Attack of the Republican governors: 'the slick, the cruel, and the bought.'

Meet Kirk Fordice--Republican governor. Shortly after taking office several years ago, Mississippi's chief executive was asked whether he planned to obey a court order requiring the state to provide historic black colleges with the same levels of aid as predominantly white colleges.

"We may have to call out the National Guard, because I'm just not going to do it," declared the first Republican to lead the Magnolia State in more than a century. Fordice mocks civil-rights-movement anniversaries, and he has failed to appoint any African Americans as agency heads in a state where they make up 36 percent of the population.

And he doesn't stop there. "The United States of America is a Christian nation," he says without apology.

Linking his words with public policy, Fordice has blocked attempts to increase support for Mississippi's woefully underfunded public schools, cajoled legislators to cap damages that can be collected by victims of corporate wrongdoing, and condemned his own attorney general for suing tobacco companies and other corporations.

To Beatrice Branch, who grew up in the Mississippi where Ku Klux Kian rallies and White Citizen Councils were still a part of the political landscape, Fordice is a terrifying throwback to an uglier time. Branch, a former head of Mississippi's Department of Human Services, who now serves as president of the state branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is deeply troubled by the direction Fordice is taking the state. But she understands that Fordice is not merely a Mississippi phenomenon.

"I used to think Kirk Fordice some kind of Mississippi mistake," she said. "But then I started to recognize that he's not all that different from the other Republican governors around the country. They all have the same philosophies; Fordice is just less polished. But the agenda is pretty much the same--divide people and turn back the clock."

While the buzz about the nation's Republican governors remains remarkably positive, Branch represents a growing number of activists, academics, and political players who see these men as the storm troopers of the Republican revolution.

"These Republican governors are the Darth Vaders of the contemporary political scene--they are slick, they are cruel. and they are bought," says consumer advocate Ralph Nader. "They have dangerous agendas, and they are putting them into action so rapidly that a lot of Americans don't even know what's hitting them."

Playing on prejudice, offering warmed-over voodoo economics," embracing corporate lobbyists, and singing loudly from the Christian Coalition's hymnal, Republican governors are using their states as laboratories of reaction. Republicans in Washington hail them as models for the nation but the trouble is that they are undermining their own states. The question is not if, but when, the whole edifice will crumble.

"If you look at what they're doing, you have to ask yourself, `How can anyone in their right mind think this is going to work?'" says Tony Earl, former Democratic governor of Wisconsin. "They're revisiting all the mistakes of the Reagan era. They're employing simplistic thinking and untried concepts. They're creating public-policy messes that could take generations to clean up."

Says Earl, "These are not models for America."

But don't try to tell the Republican leadership in Washington--or most of America's leading political pundits--that the Republican governors are a bunch of political hacks who've gotten where they are by using racial "wedge" issues and discredited economic approaches.

To Washington's new GOP establishment, the governors are Exhibit A in the court of public opinion--the living embodiment of everything the Republican revolution is about. They are providing concrete examples for how Republicans can rule.

Ever since the votes were counted last November 8, Republican governors have been the hot commodity in the shopping mall of American politics. Sarah Ritchie, of the Center for the Study of the States at the State University of New York's Albany campus, says that if the Republican governors didn't exist, the new Republican Congressional leadership probably would have had to invent them.

After forty years of standing on the outside looking in, Republicans suddenly found themselves in control of the Congress this year. Beholden to corporate contributors who poured money into their coffers in the final weeks of the 1994 campaign, the new Republican majorities in the House and Senate were committed to dismantling much of the regulatory and social-service infrastructure of the federal government they had been elected to run. But they had few blueprints to offer the American people.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich seized on Republican governors like Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson and Michigan's John Engler, hailing them as "innovators" and "trailblazers" who were putting the Contract with America into effect at the grassroots level.

Just days after he assumed the Speakership, Gingrich pledged a "new partnership" with the governors. And as the Contract with America's 100-day clock began ticking, Thompson, Engler, William Weld of Massachusetts, and other Republican governors trooped to Washington to promote schemes that would consolidate federal funding for 336 different social programs into eight block grants to the states.

Engler and Thompson urged Congress to get out of the way by scrapping existing requirements on how federal money should be spent and simply shipping the tax dollars off to the states in the form of block grants that could be administered by--you guessed it--the governors.

As the governors popped up at committee hearings and on Face the Nation and Nightline, they were showered with praise by Republican Congressional leaders--and at least a few Democrats--as well as a veritable who's--who of American political punditry.

The line from almost every quarter was, "While Washington talks. these guys get things done."

So how striking are their accomplishments?

Not very.

Take the case of Tommy Thompson, who came close to parlaying his welfare reform initiatives into a 1996 Presidential candidacy. The Wisconsin governor doesn't mention the fact that--for all the national acclaim--his much-vaunted plans remain pilot projects that operate in only a handful of rural counties and affect fewer than 1,000 recipients. The same goes for Thompson's "innovative" school-choice plan, which operates in only a few Milwaukee neighborhoods.

