Nation’s governors get tough jobs done

When the nation’s governors gathered in Providence, R.I., recently for their annual summer meeting, I was struck once again by the difference between interviewing them and my much more frequent journalistic encounters with members of Congress. The senators and representatives talk about bills they are trying to pass or defeat; the governors, about things they actually have done.

One set of politicians deals with a world of talk and paper; the other, with a real world where actions have consequences.

Before this year’s National Governors’ Association meeting in Providence, I spent a lot of time on the invaluable stateline.org Web site, run by veteran newsman Ed Fouhy with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Five days a week, Stateline culls the newspapers and sends out reporters to piece together a comprehensive look at what’s happening in state capitols around the country.

While Congress is still battling over differing versions of patients’ rights legislation passed by the House and Senate, acting New Jersey Gov. Don DiFrancesco just signed a strong HMO regulation bill into law. By the way, New Jersey became the ninth state to allow patients to sue HMOs for denial of care – the issue that has hung up Congress for three years.

To be sure, some of the battles that were engaging governors just before they gathered here are pretty trivial. South Dakota’s veteran Gov. Bill Janklow, a man for whom the phrase “sometimes in error, but never in doubt” might have been invented, had been dragged into a dispute over the right of the Sioux Empire Gay and Lesbian Coalition to join the state’s “adopt-a-highway” program, in which groups agree to clean up trash along a stretch of road and are allowed to identify themselves with roadside signs as the sponsoring organization.

The state transportation department had rejected the request on the grounds that the coalition was an advocacy group, but the American Civil Liberties Union, noting that animal rights and other activist groups were already in, said it would sue the state on behalf of the gay and lesbian organization. Janklow told me here what he had told South Dakota reporters: If the threatened lawsuit were filed, “I will just abolish the program.” It has nothing to do with lifestyle issues, he said, but “I hate to waste the state’s money on frivolous suits like this.”

Most gubernatorial battles are over more important matters. Arkansas and Mississippi, two states perpetually on the bottom in education spending, had dramatically increased teachers’ salaries this year, and Govs. Mike Huckabee and Ronnie Musgrove wanted to talk about how they had done it. Maine’s Angus King was answering questions about the pharmaceutical industry’s effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his state’s pioneering prescription drug price-control program. And King also gave his fellow governors a briefing on his initiative to provide laptop computers for every student in seventh and eighth grade, so even the rural schools can enrich their curricula with vivid online teaching materials.

Arizona last week signed a $28 million contract, the first phase of a program five times that expensive, to link all its schools to a single Internet education network by next summer. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge sent a team into Philadelphia to evaluate its struggling school system, a prelude to a possible takeover of the schools.

While Senate and House negotiators struggle to put President Bush’s proposal for annual tests from the third through the eighth grade into workable form, Florida, where his brother Jeb is governor, is about to launch a pupil evaluation system that will measure not only the current performance but the year-to-year progress of every student annually from third through 10th grades. The writing test will be toughened, because so many students now meet the state standard, and test essays will be returned to parents so they can see for themselves how their children are doing.

Governors are doing this in tough times. Except for the energy-producing states, revenues are off and budgets are being squeezed.

Two governors couldn’t make it here, because they were locked in budget crises with their legislatures. North Carolina’s Mike Easley and Tennessee’s Don Sundquist, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, had hundreds of demonstrators, egged on by local talk-show hosts, picketing their state capitols to demand they solve the problem without a tax increase.

You can see why my hat is off to the governors.

David Broder is a columnist for The Washington Post.