A "Tie" to Politics

Leonard: Government by Bake Sale

By Charlie Leonard, visiting professor, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute

It is common knowledge in the political and public policy communities that Illinois’ budget chasm is deep, wide, and extremely difficult to bridge during a down economy. But it is a structural deficit, meaning that our more-or-less fixed expenses (schools, roads, public safety, debt on bonds, etc.) have been outpacing our revenues (income taxes, corporate taxes, sales taxes, etc.) long before the current economic downturn.

It is not common knowledge in the general public. In a string of polls the Paul Simon Institute has conducted over the last three years, a very stable six in ten respondents believe that there is enough waste and inefficiency in the state government to cover our budgetary shortfalls. It is a ridiculous assertion, of course, since our deficit equals somewhere around 40 percent of all state spending. › Continue reading

Leonard: The Circus Comes to Town

By Charlie Leonard, visiting professor, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute

In my first full-time teaching post after years in the private sector, I had one of my earliest opportunities to serve as academic “expert” to the student media. A reporter for Lindenwood University’s KCLC, in St. Charles, Missouri, called me at home on Election Day evening to get my reaction to the news that professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura appeared to be on the verge of winning the governorship of the State of Minnesota.

Relax, I told the earnest, young reporter. When you wake up in the morning it will be either Skip Humphrey or Norm Coleman who has won the governorship. › Continue reading

Leonard: Political Theater Trumps Public Policy

By Charlie Leonard, Visiting Professor, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute

Consider some of the most prominent headlines from last week’s news:

A front-page piece in last weekend’s Chicago Tribune carefully debunks many of the mangled pseudo-facts ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich uses on his most recent magical media tour. Perhaps it is helpful for people to be able to spot Blagojevich’s claims as half-truths and lies, as he faces all-too-willing cameras and microphones to portray himself as an innocent victim. But how many Blago stories do we need, really? › Continue reading

Lack of a Budget: It’s Nobody’s Fault

By Charlie Leonard, Visiting Professor, The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute

Many of us have probably worked in places that could be termed dysfunctional. I can think of past egotistical bosses, passive-aggressive underlings, self-centered colleagues, executives too timid to make a decision. I bet you can, too.

None of those dysfunctional workplaces, though, holds a candle to the Illinois Legislature—particularly the House of Representatives—for malfunctioning so publicly, on such a grand scale, and with such devastating consequences.
› Continue reading

Looking at Washington through a Box

By Charlie Leonard, Visiting Professor, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute

I probably should not watch the pundits in the national TV talk shows. I tend to shout at the television, and I think very seriously about throwing things. When the kids were small it used to startle them.

What has me barking lately is to hear people saying things like, “Why is Obama focusing on health care when he should be focusing on jobs?” Or “Why is Obama worrying about Afghanistan when he should be focusing on Israel?” Or any combination of two issues—one of which the speaker thinks is getting too much attention and the other of which is not getting enough. › Continue reading

Leadership Needed

By Charles Leonard, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute Visiting Professor

The television punditocracy keeps telling us the public is angry—and they go on to demonstrate that anger with pictures of Tea Party protesters dressed up in the manner they imagine Colonial Americans dressed. (The Colonials participating in the actual Tea Party, the history books tell us, dressed like Indians.) They tell us voters are in the mood to “throw the bums out.”

Former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chaffee in last Sunday’s New York Times told us he thinks conditions are ripe for formation of a third party, similar to what the Republicans did in 1856 and 1860. Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, a Democrat, tells us he thinks voters are so fed up with both parties that conditions are ripe for a “sane Ross Perot” to enter the next presidential race.

What do I think? I think voters are so fed up that they are going to rise up out of their recliners and change the channel to The Biggest Loser or maybe The Marriage Ref.

If voters were going to do any “rising up” or “throwing the bums out,” the February 2 primary in Illinois might have been a great chance to do so. There was a sitting governor, appointed to his post, trying to hold together a state government in the second-worst fiscal shape in the nation. There was an open race for the Senate seat vacated by President Obama—a seat that could make a major difference in important national debates. There was a wide-open race in both parties for lieutenant governor—a post that just took on new relevance as Governor Quinn took over for the disgraced and ousted Rod Blagojevich.

And what happened? If you’re reading a politics blog from a university policy institute, then you already know. Fewer than one in four registered Illinoisans rose up to vote. The results were an incoherent mess. I don’t think anyone will venture to say that the voters “spoke” or that the result is meaningful in any significant way.

