At the recent Tim Kaine town hall meeting I attended, I was handed a handy-dandy ?de-coder ring,? by Republican operatives standing at the entrance to the building. The ring wasn?t anything like the de-coder ring I sent away for as a child. I think that one was from Jack Armstrong (?all-American boy and his autogiro? radio program). The Jack Armstrong ring was a rather substantial metal ring which actually had working parts. In contrast, the Jerry Kilgore ring sported a plastic ?stone? inserted in a well on a cheap plastic circle ? made, naturally, in China (Kilgore's contribution to our massive trade imbalance, helping China buy Maytag among other American companies).?Here, you?ll really need this when you get inside,? said a smiling lady while her associates, a couple of intense young men, danced around impatiently. ?You?ll need this to understand what you hear.? Great, I thought, political speeches can often be obfuscating and terminally dull.
Looking at the note stapled to the little plastic bag containing Kilgore?s ?top of the line? ring, I saw its warning about how Tim Kaine?s ?budget reform? and ?investment? were nothing more than Democratic code words for the Largest Tax Increase In History©. In other words, whenever Tim Kaine says ?investment,? he really means "tax increases," but of course he won't just come out and admit it. Very helpful. Jerry?s note then explained who paid those dreadful taxes that Tim Kaine and his boss Mark Warner raised. Turns out they're smokers, mainly, and that most Virginians actually received a net tax cut. Details, details. Still, Jerry's magic ring explained to us that ?everybody? had their taxes raised. I see. And, of course, all this resulted in -- horror of horrors -- a state budget surplus, thus proving that the tax hike was unnecessary after all, at least according to Jerry. Circular ring, circular logic.
After reading the materials from Jerry, then, it was strange when I listened to Tim Kaine himself talk to us about ?budget reform,? and about how Virginia had finally gotten its financial house in order after the disastrous years under Republican Governor Jim Gilmore. You know, the guy whose risky and imprudent mismanagement graciously bequeathed a $6,000,000,000 (yes, that?s six BILLION dollars) DEFICIT to Mark Warner and Tim Kaine when they entered office. That was a deficit which, you will recall, seriously damaged Virginia?s heretofore sterling financial reputation and which almost lost us our invaluable AAA bond rating. Oh well, who needs to borrow money at the lowest possible interest rate, anyway?
The fact is, the Warner-Kaine budget reform package pulled us back from the brink of insolvency. Of course, good guy that he is, Tim Kaine was gracious enough to point out that this would not have happened without the statesmanlike help of several senior Republicans in the state legislature, all of whom put Virginia?s needs above narrow partisanship in joining with Warner-Kaine on this much-needed reform.
So why is Jerry Kilgore now criticizing Warner and Kaine over a budget reform that senior members of his own party worked hard to bring about? Could it be that Jerry Kilgore has no clue about fiscal management, at least not on the scale necessary to run a state, and is in fact a prisoner of his own Republican Party?s extreme right wing no-tax radical clique... the very ones who got us into the mess originally? Sure seems that way.
Meanwhile, who knows how long the budget surplus that Jerry Kilgore disparages so much will actually last? Especially considering the fact the ?surplus? funds are actually spoken for: ponying up our fair share (required by law, by the way) to clean up the critical-condition Chesapeake Bay; paying for exploding Medicare costs; performing needed maintenance on roads and schools; figuring out how to fund "unfunded mandates" like No Child Left Behind, and on and on. These are all important areas that Jim Gilmore simply ignored, preferring to live off and cannibalize our existing capital.
As a former Republican, by the way, I still regard living off one?s capital as an absolutely cardinal sin. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common behavior pattern among the new Republicans, and it?s one of the main reasons why I left the GOP. Here, too, Jerry Kilgore completely flunks the laugh test when he talks about returning to ?the great leadership of Jim Gilmore,? and when he promises to undo the Warner-Kaine reforms (aka, ?liberal Tim Kaine?s massive tax increase").
Back to the budget reform. On cigarettes, the Warner-Kaine-Republican budget reform package DID jack up taxes on cigarettes. However, Virginia still maintains a very, very low tax on coffin nails, far below the fees most states impose. Still, I suspect that the higher tobacco tax still doesn?t even come close to covering the state?s expenses in dealing with smokers? health care costs. So, what's Jerry talking about? Is his rhetoric against budget reform just a big smokescreen for his own incompetence?
The thing that's most maddening is having to listen as Jerry Kilgore proposes a zillion ways to spend the same surplus he professes to abhor. What, is Jerry proposing to spend the same dollars more than once? Does he plan to return to the ?borrow and spend, borrow and spend? profligate ways of Jim Gilmore and the national Republican party? Is he seriously trying to promise us that we can have our cake and eat it too? Does he think we're stupid? Or does he think that we don't care about our children and grandchildren being stuck paying the interest on the massive debt that results from Kilgore's fiscal irresponsibility?
In other words, the Kilgore De-Coder Ring says one thing and means the exact opposite. The Ring denigrates the fiscal responsibility of the Warner-Kaine budget reform as nothing more than a pesky ?tax increase;? ignores the removal of the tax on food, ignores the tax reductions in the budget reform package, and claims without any factual merit that Tim Kaine is actually planning to move Virginia forward by hiking taxes. Anyway, that's what the crappy made-in-China plastic ring says, so I guess it must be true. Ha ha.
By the way, does this whole decoder ring seem just a little bit adolescent, something you might find in a college boy's campaign for student body president? Yeah, I thought so. But I guess that's not surprising, when you recall that many of Jerry's top advisors are graduates of College Republican Clubs. Of course, Jerry is acting pretty immature himself -- whimpering about his supposed "accent" being attacked, ducking real public debates before real Virginia voters, refusing to distance himself from Pat Robertson?s wild-eyed rantings, using highly emotional issues and even coded appeals to peoples' worst instincts in order to sidestep rational conversation on real issues. And that's not even mentioning Jerry's wacky proposal to outsource the governor's responsibilities to voter referenda. How about a new campaign slogan for Jerry Kilgore: If you're looking for adult leadership, look somewhere else!
The final De-coding of the super-secret magic De-coder ring is very simple. The job of Governor of Virginia, the job that Jerry Kilgore seeks, is plainly far bigger than he is. Jerry Kilgore simply is not gubernatorial timber.