"You probably hear more about the Republican governors doing welfare reform than anything else.," says U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. "But so far, none of them have done enough to provide models we can seriously measure."

Political observer Kevin Phillips says that the Republican governors are producing more in the way of rhetoric than records. "You hear all this talk about the Republican governors, and a lot of times they are portrayed as these great innovators," he says. "But where is the yardstick by which they are measured? A lot of them haven't even put together their first budget."

Most of the nation's Republican governors are relative newcomers elected over the past several years. The 1994 election was a watershed for the party. It went into the year holding just nineteen of the nation's fifty governorships. After November 8, the GOP controlled thirty governorships--the first time the party had won a majority of statehouses since 1970. Every incumbent Republican governor who sought reelection in 1994 won, while seven Democratic incumbents--including national figures like New York's Mario Cuomo and Texas's Ann Richards--went down to defeat.

Particularly devastated were Democratic moderates whose cautious defenses of the status quo were no match for the saber-rattling rightwing populism of Republicans who promised to put criminals in the electric chair, welfare recipients on the street, and tax breaks in the pockets of the middle class.

Around the country, the Republican newcomers now are scrambling to keep the extravagant campaign promises that Ritchie, of the Center for the Study of the States, describes as "absolutely Reaganesque." Just as the former president--who is hailed as a god by the Republican governors--allowed bizarre supply-side economic theories to create the largest federal debt in American history, so his disciples seem determined to wreak havoc on the state budgets for which they are responsible.

"A lot of them have had a hard time keeping their hands off various financial gimmicks--going after pension funds and things like that--which could turn out to be disasirous," says Phillips.

In California this summer, the state began the fiscal year without a budget for the third year running. Public employees and vendors were paid only because a court order required the state to cough up the money. Governor Pete Wilson's reaction to the mounting crisis? He flew to the Midwest to pitch himself as a Republican governor who could "do for America what we've accomplished at the state level." As part of his Presidential campaign, Wilson has announced that he will ask for a massive state tax cut--despite the fact that California's schools are now among America's most crowded, its unemployment rate is the highest in the nation, and Orange County has gone bankrupt.

Wilson is far from exceptional. In fact, as former Wisconsin Governor Earl says, "All these governors seem to be blind to the one essential lesson of the 1980s--Reagan's approach didn't work. It left this nation with a severely weakened infrastructure and the worst deficits in history. Now these governors seem determined to doom their states to play out the same scenario."

Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, whom Gingrich chose to deliver the rebuttal to President Clinton's State of the Union address, drew gasps from financial analysts around the country this spring when she announced that--despite serious budget problems--she was pushing through an income tax cut in her state.

With almost no margin for error, Whitman has gambled New Jersey's future on the theory that "projected growth" will make up for lost revenues and prevent the state from going bankrupt. If her scheme fails, analysts say, not only will state services collapse but pension funds for retired state employees could be devastated. She's been selling off state properties at fire-sale prices. As Bob Herbert of The New York Times noted, she let go of two beautiful public marinas "for the price of a used Volvo."

"There are a lot of people around Christie Whitman who are nervous about whether she can hold this thing together," says Phillips.

Wisconsin's Tony Earl is also nervous. "You can't keep pushing things off--pushing off payment dates--you can't continue using every rosy scenario imaginable and expect a state to continue to function." he says. "Ultimately, you're going to have to pay those debts, and that will be painful. They're creating a real mess that someone else is going to have to come in and clean up."

Whitman, who was elected in 1993, has exported her theories across the border to neighboring New York. There, George Pataki is embarking on a reign of error that owes more to Marie Antoinette's "let-them-eat-cake" provisos than to anything approaching sound economic theory.

Pataki has rammed through an income-tax cut that virtually every serious analyst says will devastate one of the most effective state governments in the nation.

The Pataki plan cuts spending for schools and social services for the poor. At the same time, his administration has agreed to provide IBM with $75 million in low-interest loans. According to The New York Times, the state is in the process of "providing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other benefits to big business, including some of the nation's largest corporations."

Pataki's willingness to use state government to line the pockets of major corporations knows few bounds. At the behest of the insurance industry, he has pushed through a plan--previously vetoed on a regular basis by Cuomo--that will allow for massive increases in auto-insurance premiums. He has also fallen in line with a proposal from the real-estate lobby that exempts realtors from having to reveal defects in properties they are selling.

Pataki's determination to tow the barge of business fits a pattern among Republican governors. Nowhere is this more evident than on the issue of so-called tort reform. In virtually every state where a Republican has assumed the governorship, there has been a major push for caps on damage awards to victims of medical malpractice and corporate malfeasance.

Most recently, George W Bush signed a bill in Texas that effectively undercuts the ability of victims of corporate and medical wrongdoing to sue for reasonable damages. Thompson has signed a similar bill in Wisconsin, and in states across the country Republican governors are picking up their pens to do the same.

"The Republican governors are all reading from the same scripts--same slogans, same rationales, same everything," says Nader. "The script is to destroy that pillar of American democracy that gives every American the right to a day in court by codifying restrictions on judges and juries who might otherwise make determinations in favor of the victims of medical and corporate wrongdoing. This is the fast-track on PAC-greased skids. It is the corporate politicization of our courts, judges, and juries."

