| Laura Berman in today's News, frustrated that the reaction of inept leadership to inept leadership is to throw up its hands and declare it all a collective wash. But Cherry, and other Lansing would-be leaders, cannot be allowed the luxury of throwing up their hands and hoping smart people out there will devise a solution and get it on the ballot. That's his job, or at least it's the one he hopes to win. Name the problem, identify a solution, galvanize support to fix it: That's what leaders, especially political ones, are supposed to do.
What Cherry has done is acknowleged two fundamental problems, the first that the Legislature is broken and that a meaningful solution coming from that body is not going to be forthcoming and the second that voters are not likely to one one such proposal seriously in the first place. No one trusts Lansing ... and, why should they considering that two of the last budget cycles actually managed to go past a deadline that state government used to meet months ahead of time. The cause of much of this, it should be pointed out, rests squarely at the feet of the state's electorate, which nearly two decades ago helped push the elected wing of state government more squarely into the controls of the party partisans by supporting term limits. That is, they turned the job of watching over elected state government to a piece of paper, the state constitution. You can probably see why things went ... errrr ... slightly awry. The takeaway from this, that government overseen by piece of paper is not such a good idea. In fact, it's failed so badly that perhaps the only way to fix things is if the citizenry who fell down on the job in the first place gets active in the political process. |
