February 24, 2010 07:57 PM UTC

GOP Governors Push Back on Stimulus Disparagement

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

A great report from the Colorado Independent yesterday we didn’t want to escape mention:

To hear Republicans in Congress tell it, the Grand Old Party is pretty much united against the deficit-spending approach to economic recovery. Don’t tell that to local GOP officials.

Faced with the most severe budget crises in decades, state and local policymakers from across the country – including a growing list of prominent Republicans – have been only too happy to accept the additional federal funding that accompanied last year’s $787 billion stimulus bill. Not only did that money prop up job markets, many say, but it kept social-service programs running strong during a period of greatest need. They don’t see stimulus spending as indebting the future. They see it as an investment in the future.

“I don’t apologize for it at all,” Florida GOP Gov. Charlie Crist said Monday of accepting the federal help. “It was the right thing to do. We needed the money.”

That’s not all. Twelve months later – even as Republicans on Capitol Hill are balking at the new jobs bills being pushed by Democrats – a number of conservative governors have unveiled 2011 budget proposals assuming that billions of dollars more are on the way from Washington. Adding to the sense of urgency, 47 of the nation’s 50 governors on Sunday sent a letter to congressional leaders urging billions of dollars in additional Medicaid funding.

The saga highlights the expansive divide between GOP leaders on the national stage – who are focused almost exclusively on how many seats the party can pick up in this year’s mid-term elections – and those running the states, where the more pressing issue is how to balance budgets amid the economic chaos.

The two perspectives couldn’t be more different. Washington’s Republicans – who have voted near-unanimously against the Democrats’ stimulus bills – have effectively bet their political fortunes that those efforts would not only anger an American public grown weary of deficit spending, but would also fail to spur a recovery. An economy in turmoil, therefore, will play to their advantage at the polls in November – leaving them in the odd position of hoping the downturn endures until then. State officials, on the other hand, are grappling in real time with pinched budgets, a scarcity of jobs, and safety-net services threatened by increased demand and falling revenues.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last year talking about the disconnect between election-minded rhetoric about the stimulus and the reality of what it’s done to assist during Colorado’s ongoing fiscal crisis. We’ve maintained from the beginning that it takes some real chutzpah to declare, for example, that you would not have accepted federal stimulus funds as Governor, but then throw tantrums whenever budget cuts impact your constituents. What we’ve seen in the last year is that kind of rhetoric meeting the reality of the worst economy since the 1930s–and losing. If anything, the federal stimulus bill passed last year should have been larger, with more emphasis placed on the stabilization of state government budgets, as we and state officials said while it was being debated. But even the size it was it amounted to hundreds of millions in irreplaceable assistance, and no Republican has dared to offer a budget plan that carries out the cuts stimulus funds have backfilled. There’s a simple reason for that: it would be a nightmare scenario.

We do think it’s interesting how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), or more to the point, demonizing ARRA as a central campaign theme, is emerging as an election issue for some Republicans–including all of the marquee candidates for office in Colorado. They can maybe win primaries doing so (note to Charlie Crist), but if Democrats can swing public opinion back to  favorable on the Recovery Act, by selling it like they should have been a year ago and finally seem to be doing now, Josh Penry’s “I would reject the stimulus” rhetoric could become a perilous limb for his fellow Republicans to have gotten out on.

Speaking of which, has anybody ever nailed down Scott “Rick Perry” McInnis on this?

The curious thing about polling public opinion on the Recovery Act is that the individual provisions in the bill are broadly supported by the public when adequately explained. There is a fundamental disconnect between the public’s overall impression of the Recovery Act and what it actually was, and we think that can only be attributed to the deafening and rhetorically undifferentiated attacks on “the stimulus” heading into this election year. It’s never easy to argue your case when it’s more complicated than your opponent’s sloganeering, but there does seem to be a roadmap here for Democrats to turn their ‘liability’ into an asset.