New Jersey's new governor took the initiative and picked a fight with the unions, turning them into the villains in the budget crisis

Learning from Christie and Brewer How to Confront the Problem

By Daniel Greenfield
Sunday, July 11, 2010

The most important lessons for the Republican party aren’t coming from any of the retired politicians doing their speaking tours right now. They come from two sitting governors, Governor Christie of New Jersey and Governor Brewer of Arizona, and what they’re doing is very simple. They’re confronting the problem.

When Christie won an election, like so many other state governors, he was thrust into the middle of an impossible budget nightmare which was full of impossible problems. State budgets had been bulked up by entitlements and their attached public sector unions. Cutting them meant a battle with the unions. But not cutting them meant serious tax hikes. Most governors chose to walk some kind of middle path, negotiating with the unions with the least political fallout, and raising taxes, to create a compromise that everyone hated.

But Christie made the rational calculation that he had nothing to lose by taking on the unions because they would reliably come out against him during reelection anyway. And if he didn’t take them on he would have to shoulder the blame for a budget crisis that he had nothing to do with. So while neighboring New York’s state government was trying to tiptoe around a complete shutdown over budget talks, New Jersey’s new governor took the initiative and picked a fight with the unions, turning them into the villains in the budget crisis.

Unlike Schwarzenegger who had tried the same thing in California a few years too early before buckling under the response in response to his failed referendums, Christie benefited from better timing and from voters being able to directly connect the teacher’s union to property tax hikes over school budgets. It was a scenario that gave people who were already cutting back a chance to directly stand up to tax hikes in local elections. And while teacher’s unions are almost as good at wrapping themselves in a self-righteous cloak, as the California nurses union was, their own stunts ended up backfiring on them.

Christie’s campaign served to put a major political foe on the defensive and shifted the perception of blame for the state’s economic troubles, boosting his own popularity, protecting his reelection campaign and giving him a measure of control and power over an out of control situation.

What Christie did, though, is resonating beyond New Jersey as Republicans, and even Democrats, quickly rushed to jump on the anti-public sector union bandwagon, even when they had been taking money from those same unions not so long ago. That’s because a winning strategy in one state has implications for other states. At a time when incumbents are terrified of public outrage, and scrambling for a way to avoid being blamed for the economic disaster all around them, a good tactic is a good tactic.

Arizona was being bled by the cost of illegal immigration

Similarly in Arizona, Governor Brewer zeroed in on the problem and tackled it. Like so many other states, Arizona was being bled by the cost of illegal immigration. http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/06 ... n-pit.html Brewer directly tackled the illegal alien issue, and by doing so earned the ire of liberals and the Obama White House, but boosted her own popularity inside the state. Which is what really matters.

Like Christie, Brewer’s presence was a bit of a fluke. Christie was an unlikely winner. And Brewer hadn’t even won an election. But what looked like a disadvantage was actually an advantage. Because it meant both of them had less to lose than governors with more stable bases. And it made them hungrier to go on the offensive and stabilize their political prospects. Christie has already said that he’s happy to rule as a one term governor, but his actions so far are giving him the best shot at reelection, which would not be the case if he had just overseen the usual compromises between unions and tax hikes that most other governors are doing. Similarly Brewer’s polling has improved, even as so much of the left coast has lost its mind over her actions.

Brewer confronted a problem that happened to be part of the liberal base. She touched the “untouchableâ€