In era of leadership shortage, governors step up
State officials are being cast as outsiders with experience
When GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona was asked last month about his stand on the Republicans’ controversial health care reform plan, he said that he’d do whatever Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey wanted.
When President Trump said in June he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, California Gov. Jerry Brown and the governors of 11 other states said they wouldn’t go along.
This month, Democratic Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and John Kasich, Ohio’s Republican governor, argued that the nation’s governors, not the Senate nor the White House, could best take the lead on health care efforts.
With the president’s popularity and political clout at record lows and Congress stymied by gridlock, the country’s governors look to become the Washington outsiders voters say they want, only with the hands-on political experience people increasingly say they long to see in government.
“Governors are solving problems for the people of their states,” said Scott Pattison, executive director and CEO of the National Governors Association. “Compared with the federal government, it’s no surprise that when people think of their governor, they
think of action.”
There’s nothing new about governors taking a leading spot in national politics. Since 1977, four of the seven presidents have been governors, not only of huge states like California (Ronald Reagan) and Texas (George W. Bush), but also of smaller states like Georgia ( Jimmy Carter) and Arkansas (Bill Clinton).
The job of running a state often can translate well in a move to the White House, since governors learn early that the buck stops with them, said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University.
“Governors are basically presidents in waiting,” he said. “They’re the policy implementers, the place where the rubber meets the road in their states.”
That’s experience Trump, a high-profile businessman with no background in politics or government, has proved he sorely lacks. While he was elected as an outsider who promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington, many of the problems in his first months in office have stemmed from his unfamiliarity with the work that’s needed to turn his political dreams into policy reality.
“Running the office is very different from running for office,” McCuan said. “Implementing policy requires a different set of skills.”
There’s a big difference between a senator or a member of Congress, who can cast a vote on a controversial bill and then move on to the next issue, and a governor who is forced to deal with the effects of that bill, day after day after day.
While the effort to “repeal and replace” former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was a partisan political fight in the Senate, with every Democrat opposed and almost all Republicans in favor, it was a different situation outside the Washington Beltway, where many GOP governors were desperately worried about what a repeal would mean for their states.
“Let’s just say they just got rid of it, didn’t replace it with anything,” Ohio’s Kasich said in a Politico interview in January. “What happens to the 700,000 people (who receive Medicaid benefits in Ohio)? What happens to drug treatment? What happens to mental-health counseling? What happens to these people who have very high cholesterol and are victims from a heart attack? What happens to them?”
On health care and other issues, governors find themselves forced to consider both the intended results and the unexpected consequences of the laws that flow from Washington, even as they try to make them work best for the residents of their states.
That nitty-gritty, closeto-the-voter approach to governing is especially attractive to Democrats looking toward the 2020 presidential race, when they need to win back working-class voters who in November rejected Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state who was the ultimate Washington insider.
“Right now Democrats are facing a battle between the Bernie Sanders progressives and the Democratic establishment that nominated Clinton,” McCuan said. “Governors provide a third option.”
In May, Politico released an admittedly early look at “The 43 people who might run against Trump in 2020.” That list included six of the Democrats’ 15 current governors, five former governors and one potential governor, California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, one of the Democrats on that list, told the National Governors Association last month that the country’s governors are ready to handle the problems Washington can’t or won’t deal with.
“What I try to tell everybody is, ‘Forget the federal government. Come directly to the states,’ ” he said.
The governors in red or purple states that backed Trump in November are seen as potential candidates to flip those states — and possibly the presidency — back into the Democratic column.
One of those prospective challengers is Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who last month formed a federal political action committee that will raise money to allow him to travel the nation to “share Montana’s story,” which likely will include stops in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.
Speaking in May to the progressive Center for American Progress, a policy institute founded in 2003 by John Podesta, chair of Clinton’s campaign last year, Bullock talked about how he governs in a GOP-friendly state where Trump won an overwhelming victory.
“It’s about showing up,” he said. “As a Democrat in Montana, I don’t have the luxury of spending all day talking only to people who agree with me.”
Although Bullock, like other Democrats, doesn’t talk directly about a 2020 run for president, his speech was essentially a rural state governor’s blueprint for a more inclusive party, one that looked beyond its traditional big city base.
“Democrats need to do a better job of showing up and making arguments even in places where people are likely to disagree,” the governor said. “It’s good for democracy, and it’s good for the Democratic Party.”