As his tattered career in the Blaine House struggles to a conclusion, John McKernan’s future in the private sector looks bright. The Republican governor has announced he’ll form a company called McKernan Enterprises, which will help businesses analyze their resources, and find capital for expansion. If Jock is as successful at that as he was at managing the state’s finances, his new job should provide an enormous economic boost for bankruptcy lawyers.

McKernan’s legacy from his eight years in office is a series of budgets that read like bad fiction, and buckets of red ink sloshing toward the $400 million mark. The Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation is under court order to find millions more for community services Jock promised but never delivered. The Maine Youth Center is a shambles after McKernan’s plan to privatize it unraveled. His proposed income tax cut went nowhere, even with members of his own party. And the youth apprenticeship program he touts as his crowning achievement in his book, “Making the Grade,” has found jobs for fewer than half the students he originally projected.

But none of that, according to Jock, is his fault.

The state’s financial problems resulted from a national economic downturn, which McKernan claimed he did his best to counteract. “I was totally candid with the voters on what I felt was going to be the situation,” he insisted during a post-election interview in 1990 with the Maine Sunday Telegram. “It is going to be worse than I suspected.” His lack of suspicion wasn’t due to a lack of critical comment about his budgeting schemes. But he dismissed concerns raised the previous summer about weakness in state tax collections when he told the Associated Press, “I understand it’s killing the Democrats that we’ve solved the (budget) problem.” Even when the crisis was in full force in 1991, after the state shut down, McKernan continued to believe the fault lay elsewhere. He told the AP, “Most of the people who are criticizing our budget are people who don’t know anything about the budget.”

The mental health fiasco was another one the governor didn’t see coming, even though he was warned. In 1993, he dismissed claims the state had failed to comply with a court consent decree to provide services to Augusta Mental Health Institute patients as, “inaccurate because this is a simple black-and-white statement about a difficult issue.” A few months later a judge cut through the complexities to find the state hadn’t lived up to its commitments, and ordered a black-and-white solution of millions in corrective spending.

More McKernan-speak: The Maine Youth Center plan was disrupted by Washington’s reluctance to pay for it. (Never mind that Jock was told repeatedly before he embarked on the project that it probably wouldn’t meet federal guidelines.) Democrats were to blame for the 1994 tax cut’s failure (although he announced it without first lining up Republican support, leading them to conclude he wasn’t serious about trying to pass it).

McKernan’s real problem is that he’s a lot better at the stuff he got to do in his first term, when the state had so much surplus cash it gave rebates, than in his second four-year stint, when all the state treasury was good for was making pathetic echoing noises. From 1986 to 1990, Jock conducted photo opportunities, cut ribbons, kissed babies and negotiated a state employee union contract without bothering to figure out where he was going to get the money to pay for it. From 1990-1994, the governor has been far less visible.

Part of that is due to the death of his son in 1991. That tragedy, followed by the bitter state shutdown, seemed to leave McKernan with little enthusiasm for his job. He spent much of his time out of state, sometimes averaging more than a trip a week. That gave the impression he was disconnected from events, leading officials in Fort Fairfield to rip him for failing to help keep a small electrical generating facility open, and Rockland’s town fathers to criticize his lack of effort in preventing a major employer from closing. In both cases, McKernan was able to show his people had been active behind the scenes, but he was never able to explain why he wasn’t involved in saving those jobs.

McKernan has had some successes. The ASPIRE program is flawed, but could become a prototype for compassionate welfare reform. Workers’ comp cost reductions were passed on Jock’s watch, although he had little to do with it. Several of his appointees, such as Susan Collins, John Fitzsimmons and Bill Brennan, were first rate, but others, such as Susan Parker, Lynn Wachtel and Rollin Ives, could have served as consultants in bumbling for the Clinton administration.

Such modest accomplishments are unlikely to obscure his failures to lead, to inspire and to take responsibility. As he fades into the limbo of ex-politicos, his epitaph may well have been written by one longtime State House observer who said, “For much of the time he was here, it seemed as if he was trying to match a part-time Legislature with a part-time governor.”

Al Diamon is a television commentator, free-lance writer and weekly NEWS columnist.