Am I the only one who thinks this tease from The New York Times Web site is just a bit over the top?
Nevada was vaulted into the position of tie-breaker after the victory of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in New Hampshire Tuesday.
The story is a pretty straight summary of the activity in the southwestern state, so I’m not sure what possessed the Times to take a page from the cable networks.
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This is a lot to take in. The governor is proposing borrowing enough money to cover paying down a large portion of the state’s debt, but also to replenish the state’s Transportation Trust fund and maintain the state’s toll roads for years to come.
Gov. Jon Corzine is billing his toll road proposal as a way to bail out a state awash in debt, a state with a political class that has relied on a host of gimmicks and accounting tricks to spend like drunken sailors while pushing off the consequences for another time.
That time is now. Debt payments are consuming a greater portion of the state’s budget every year. In addition, the state’s pension and healthcare funds are woefully underfunded. Together, these obligations are crowding out other priorities — including real property tax and educational funding reform.
Yes, the Legislature did provide some nominal tax relief this past fall. And yes, it approved on Monday a new school funding formula that calls for a $500 million boost in overall state spending on schools.
The reality, however, is that both of these accomplishments were nothing more than nibbling — a much larger infusion of state cash into local school is needed both to ensure equality of educational opportunity and to reduce the amount spent locally in property taxes. And this does not take into account the cash needed to build the affordable housing units needed both to provide housing and to desegregate this horribly segregated state.
Will the toll-road plan address these issues? Perhaps. The governor certainly seems to think so.
In a speech that may be the most important of his political career, Corzine described his plan as “comprehensive and sober,” adding that is bound to be “controversial.” He ticked off its four elements, some of which Republicans have been demanding for years.
“One: Freeze spending now,” Corzine said. “Two: Limit future spending to revenue growth. Three: Capture the enterprise value of our tollways to pay down debt and make capital investments. Four: Limit borrowing by requiring voter authorization.”
“If there is a better plan, I am open to its consideration,” he said. “Put it on the table.”
According to The New York Times, the governor wants to boost highway tolls over the next 15 years (by 50 percent in 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022), while borrowing between $30 billion and $38 billion “to help the state pay off half of its debt and pay for transportation improvements.” The plan also calls for the state to “establish two new agencies, one to operate and maintain the roads, and the other to provide some oversight.”
It is an ambitious plan, that’s not in question; there is no way to address years of political timidity without being bold and ambitious.
What is questionable is whether this plan is the right plan to address the state’s woes. That’s a question I can’t answer at the moment.
My initial sense, however, is that this is just another in a long line of gimmicks foisted on taxpayers — though there is a twist: Taxpayers will not be the ones on the hook for the plan; drivers, the majority of whom the governor says come from out of state, will be. That, in the end, is his chief selling point.
At least the governor is being honest. Unlike his predecessors, who revalued the state’s pension plan so that they could avoid making payments into the fund (I’m talking to you, Christie Whitman and Jim McGreevey), Gov. Corzine is being honest about this plan and the pain, about its risky nature and about the pain it will cause for drivers.
I’m skeptical, but will keep an open mind. It’s now up to the governor, in his upcoming statewide dog-and-pony show, to convince voters and state legislators that his plan offers far more good than ill.
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Hit the treamdill today, even though it was nice. Hate to run when the shoulders are wet — makes for questionable footing. Did four miles in 33:13. Music was a mix.
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Hillary Clinton cannot win for losing. It is becoming increasingly clear that the New York senator is being held to a different standard than every other candidate in the race.
Consider yesterday’s mini-firestorm:
Everything is on the table inside Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign if she loses the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, her advisers say — including her style of campaigning, which shifted dramatically on Monday when Mrs. Clinton bared her thoughts about the race’s impact on her personally, and her eyes welled with tears.
“I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do,” she said here in reply to a question from an undecided voter, a woman roughly Mrs. Clinton’s age.
Her eyes visibly wet, in perhaps the most public display of emotion of her year-old campaign, Mrs. Clinton added: “I have so many opportunities from this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. This is very personal for me — it’s not just political, it’s not just public.”
Mrs. Clinton did not cry, but her quavering voice and the flash of feeling underscored the pressure, fatigue, anger and disappointment that, advisers say, Mrs. Clinton has experienced since her loss on Thursday in the Iowa caucuses and that she continues to shoulder at this most critical moment.
The Times is playing this pretty straight — but that hasn’t stopped those tears from becoming an issue. And that’s the problem. The array of opinions — to get a sense of what everyone is saying, go to the Times’ The Caucus blog — offers a pretty stark reminder of the biases Clinton faces these days. She has been criticized both for being emotional (read this as code for “weak woman”) and for not being sincere in her emotions (which plays into the stereotype of her as cold and calculating — another in a long line of misogynistic stereotypes used to damage strong women) — sort of a “damed if you do, damned if you don’t” critique.
I’m no fan of the New York senator. She is too much of a centrist for my taste and far too much like her husband: a Democratic triangulator.
But the controversy over her tears seems contrived and a distraction.
Of more significance, I think, maybe the responses from her chief Democratic rivals.
From Barack Obama:
As Mr. Obama stopped briefly for a cup of hot tea in New London, N.H., he was asked about the video image of Mrs. Clinton.
“I didn’t see what happened. I don’t know the context of it,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “I know that this process is a grind, so that’s not something I would care to comment on.”
From John Edwards:
John Edwards was asked for his reaction to Mrs. Clinton’s emotional display at a news conference on Monday.
“I don’t really have anything to say about that,” he said, but then continued, “I think what we need in a commander in chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also very tough business. And the president of the United States is faced with very, very difficult challenges every single day and difficult judgments every single day. What I know is that I’m prepared for that.”
Edwards comes off looking pretty sexist, as Katha Pollitt points out in her blog at TheNation.com:
Today he deployed against Hillary the oldest, dumbest canard about women: they’re too emotional to hold power.
She adds
Ooh, right,we need a big strong manly finger on that nuclear button! Even if that finger has spent most it its life writing personal injury briefs in North Carolina, which, when you come to think of it, is not an obvious preparation for commander-in-chiefhood.
“When people say they don’t want anyone’s finger on the button who cries, I say I don’t want anyone’s finger there who doesn’t cry,” Pat Schroeder told me when we spoke by phone this afternoon. “Tears show someone is a human being.” Schroeder ought to know. In 1987 she was viciously attacked for shedding a few tears while announcing her withdrawal from the presidential race. “Ronald Reagan used to tear up all the time,” she said. ” when John Sununu left the New Hampshire governorship to run Reagan’s campaign he was crying so hard he couldn’t finish his speech. Bush recently teared up. Dozens of male politicians cry. But when a man cries, he’s applauded for having feelings. when a woman cries, she attacked as being weak.”
Edwards backtracked some this morning, saying he wasn’t criticizing Clinton. I’ll let others judge.
In any case, Edwards did come off better than Rudy Giuliani, who opted to use this silliness to once again remind us that he is running for president of 9/11.
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Hard not to agree with this from Scott Horton on Harpers.org. Barack Obama has been getting glowing news coverage, as John McCain has been for years — in contrast with not only Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, as Horton points out, but John Edwards, as well. McCain finishes fourth in Iowa and gets kudos; Edwards finishes second, spending next to nothing compared with Obama and Clinton, and he was one of the big losers.
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