I’d thought that we’d already litigated, so to speak, the 2004 budget reform back in the 2005 state elections, when Republican gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore railed against what he termed the “largest tax increase in Virginia history” as the centerpiece of his message to Virginia voters, and snatched defeat from the jaws of electoral victory in his race against Democrat Tim Kaine in the process.
But then Bob McDonnell used the same terminology to the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce last week. Speaking of the ’04 reform that stabilized the state budget and put Virginia on the path to being named the best state for business on a yearly basis since, McDonnell dismissed the bipartisan move as, you guessed it, “the largest tax increase in Virginia history.”
“I did not think it was the right vote at the time, because the kind of governor that I’m going to be is to find ways to do things better,” said McDonnell, basically begging Mark Warner to get involved in the ’09 governor’s race, and Warner took the bait, joining with retired State Senate Republican Majority Leader John Chichester on a conference call arranged by the Creigh Deeds gubernatorial campaign to counter the McDonnell smear.
“Bob McDonnell reaffirmed the fact that he would not have joined with the bipartisan coalition in 2004 that supported the structural budget reform that we were able to pass. This was after two and a half years of major cuts to virtually every part of state government, after putting in place new business practices in place to try to reform state spending, and we were still confronted with a structural budget deficit. This was confirmed by the fact that the bond-rating agencies put our credit rating at risk,” Warner told reporters on the call.
“We recognized that once we came out of the recession we were still going to be in a deficit posture, unless we came way out of it, and even if we did, it would be a temporary affair. So we had to cure the structural imbalance. And of course we weren’t the only ones who knew that. Wall Street knew that as well,” Chichester reminded.
I understand McDonnell’s dilemma here. It’s political more than good policy. A Republican candidate for elected office can’t talk about taxes in any other way than to refer to them as being automatically bad. Especially when that same Republican candidate is trying to use the tax issue to divert attention away from his real focal point in the social-policy arena as a budding social engineer.
It’s a shame, that. Good politics ends up getting in the way of good government.
“In one of those moments that I wish we would actually see more of up here on Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans in large numbers left their Ds and Rs at the door and put Virginia first. It was a hard vote, but people in both parties, in major numbers, stepped up. And what I find disappointing is that again Mr. McDonnell says it was not the right approach when if we hadn’t acted this way, Virginia’s budget would now look like California’s,” Warner said.
– Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
