Taking It Easy in Annapolis? Maryland’s annual state of the state message usually takes on a special significance with a new governor as we wait to see the tone he will set. Controversy in Martin O’Malley’s first speech to the General Assembly was as absent as Bob Ehrlich. It was a low key affair. In contrast with Ehrlich’s hectoring, O’Malley called for civility and cooperation between the governor and the legislature. The fact that there was little to argue with in O’Malley’s workmanlike budget made Speaker Mike Busch and the obstreperous Senate President Mike Miller unusually agreeable.

But is that a good thing for the state? Maybe legislators were tired of fighting with Ehrlich and needed a breather. Civility may be a good thing for cocktail parties, but it isn’t a necessary prerequisite for getting the people’s business done. We pay these guys, women included, to come up with new ideas to solve the state’s problems. It’s in the clash of ideas that progress is made. And if everything is so hunky dory, maybe there aren’t enough controversial new ideas being floated in our capital city.

It’s not as if there aren’t problems that need to be addressed. With all the talk of a structural deficit, there was no attempt made to deal with it in this session. The state’s strong tax revenues, mostly from the hot real estate market, allowed the Governor to dip into the flush rainy day fund to pay for increased school construction and transportation projects.

As Dan Rodricks pointed out in Thursday’s Sun, O’Malley barely mentioned Baltimore in his address. But the problems of bad schools, drugs and crime haven’t changed in the month since O’Malley turned over the city to Sheila Dixon (more on that in another column).

While O’Malley called for civility, another new Democratic Governor, Eliot Spitzer immediately started a fight with the state legislature over his proposals to cut property taxes, radically re-structure New York’s health care system and provide health insurance coverage to 400,000 uninsured children. Unlike O’Malley, he addressed the education needs of his state’s largest city, New York, with his plan to direct unprecedented amounts of new money to the neediest schools.

When I first started in the investment banking business, the bank I worked for proposed to cut its fees to win some business in order to establish itself in a new market. When asked why, my boss explained to the Vice Chairman reviewing the deal that it was a “loss leader”. To which the Vice Chairman replied: “Loss leaders are just losses.”

They may be getting along great in Annapolis, but time doesn’t wait. Civility may be the new administration and legislature’s loss leader. But delaying action is a just a loss for our uninsured and uneducated children and other problems our state faces.

Labels: Governor, Maryland, O'Malley

  6:17 PM •  0 Comments • Links to this post

Out With The Old Gov And In With The New The Governor’s mansion in Annapolis changed hands yesterday. Ehrlich is out, O’Malley is in. So what did Bob Ehrlich accomplish as Governor? As the first Republican to hold the highest office in Maryland since the disgraced Spiro Agnew, how should we judge his one term performance?

Ehrlich’s most memorable legacy will likely be a highway, the Inter County Connecter, which took the Governor’s backing to move the project from plans to pavement. Other than that, history will judge Ehrlich’s tenure as unremarkable. There were some achievements, like the “flush tax” to help rescue the Chesapeake Bay, and more funding for black colleges and primary and secondary education. These are important, but were hardly that major change to politics as usual in Annapolis that his election promised.

Ehrlich’s goal was to move Maryland politics to the “center” and provide an ideological balance to a liberal legislature. His policy achievements were mostly “small ball”, incremental changes that built on earlier policies. In this respect, he probably was not much different than his democratic predecessors.

Where Ehrlich should be judged is for his inability to move the state in bold new directions. His biggest failure is that he lacked vision. Being a nice guy from Arbutus wasn’t enough. This was the reason why Ehrlich was unable to achieve his long-term goal to create a competitive and sustainable Republican party in Maryland.

Ehrlich’s uninspired leadership was mainly the reason he wasn’t re-elected, not the fact that it was a democratic year nationally. After all, Republican Governors won re-election in blue states.

One of the bluest is California where the Governator, Schwarzenegger easily won re-election and is now making waves with a show of bold policy making that Ehrlich lacked. In his first term, Schwarzenegger took on entrenched interests to reform the state’s worker’s compensation program, which was killing businesses in California. Now Schwarzenegger is proposing far reaching reform of California’s health care system and is taking the lead nationally on global warming by proposing a reduction in the carbon intensity of gasoline.

Health care and the environment are issues where voters look to democrats to take the lead. But Maryland, which prides itself on its progressiveness, has failed to meaningfully tackle long-standing problems with education, health care, and the environment. Baltimore’s students are still failing, too many lack health insurance, and the Bay is still dying.

Being a great governor is less about whether you are a democrat or republican and more about whether you dared to provide bold leadership. Yesterday, Martin O’Malley began his first term cautiously, but in time, we will know whether the new governor is willing to take that dare.

Labels: Bob Ehrlich, education, flush tax, Governor, O'Malley

  3:35 PM •  0 Comments • Links to this post