We can and should blame some structural factors for the miserable Feb. 2 turnout—particularly the early primary that essentially only gave candidates a month to campaign. It only gave the weakened Illinois media a month to try to examine a plethora of candidates. Certainly they did an inadequate job in helping to shine a light on Scott Lee Cohen, the Chicago pawnbroker and alleged domestic abuser who won the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor. Yes, the primary should be moved back to mid-March, or later.

And I’m not necessarily going to tut-tut at the Illinois voters who stayed home. I teach political science in a university, so of course I am used to standing up in front of a room and saying democracy works better when everyone votes—and that everyone has a responsibility to vote. But the voters can be forgiven for wondering whether it matters. Who among all those people running for high state office stood out—or stood up—to convince us that he or she had the leadership ability and the smarts to lead us out of the wilderness?

I am really pulling for Governor Quinn to do something that looks like leadership in his budget message to state lawmakers March 10. Not only is the budget the central issue in state politics right now (it could be printed in barrels of red ink), but the budget message is something like a do-over of his rambling, extemporaneous State of the State message last month. That was not the performance of somebody who was organized, prepared, and ready to take on a daunting, Herculean task.

So here’s hoping that the Governor has great speechwriters, smart policy people, insistent media handlers who will make him rehearse, and the capacity to look like a leader who is capable of speaking hard truths. Appearances matter in this media age. Preparation is important. Disorganization is easy to spot. Off-the-cuff, folksy charm is not enough to inspire people to pick up their shovels, tighten their belts, and fork over a little more money to the state.

If the Governor doesn’t show us that spark, if he doesn’t show us something that looks like leadership, the voters are not going to rise up against him.

They are going to just change the channel.

Not Enough Bureaucracy

By Charlie Leonard, Visiting Professor, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute

I sympathize from time to time with people who say we have “too much government” in our lives, or that we need to “get the government off our backs.” However, as someone who works for a public policy institute and who teaches courses in a public administration program, I sympathize more often with the so-called “faceless bureaucrats.”

We need only to look to our brothers and sisters in Haiti, suffering devastation and deprivation in the wake of the earthquake, to see what happens when there is not enough bureaucracy.

That annoying building inspector who tells us we have to shore up the foundation of the rental house we own before we can rent it to students? Darn bureaucrat. Well, certainly if Haiti had had a system of building and engineering inspection and licensing, many structures, many livelihoods, and many lives might have been saved.

We pay local taxes and fees to build and maintain roads, bridges, and water systems, supervised by bureaucrats in government-provided cars and trucks. Often we complain about seeing too many government employees standing around a work site as we drive past. Where’s the clean water for the suffering in Haiti? When will their government workers and trucks materialize to clear the debris, fix the roads and patch the water pipes?

As the shock and horror of the Haiti earthquake wear off, as desperation mounts with no government authority in control, we read reports that gangs armed with machetes are prowling the streets, taking what little they can grab. Where are the police—the ultimate street-level bureaucrats—to protect the victims from more victimization?

Those of us in Southern Illinois well remember last May’s destructive “inland hurricane” and the valiant response by everyday citizens and utility workers, but also by government employees like police officers, firemen, and the SIUC physical plant crew and residence hall staff. As disruptive and unpleasant as that event was, we had a governmental and societal infrastructure in place to respond to the emergency. No such civilized organization exists in tragic, fragile Haiti.

“For us, the government doesn’t exist at all,” one earthquake survivor woefully told the Washington Post last week.

We should be grateful for the bureaucrats we have.

What’s to Blame: Too Much TV? Or a Too-early Primary?

By Charlie Leonard, Visiting Professor, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute

From my perch here in Southern Illinois, my guess is that my neighbors south of I-64 are looking on in something like bemusement at what appears to be a full-scale freak-out over the possibility of relocating some Guantanamo Bay terrorism suspects to what would be a supermax-level federal prison in rural Thomson, Illinois. Governor Quinn supports a proposal to sell the prison to the feds, who would in turn hand over a portion of it to the Department of Defense to house the terror suspects.

Some Illinois Republican leaders wrote in a letter to President Obama that moving Gitmo prisoners to Thomson would mean that “our state and the Chicago Metropolitan Area will become ground zero for Jihadist terrorist plots, recruitment and radicalization.” Another Republican politician wondered, “Will radical Islamic elements migrate to the area surrounding the terrorist prison?”

