The most important lessons for the Republican party aren’t coming from any of the retired politicians doing their speaking tours right now. They come from two sitting governors, Governor Christie of New Jersey and Governor Brewer of Arizona. And what they’re doing is very simple. They’re confronting the problem.
When Christie won an election, like so many other state governors he was thrust into the middle of an impossible budget nightmare, which was full of impossible problems. State budgets had been bulked up by entitlements and their attached public sector unions. Cutting them meant a battle with the unions. But not cutting them meant serious tax hikes. Most governors chose to walk some kind of middle path, negotiating with the unions with the least political fallout, and raising taxes, to create a compromise that everyone hated.
But Christie made the rational calculation that he had nothing to lose by taking on the unions, because they would reliably come out against him during reelection anyway. And if he didn’t take them on, he would have to shoulder the blame for a budget crisis that he had nothing to do with. So while neighboring New York’s state government was trying to tiptoe around a complete shutdown over budget talks, New Jersey’s new governor took the initiative and picked a fight with the unions, turning them into the villains in the budget crisis.
Unlike Schwarzenegger who had tried the same thing in California a few years too early before buckling under the response in response to his failed referendums, Christie benefited from better timing and from voters being able to directly connect the teacher’s union to property tax hikes over school budgets. It was a scenario that gave people who were already cutting back a chance to directly stand up to tax hikes in local elections. And while teacher’s unions are almost as good at wrapping themselves in a self-righteous cloak, as the California nurses union was, their own stunts ended up backfiring on them.
