The presidency aside, politically, being a governor is the best place to be… right?

You run a big organization, so you can claim executive experience. You get to make important decisions on your own and not be bogged down by opponents digging through your voting record, so you can claim you’re your own man or woman. And best of all, you get to not be in Washington, so you can claim yourself as an outsider to the shady business perpetually presumed to occur there. Plus, there is the awesome linguistic anomaly “gubernatorial” that you get to keep close at hand for when things get dicey. Don’t eff with it.

Republican governors have it even better. They’re supposed to believe in the sanctity and superiority of state government and states’ rights, so they can claim blanket disavowal and widespread disapproval of all manner of DC doings. In keeping with that, they frequently exercise wild abandon provoking or unleashing invective at the Establishment (when that Establishment is Democrats). Texas’ captain of the capitol, Rick Perry, exemplified this most inspiringly in threatening to take his Lone Star and secede last fall. His bold proposition made me long for the days when all Texas governors did was ignore a ringing phone on the day of a lethal injection. Read the rest of this entry »