Nader sees this effort as merely the first step in a broader assault by Republican governors and their legislative allies on state regulations that protect workers, communities, and most particularly the environment.

U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt agrees. "Teddy Roosevelt would be turning in his grave if he saw what some of these Republican governors are doing as regards the environment," says Babbitt, himself a former Democratic governor of Arizona. "Historically, Republican governors were often ahead of the pack on environmental and conservation issues. But that's not the case anymore."

Much has been made of the fact that some of the most prominent Republican governors are in the pro-choice wing of the party--including Wilson, Whitman, and Weld. But the majority of Republican governors are prolifers, and some of them are among the most extreme advocates for the anti-abortion position in American politics today

Utah Governor Michael O. Leavitt flatly declares, "I am strongly pro-life and anti-abortion. I believe in the sanctity of life at whatever stage of development it occurs." Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating brags, "I'm a Catholic. I'm pro-life and always have been. I'm one of the architects of the right-to-life movement in Oklahoma."

New Hampshire Governor Steve Merrill recently vetoed a bill that would have prohibited the use of force, threats, and intimidation by anti-abortion protesters at clinics, and has said he favors criminal penalties for doctors who perform most abortions.

And many Republican governors who claim to be pro-life have little trouble with ending it in the electric chair.

The death penalty is perhaps the most popular crime-fighting option among Republican governors--although prison construction stands as a strong second. Already this year, Iowa's Terry Branstad--who, like many of the Republican governors, has forged close ties with the Christian Coalition--has led the campaign for a death-penalty bill that will end his state's historic ban on state-sponsored killing. New York's Pataki made institution of the death penalty his first priority.

"The death penalty is such an easy issue for these governors," says Ritchie, of the Center for the Study of the States. "Even though all the evidence says it has no effect on crime rates, they know it's popular, so they just jump on board."

Indeed, the Republican governors have mastered the art of jumping on board so-called wedge issues, which tend to target particular communities either for neglect or flat-out retribution. Some are particularly blunt, such as Fordice, a man who never misses an opportunity to bash the civil-rights movement that in the 1960s began to dismantle Mississippi's equivalent of apartheid.

When he is not defending the presence of a Confederate symbol on the state flag, Fordice is bashing Freedom Riders who spearheaded efforts to end segregation in Mississippi. Greeting former Freedom Riders who arrived in Mississippi for a 1994 reunion, Fordice said, "These people feel that they want to relive what happened for their own reasons. I think the sooner we put that behind us, the better."

While Fordice undoubtedly takes the prize for racial and cultural insensitivity, he faces mighty competition from his fellow governors--particularly Wilson. Once considered a moderate, Wilson was elected in 1990 as a champion of gay and lesbian rights. But the following year he responded to pressure from the Republican right by vetoing a gay-rights bill.

Since then, Wilson has consistently responded to political pressures by scapegoating minorities. Facing a tough reelection battle in 1994, he became the champion of Proposition 187, which ended essential services for illegal immigrants.

As he prepared to enter the 1996 Republican Presidential sweepstakes, Wilson launched a crusade against affirmative action--targeting racial set-aside and racial-preference programs for elimination in California. He has made this the key issue in his Presidential campaign. Other Republican governors have found their own wedge issues, most particularly welfare reform.

The work-or-starve rhetoric pioneered by Thompson and Engler has been turned into a virtual template for Republican governors.

While their demagoguery on social issues may help them in the short run, their economic policies may do them in. Congress is preparing to cut Medicaid payments in ways that could severely reduce the federal largess for many big states.

By summer, some Republican governors were raising red flags on this issue, but they have had a hard time getting much attention--since they spent so much of the winter and spring cheering on the GOP Congress.

"They're facing more serious threats than some of them may recognize because of the prospects that there will be large cuts in the money coming from the federal government to the states," says Phillips. "I think it's going to get harder for them to maintain their appeal. As things get tighter, it's going to be very hard for them to blame Washington--since they've encouraged so much of this. So if things go sour, a lot of it could slop over on them."

Nader sees even more serious troubles for the Republican governors when voters begin to recognize that they have been deprived of basic regulatory and legal protections that once allowed them to feel secure in their homes, their workplaces, and their communities.

"We have to start identifying what they call `tort reform' or `regulatory reform' for what it is," says Nader, "an effort to basically entrench a corporate oligarchy over the American people by destroying law and order against corporations and weakening the laws that prevent industrial violence in the workplace and the marketplace. What they're really pushing is corporate lawlessness--the right to pollute, the right to make defective products, the right to create dangerous workplaces."

By turning "pitiless abstract ideologies" into frightening realities, "the Republicans are setting the stage for a major progressive comeback," Nader predicts. "The Republican governors will keep getting away with this stuff for as long as there's no opposition party. Once there is an opposition, people will respond by saying, These guys are dangerous. We've got to stop them.'"

John Nichols is an editorial writer for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He writes about electoral politics for The Progressive.