Our former Governor Sundquist might have made the list once. He wasn’t bad so much as lazy. The man basically sat around and twiddled his thumbs while Tenncare stabbed the whole state in the back.
Meanwhile, he spent a lot of time trying to get a big (and the first) income tax through, which people obviously weren’t going to go for. Too many peope in tennesse came form other states where they had an income tax, and they were more than willing to pay the sales tax instead.
As a side note, that’s pretty sad isn’t it? Despite all the big noises from supporter about how people were gonna pay less overall, they couldn’t convince a fraction of the electorate. We *knew * they were gonna raise taxes way up and waste all the money.
I don’t know why Romney is listed in the OP. He’s been pretty much ineffectual, sure, but that’s how the MA job is structured, with the real power in the Legislature. About the most anyone can do is avoid scandal, and he’s done that.
He’s also provided some comic relief with his equivocating on gay marriage and abortion rights as part of his presidential campaign. That ain’t gonna work, Mitt-boy - the live-and-let-live things you’ve said in public here are going to be quoted by your opponents in the South, in sharp contrast to the RR-massaging you’ve fed them there. Shoulda stayed in Utah and you wouldn’t have that problem.
One theory is that he benefited from the Ted Kennedy Effect:
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Nobody will expect you to win. It’s a great way to introduce yourself to the voters of Massachusetts. And the Republican Party regulars will rally around you and will always stand with you in any future races you might want to run.
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First, although I was born and raised in Fargo, North Dakota and was inclined to take exception to Little Nemo’s comment, it would seem that he was on to something after all*.
Second, I seem to recall that former-CT Governor Rowland was booted out of office in November, if not within the last 6-9 months. Her pre-gubernatorial record notwithstanding, unless Jodi Rell has done some pretty stellar things since taking office, it looks like she hasn’t been there long enough to really piss anyone off.
Just a nitpick, perhaps, but in the meantime I’m going to look into this.
*Hoeven wasn’t governor yet when I left the state. All the same, I don’t know him.
He’s still got a long row to hoe if he wants to keep his job. If the Democrats put anyone with a pulse up against him, he’s probably toast. I just can’t decide who it’s gonna be. Stumbo has a good chance, and there’s no discounting someone like former Gov. Brereton Jones jumping back in.
Whoever does run is gonna be able to hang these indictments around Fletcher’s neck and score big.
I used to like Rendell, and still kinda do, but Airman has explained why he’s screwing up big time, at least so far as property-tax reform and slots gambling are concerned. Pennsylvania can take a lesson from Texas’ history of school finance; Texas funded schools from oil and gas taxes for years until the industry went belly-up. Now it can’t get a school funding plan that relies on alternative sources of revenue passed, despite the fact that it’s been court-ordered to do so. I predict PA will have the same problems when revenue from slots dries up or hits a plateau and there’s just not enough money to go around.
As for the doctors, I found out last week that if we decide to have another baby, I’ll likely have to go to Hershey Medical Center about an hour away, because none of the local OB/GYNs where we live deliver babies for fear of malpractice suits. The state’s response to that crisis was to enact a 50-cent-a-pack tax on cigarettes, with the money to go into a state fund for malpractice insurance. Heck, none of the pre-med students I know want to practice anywhere in PA. And the malpractice “crisis” is having an effect on medical support employment as billers and assistants are being let go and forced to find employment in other fields. Nothin’ quite like having to take a $3-4 an hour pay cut when your $10-an-hour doctor’s office job turns into a $6-7-an-hour nursing home job.
I’d love to think so, but Kentucky tends to eat up the “God, guns, and gays” line, so a lot of them are just pulling the “R” lever reflexively these days. I mean, they re-elected an obviously senile Republican Senator (though they would have won that one if the Dems had even contested it, instead of putting up cannon fodder like Mongiardo).
He resigned June 21, 2004 during his impeachment hearings, forced by a corruption scandal which had dragged on long enough to make people in CT thoroughly sick of him by then. If, that is, they weren’t already pissed about his not removing the state income tax like he’d promised. As you suspect, anybody would look great after following him.
Why no votes for Schwarzenegger? Has he done anything to really address the structural deficit in the state budget? Or has he merely sold bonds to postpone the day of reckoning?
I figure that everyone (including everyone who voted against the recall) is just pleased to be rid of Gray Davis.
As for Romney, I think his current numbers have to have gone down since the figures cited. The guy just seems more concerned about the Republican Party (which is so unpopular in Mass. that he can’t even sustain a veto in the legislature) than he is about running the state. If he truly wants to run for President in 2008, in order to get the Republican nomination, he will have to move so far to the right that he won’t have any hope of winning the 2006 governor’s election. Still, he’s reasonably competent, or at least far from the worst.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s because no one from California has posted in here. So far everyone seems to be nominating their own governor, or governor of a place they used to call home/are familiar with. Definitely a case of familiarity breeds contempt. I really don’t know enough about most current governors without the last name of Bush. Bush’s vices and plusses I know, and I’ll even begrudgingly give him some decent marks for how he managed last seasons hurricanes, although I think the way he’s attacked classroom size, Schiavo, and some other local things definitely outweigh his very few positives.
My impression is that no one in California even remembers Gray Davis was ever governor at this point – Schwarzenegger’s approval ratings have plummeted considerably.
My dad is a hard nosed Republican. He thinks Tricky Dick was set up. He has an irrational hatred for Bill Clinton. And don’t even mention the name “Hillary” around him.
Jeb Bush tops the list – not for anything he’s done to Florida, but because, without his cynical and dishonest manipulation of the system, Dubya would not be president. That’s enough, by itself, to put him in running for the “worst governor in history” title. As for his domestic record, there’s his school vouchers program, his pointless program of assigning performance letter grades to public schools – has accomplished nothing yet, so far as I can see – his stubborn opposition to high-speed rail (goddamn oilman), and, of course, his shameless and ghoulish exploitation of the Schiavo affair.
