuff like that.
Two or three would be a plenty for that.
We’ve got six.
We don’t need that many.
About
the time they learn how to govern, how to run a
state, we have to go through this gigantic rug
bazaar of a thing called a campaign and get us
another one that we have to clamp the training
wheels on. How
much sense does that make?
Train them on our nickel, get them broke in
good, and then run ’em off just about the time
they can find the toilet by themselves?
And,
hey, it’s not easy on them either.
Can’t be. It’s
not like you can go back to the filling station and
fix flats for a living after you’ve been the
governor of Virginia. That just
wouldn’t do. None
of us would stand for that.
I mean, good grief, there are appearances to
keep up. Image
considerations. Stuff
like that.
That’s
where these big fancy law firms come in handy.
You probably haven’t thought about it like
this, but we owe them a favor for taking these guys
in. We really
do. Ex-governors
without the structure of a place to be at
nine o’clock
every morning could cause us all kinds of
aggravation.
Plus,
this is where they hatch their “big ideas” and
their “big issues.”
Have you noticed that most
Virginia
governors seem to have better ideas after they leave
office than they did while they were working for us?
Bigger ideas, too.
They have longer horizons, seems like.
They think “globally” after they leave.
What’s with that?
Maybe the office itself cramps your thinking.
I don’t know what else it could be.
You
think I’m making this up?
Let’s review the tape.
When
Jim Gilmore was governor, it was “No Car Tax.”
Now it is “Americans for Freedom and
Opportunity
,” a group he recently founded to “find ways to
advance the cause of justice and goodness for the
people of
Virginia
and the nation.” Which
one seems bigger to you?
Chuck
Robb recently finished co-chairing the Commission on
the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States
Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Nobody asked him to do stuff like that when
he was governor.
George
Allen trots the globe, wearing the cloak of the
United States Senate, looking and sounding like a
statesman. Says
he in a recent communication:
“Political parties come and go, inventing
and reinventing themselves with great frequency.
At the end of the day, what lasts is the
principle that, in our free land, competition,
accountability and beneficial reform go hand and
hand.” When
he was governor, it was “No Parole.”
What
is with this?
Maybe
the thing to do, if we’re not going to let
Virginia
governors succeed themselves in office, is to put an
age floor on the thing—not let them run until
they’re 60 or so. Let
somebody else smarten ’em up and turn them into
statesmen—then we’ll elect them governor.
Linwood Holton
has been an ex-governor nearly half his life—31
years. That’s
a long time. He
was smart at the time, no doubt about it.
But think about how much smarter he must be
now—how much more we could get for our money
today. Of
course,
Richmond
’s got the best bargain in ex-governors in the
last century or so. I
don’t know how much they’re paying their new
mayor, but it is not enough—not by a mile.
Then,
of course there is Jerry Baliles.
If there has ever been a governor we should
have let grow old in office, it is this one.
Baliles didn’t take much from the
governor’s office when he left.
He brought it all with him when he came.
--
May 9, 2005
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