Tone Deaf Governor

For all of his skills as a candidate, the Governor is completely tone deaf in relation to CMS with his first quote being:

“My understanding is that the conflict between the auditor general and CMS is sort of like a prize fight between accountants, OK?” the governor said. “There’s not a lot of muscle there but a lot of argument and quarrel.”

The strategy isn’t a horrible one if this was the first hint of these problems, but in this case, other Constitutional Officers have been involved on several of these issues including Hynes in relation to the time it takes to submit contracts.

The idea is to post-modernize the debate into a he said-he said argument between the two and stay above the fray, but in this case, for many reasons, this isn’t that easy to solve.

First, there is an arbiter of the legal issues called the AG and when she comes back with charges and clear findings, it comes down to state law.

Second, at this point, Holland has a lot more allies than does the Administration in the Lege. The Governor has angered most of the Democratic caucus at various times and the only real incentive is to go after him. He doesn’t have the political machine and 30 years of relationships that George Ryan had when he got into trouble.

The Republicans already have every reason to attack the guy, he just gave the Democrats a reason–to distance themselves from him and his falling poll numbers. When his numbers were up around 60%, people went with him because he had the public at his back, when that is gone, its better to oppose him if you are from a swing district and a Democrat. And safe seat Dems see little reason to back a guy who has cut him off at the shins.

Being difficult with the Lege can work–Edgar showed that, but you have to keep yourself popular and relatively clean.

Third, Holland worked for Phil Rock and knows the Lege well. He’s not just some hapless bureaucrat. He has long standing relationships on both sides of the aisle, and no one in the Lege is going to back the administration over him. He already did a bang up job on the audit response comments. As someone who has done a evaluation that include document reviews chosen from samples, everything in that audit stands as reasonable. He was smart in hitting back immediately instead of letting the administration get out in front of this and attack him.

Fourth, the audit provided a roadmap to those who want to follow-up and investigate what is going on–instead of just being one time report, this offers reporters months of stories with the documentation to back it up and a legit explanation to editors to give them the time to track down more examples.

Fifth, it hits at a time where the refrain amongst the chattering class is that he’s more of the same instead of changing business as usual. Combine this with number four and you have a meme starting just as the lines of attack for the general election are starting to get going.