What Obama Giveth, Douglas Taketh Away

Since November, Gov. Jim Douglas has put his spin-machine into overdrive to ratchet up the drumbeat for budget cuts, budget cuts, budget cuts (with maybe a tiny break to mention layoffs).

It all seems like an exercise in cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the message from the Governor is that the sky is falling and the only choice available to us is to slash essential human services budgets, fire state employees and raise health care premiums and prescription drug benefits for seniors and people with disabilities. Meanwhile President Obama says the federal government will provide aid to the states to help fill budget holes. Not only that, but his first budget lays out an ambitious agenda that sets aside more than half a trillion dollars for health care reform, massive energy infrastructure investments, and many, many other dollars flowing from the federal government to the states.

So what gives?! Obama is going to save us, right? But Douglas is still playing the Soup Nazi.

Douglas: "No soup for you!"

But there's a reason for the cognitive dissonance. Obama trots Jim out for a photo op to show "moderate" Republican support for his stimulus package and his first budget proposal (it was hard not to imagine a retractable leash on the Governor as he sat in the Presidential box behind the First Lady). Jim can trot out the photos of him with Obama to show he's a "different" kind of Republican - one who works with Democrats and has a friend in the highest of high places in Washington, D.C. So, the short answer for this oddest of political bedfellows is that they need each other (obviously, Jim needs Obama far more than Obama needs Jim), or maybe better put: they can use each other.

Douglas: "He likes me... he really likes me!"

Meanwhile, back here at home, the chickens are coming home to roost on the Governor's budget. And, as will happen with chickens from time to time, there's some egg on the faces of those who simply advocated "across the board" cuts without regard to program area, maintenance of effort funds tied to federal dollars, and what might be coming in the stimulus package. As it turns out many of the cuts proposed by the Administration are either not possible, or ill-conceived. Some of the federal dollars require the state not cut funds (maintenance of effort) in order to receive them. So, as Secretary of Administration, Neale Lunderville was forced to admit this morning on the radio, (paraphrasing) "it doesn't make sense to cut $2.5 million dollars in the state budget, only to lose out on $250 million in federal stimulus money, and we're just not going to do that." The Times Argus also reported that he conceded the same thing when the stimulus package was announced.

Other examples include proposed cuts to Vermont's Reach Up program. The federal government is offering to pay 80% of the tab for increases in caseloads. The Administration is proposing instead to reduce caseloads - not because need is going down (they expect 2,000 new cases in the coming years), but because they're proposing to just throw families who need assistance off welfare altogether. So, reducing our caseload, despite increasing need may well preclude our ability to tap into new federal funds that would help thousands of Vermont families in need. By delaying or terminating the Reach Ahead program (a food assistance program to provide newly working families with some support so they don't slip back onto Reach Up), our work participation rate will suffer and Vermont will be sanctioned to the tune of multiple millions of dollars. Far more than we would save by stopping that innovative new program.


So, where does all this leave us? Well, we have arguably the most sweeping progressive budget and agenda coming out of Washington since Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty.

Meanwhile, here at home, the Governor who promised us that Jim would equal Jobs has given us longer unemployment lines.

The Governor who promised us an "affordability agenda" gives us rising health care premiums, takes food off the tables of low income families, and increases the cost of prescription drugs.

Let's face it for six years, Jim Douglas took credit for the Vermont economy during the early go-go part of this decade. He OWNS this economy, and he subscribed to every rule in the Bush playbook. Now that the economy has imploded due to Republican fiscal recklessness, Douglas refuses to face up to it. But, it's too late... That economic recipe was quite the "bitter swill". So he'll point to the federal government ("their fault") and he'll point to the legislature ("their fault"), but in the end, these are his budgets, his policies, and he has largely had his way with the legislature over the years. The more he squirms, the tighter those knots are going to get and simply saying "there's nothing we can do" isn't going to play.

Recently the Governor mentioned that he thinks the legislature is "divorced from reality" for suggesting we raise a modest amount of new revenues to couple with the stimulus package to fix the budget crisis (they included some cuts as well). That may be better than being married to recalcitrance. The Governor in clinging to his "cuts will save us all" mantra has taken on a tinge of that childhood wish:"if I say it enough times it might become true." Safe to say that nobody in the Administration owns a pump, or knows how to prime it.

Meanwhile, despite his insistence that "we're all in this together" the Governor asks nothing of the most affluent among us. No sacrifice. Nothing from those who took a ride on the Bush express and saw their incomes skyrocket over the last eight years. I'm trying to imagine what the Governor means when he says that we're all in this together. This recession looks very different depending on whether you're sitting in a homeless shelter, or you've recently been foreclosed upon, or you've lost a benefit on which you rely as opposed to having to give up that vacation to Thailand this year.

That rare air in the presidential box must be pretty thin and going to his head. On the one hand, while in Washington he thinks he's an FOB (Friend of Barack). Meanwhile, outside the glare of the klieg lights in D.C., Jim Douglas is doing everything in his power at the local level to blunt the reforms that President Obama is attempting to implement at the federal level. That is not a recipe for recovery, that is a recipe for disaster. It doesn't make sense, and it's not good politics.