What do New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and longtime-blogger-turned-California-Senate-candidate Mickey Kaus have in common?
Both are talking candidly and with enormous conviction about the peril in which public employee unions have put the finances of their respective states.
The result is that Christie is the newest populist hero: a living, breathing pol who answers questions directly and does not shy away from detailed arguments about fiscal excess.
And Kaus may yet demonstrate that even primary voters on the Democratic side of the ballot are paying attention to the excesses of their party. If Kaus scores in double digits against incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in the June 8 Golden State primary, it will send a message that not even the most entrenched Beltway MSMer can avoid or mistake.
Unlike President Obama, who can use up 15 minutes and say nothing, Christie needed less than five minutes last week to rebuke the standard media narrative about what is unfolding in the Garden State. Christie’s pushback at the assumptions in reporter Tom Moran’s question about the governor’s alleged “confrontational” tone instantly shot across the country’s many forms of media. I could have replayed it four times an hour for my talk show audience and they’d still be asking for more.
Americans love it when underdogs bark back at bullies. In this instance, the bullies are the New Jersey public employee unions and their protectors in the MSM. Every time a budget crisis erupts in any part of the United States, the old media dutifully picks up the refrain of the entrenched liberal elites: teachers unions, prison guard unions, the Service Employees International Union and others with many fingers deep into the public dish.
“Will the governor force teacher layoffs?” is a classic approach to a budget impasse rather than “Can the public afford the pension and health benefit payments that teacher unions are demanding?” But with Greece imploding and the level of the federal debt reaching a point where the country risks a fiscal stroke, public opinion has turned decisively against the old narrative of “teachers good, anti-tax activists bad.”
Kaus makes the same case to anyone who will listen in California, but very few in the old media have been willing to do so thus far. State Democratic power brokers denied Kaus even the opportunity to address their convention, and only recently have some of the state’s editorial boards begun to wonder whether this public intellectual’s throwdown to Boxer doesn’t deserve more ink than it has been allotted, which to date is almost none.
KausforSenate.com hasn’t yet become an Internet sensation, but the reaction to Christie’s passionate declaration of the differences between a tax-and-grow-the-government approach to governing and the view that government has burst out of its appropriate banks and threatens us all was a wake-up call to all candidates, Democratic and Republican.
More candor, more specificity, more honesty about the need to carve back the sweet deals made over the past two decades will bring sustained applause from voters.
Federal spending power was used to oblige states to lower their speed limits to 55 miles per hour a few years back. The same authority could be employed to oblige states to curtail public employee pensions. A new federal statute, stating simply that the Treasury will not be sending assistance to any state awarding any new six-figure pensions under any circumstances, would be approved by overwhelming margins.
As Chris Christie demonstrated this week, the public understands and will support the end of this out-of-control excess.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com