“Thumbs down,” said the editorial writers of the Southern Illinoisan in the edition that landed in my driveway Friday morning. The Southern tries to steer it down the middle, in my estimation, though it did endorse John McCain for president last year. “[M]any politicians are making it sound like Al-Qaida operatives will be roaming the streets,” the paper said in its rebuke.

This has produced a backlash among the folks in Illinois who follow such things—accusing the Thomson-Gitmo critics of fearmongering or worse.

It sounds as though the critics are overestimating the abilities of terror suspects and way underestimating the abilities of American corrections professionals. After all, down the road in Marion, Illinois, a federal prison has been holding the worst of the worst criminals for decades, and we go about our daily business as though they weren’t there. And lot of our neighbors have good jobs and enjoy economic spinoff benefits as a result. So what’s going on here?

Are these critics watching too many X-Men movies on late night TV? If these terror suspects are what the government says they are, they are wicked men, indeed. But they’re not supervillians who can walk through walls. A colony of their followers are not going to move to Illinois like the Pod People, sprouting up and turning the townspeople into pliant zombies. No one has ever escaped a US supermax-level prison. And something tells me a radical Islamic enclave would not find itself welcomed in small-town Northwestern Illinois.

Though good research (Kull, Ramsay, and Lewis, 2003) has shown that people who get their news from television are more likely to get their facts wrong than those who get their news from print sources or NPR, this time I don’t think TV is to blame.

The culprit, I suggest, is our way-too-early February primary. See, here we are on the cusp of Thanksgiving, and potential primary voters are going to stop paying attention to politics as they turn their attention to family matters and the holidays. And once the holidays are over, it will only be a few short weeks until the February 2 Primary. How can a politician stand out among a crowded field of gubernatorial and senatorial candidates? Maybe by shouting the loudest, scariest warnings about a sensitive and emotion-laden topic.

John Jackson, my esteemed colleague at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, has forcefully and convincingly argued for pushing Illinois’ party primaries further into the Spring. The current system limits the time voters have for serious debate, and it favors establishment candidates who have more name recognition and easier access to cash than political newcomers who might have better, fresher ideas. A longer primary season would give “outsider” candidates more time to make their cases to the voters—perhaps leading to more regular turnover among our now-entrenched political class.

A too-short campaign season—interrupted by the holidays—leads to ill-considered shouting and grandstanding. A longer campaign season gives good policy ideas a chance to win out over bad ones, and better ideas a chance to win out over the merely good ones.

Let’s add a longer primary campaign season, along with redistricting reform, to our Holiday Reform Wish List this year.

Happy Thanksgiving.

It Could be Worse—And It Could Get Better

By: Charles Leonard

My colleague Linda Baker is right on target in her blog posting when she talks about how statewide budget uncertainties reach down to touch the lives of real people.
Some are lower-income college students who need a boost to help them become more productive taxpayers. Some are chronically ill, or citizens with disabilities, or parents of kids with debilitating conditions that put intolerable drains on their incomes.
Nor are the people who deliver services to the citizens of Illinois faceless bureaucrats; they are fellow Illinoisans with spouses and kids and car payments. They fix the roads and bridges; they help your daughter get her driver’s license; they guard the inmates in the prison. And when they are out of work, the work of the people does not get done.
As Linda perceptively describes, these troubles reach down to our neighbors at the individual level. They also reach all of us at the larger, group level. For example, in the latest Paul Simon Public Policy Institute statewide poll, our fellow citizens’ dissatisfaction is evident: Only about one in five voters surveyed (21.8%) said things in Illinois were headed in the right direction. Two-thirds (67.8%) said that things were off-track and headed in the wrong direction.
Contrast this with our survey respondents’ view of the direction of the nation: More than four in ten (42.3%) said the country was headed in the right direction. This is still not good. We are in the middle of deep and painful recession. Of course a majority (50.4%) would say we are headed in the wrong direction.
What alarms a professional observer of political opinion about these numbers is that normally the public’s view of the state government is substantially more optimistic than the public view of the national government—particularly in trying times such as these.
The people of Illinois seem to think their government is broken, and they are in a bad mood about it.
If you have stuck with me for this long, I am going to let a little ray of sunshine into the cave: The public mood is better than it was a year ago (believe it or not) and there is evidence that public sentiment may be building in favor of significant change—as heavily as our entrenched, inert system in Springfield may weigh against it.
As noted, 21.8% in this year’s poll said the state was moving in the right direction. In last year’s poll, only 12.4% said so. This year, 42.3% said the country was moving in the right direction. Last year, only 6.3% said so. As bad as the public mood is this year, it is a lot better than it was a year ago.