Governor Rendell went to Harrisburg hoping to follow his path to success in Philadelphia. As Mayor of this left of center city with its strong labor unions, Rendell governed from the center. He took on the municipal unions, forcing them to make significant concessions. He cut taxes. He used city funds and tax breaks to create the public facilities and to encourage the private initiative that spurred development, mostly in center city. He was neither a rightist who minimized the role of government nor a leftist who attempted to use government to pursue social justice.
Governor Rendell’s Centrist Strategy
As Governor, Rendell has tried to follow a similar centrist path. He had a number of reasons for taking this path.
First, Rendell is temperamentally someone who thinks about solving problems not about articulating political philosophies. That is one reason he has never wanted to run for the Senate. He chooses his political goals by focusing on the discreet problems that concern the public at any one time and then tries to devise public policies to address those difficulties. He does not have any overarching theory of the role government should play in our lives but is prepared to improvise from issue to issue.
Second Rendell’s convictions about the goals of government have for a long time been just a little left of center. Rendell has from time to time shown some small allegiance to the liberal aim of reducing inequality, but he has always been more committed to using government to increase everyone’s income than to redistributing income from rich to poor. And his consistent support for reducing wage, property and business taxes suggests that he shares the neo-liberal fear that too much taxation interferes with economic growth.
Third, Rendell, wanted to make a mark in Harrisburg and believed that the best way to do so, particularly when Republicans controlled the General Assembly, was to take a centrist path that promised to appeal to moderate Republicans as well as Democrats. He seemed to believe that he could form a partnership with Speaker John Perzel that paralleled his working relationship with John Street. Rendell was counting on Perzel being is a man who, like the Governor, was more concerned with creating a list of accomplishments than with moving government in any discernible direction.
And, fourth, Rendell had a strategy for enlisting more than a small portion of the Republicans in his various projects. That was the use the promise of pork barrel spending in legislative districts to win over recalcitrant Republicans. Rendell’s successes—his new spending on economic development initiatives, his Growing Greener environmental bond, and his support for gambling—won support in the legislature precisely because the Governor could promise to back the pet projects of senators and representatives of both parties. In doing so, Rendell also provided subsidies for businesses in every part of the state who have returned the favor with campaign contributions to the Governor and legislators. If some of that spending or the number and placement of gambling casinos location could not meet any reasonable cost-benefit test, that was a small price to pay for gaining Republican support for programs that made a mark and might, overall, do some good.
(By the way, it is time for an enterprising team of reporters to start pointing to the pork barrel projects that are unlikely to have any discernible positive effect on job creation or the environment.)
This centrist strategy was sensible for a Governor who was, at least initially, skeptical of some Democratic goals like raising the minimum wage and has for a long time been attracted to some Republican goals like cutting taxes. Given this strategy, we can understand why Rendell was not reluctant to embrace the Republican goal of requiring citizen approval for school budgets as a means of winning GOP votes for his increase state education spending. And we can also understand why Rendell was willing to promise Republican legislators that he would not campaign against them if they voted for a small increase in the personal income tax to pay for that spending.
When and Why Rendell’s Strategy Has Been Failing.
While Rendell’s strategy made a certain political sense, I would suggest that, on the whole it has been more of a failure than a success. Rendell’s approach has been caught in a pincers. He has been hemmed in, on the one side, by the evaporation of Republican moderation. Deals with John Perzel have been difficult to cut. Once labeled the second most powerful politician in Harrisburg, John Perzel know looks much more like the moderate face on an increasingly rabid, hard right majority.
On the other hand, the problems of the moment, cannot be solved without the kinds of new government initiatives that Republican right in Harrisburg is determined to block. Consider again some of the examples I mentioned in my last post:
—We can certainly find much to criticize in our transit agencies, but only a radical right-wing Republican could plausible deny that public transit is critical to the economies of Greater Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and thus to the whole state. This is a difficulty that no problem solving Governor can avoid. Yet during last year’s transit crisis Perzel disappeared from view and House Majority Leader Sam Smith took the lead, constantly repeating his opposition to any new state funding of public transit. The rumor going around Harrisburg at one time was that Perzel could only promise Rendell 14 Republican votes for a package that included funding for both transit and roads and bridges. The Governor temporarily resolved the crisis by transferring federal highway funds to transit. And then he embraced the typical, deal-making centrist expedient of appointing a blue ribbon commission that would only make its report when the lame duck legislative session begins after the November election. The problem, however, is that is precisely the move Rendell tried before, when he promised to solve the transit problem during the 2004 lame duck session. It failed then. And there is no reason to think it will be successful this year.
—Raising the minimum wage is another issue whose time has come, in part because most of the states surrounding Pennsylvania have raised their minimum wage, in part because the Minimum Wage Coalition has been effective in mobilizing support for an increase, and in largest part because 84% of the public wants to see the minimum wage increased. Yet this is an issue which Rendell cannot easily resolve by cutting a deal with the Republicans most of whom abhor the very idea of minimum wage. The Minimum Wage Coalition has been going out to the constituencies of House and Senate leaders to find local proponents of an increase and to run radio advertisements denouncing those leaders for blocking a vote on an increase. We might still win. But it is increasingly clear that we are up against a very large block of Republicans who are insisting that their leaders not allow a vote so as to protect themselves from having to choose between their ideology and their business constituents on the one hand, and the demands of their broader constituency, on the other. There is little Governor Rendell’s usual methods can do to break this logjam.
—Medicaid funding is another issue that is not amenable to a cross-party coalition greased by pork barrel spending. And, we progressives are determined that the Commonwealth make up for federal cutbacks in health care spending. Last year we pushed the Governor to reduce the cuts he initially proposed. This year, with growing state tax revenues, the Governor promises to increase spending on Medicaid and our two state-run health care programs for the less well off, CHIP (for children) and adultBasic. We will see whether the Republicans in the General Assembly go along with this plan. And, further down the road, when state revenues are again to tight to easily make up for continued federal cut-backs, it is likely that the Governor will again find himself caught between his liberal constituents and the right wing General Assembly.
—And, finally, on school funding and property taxes, the central issues of Rendell’s first years in office, the Governor’s record is disappointing. Face with Republican opposition to tax increases, Rendell succeeded in obtaining no more than a third of the funds he wanted for improving schools and equalizing education spending. And his plan to use gambling revenues to reduce property taxes floundered because school boards, reasonably enough, don’t want school budgets to become the main target of tax cutters throughout the state. As a result, significant property tax reductions have still not taken place.
Governor Rendell might still find some successes down the road. His call for a bond issue to finance health care research might win the support of legislators who are eager to subsidize research projects in their district. Yet this plan was immediately attacked by Republicans who claimed that it is an inappropriate use of the power of government. Perhaps Rendell will win on this and other similar issues. But it is becoming increasingly difficult for even centrist public policies to overcome the opposition of an increasingly restive right-wing Republican majority. And, to the extent we progressive can bring put moderately liberal ideas like an increase in the minimum wage or an expansion of health care back on the political agenda, Rendell will be increasingly caught between the demands of his constituency and the roadblocks put in his way by a right-wing General Assembly.
What is the Governor to do?
The answer, which I will discuss in my next post in this series, is to join with progressives in holding the political center not by cutting deals with the few remaining moderate Republicans but, instead, by presenting an invigorated vision of progressive government that shows why everyone benefits from innovative public policies. What he and we have to do, in other words, is offer an alternative to the right-wing ideologues that, at the same time, reveals the real implications of their unfair, privatized, and undemocratic vision of political life.
And if, as I suspect, the Governor won’t do this, we progressive are going to have to do it for him.