Someone Call Sufjan Stevens

Paul LePage, Maine's governor, is a succinct summary of the present-day Republican Party: He ordered his state's labor department to remove its historical murals of mill workers, shipyard hands and other laborers because Maine's industrial past wasn't sufficiently pro-business for his taste. Yet LePage is thrilled by the number of private jets landing at small runways around Maine as parents leave their kids at summer camp because they may stay the night and spend some of their wealth shopping and eating (even though the point of renting a private jet is to leave as quickly as possible). "Love it, love it, love it," he told the Times. "I wish they'd stay a week while they're here this is big business." LePage shuns working families who live in Maine while hoping to cement the state's reputation as a vacation playground for the rich. Hopefully his economic development team has the courage to tell him that this approach is good economic development policy in reverse.

State governors offer insightful but overlooked windows into politics and governing. D.C. has imploded this summer because so few congressman, most especially Republicans, are willing to move off their party lines and there are so many of them -- 535, House plus Senate -- that compromise is too difficult to coordinate. But in states, the legislatures are small and often only in session for part of the year, leaving their governors to take some of their party's most strident positions and their states' quirks and run in strange directions. Most infamously this year, Republican Scott Walker tried to end Wisconsin's public labor unions. Texas' Rick Perry, who's about to join the Republican presidential primary, presided over a massive prayer session, which is the most bizarre twisting of the First Amendment that I can remember. Here in Massachusetts, Deval Patrick advocates to allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at state colleges, which I support but I also suppose is on the far left flank of the Democratic platform.

In Florida, Rick Scott's approval ratings have been hammered into the low 20s as he tries to rip apart any semblance of the social safety net. This disproves the generally accepted storyline of the past two years that the voting public has forcefully rejected the Obama administration's expansionist view of domestic policy. Floridians have seen austerity up close and even more vehemently said no (if one can use approval ratings, where Obama's are still much higher than Scott's, as the barometer). That the man who led a company responsible for one of the country's largest frauds ever in the health care industry would mishandle his state's health care system isn't much of surprise. Unfortunately, Florida is learning this the hard way.

Scott says his anemic approval rating is the consequence of making tough decisions, though I think this is good evidence that the rest of the country doesn't welcome austerity, as federal Republicans claim they will. People have much more direct relationships with their governors than they do with Congressional leaders. They see their governors on TV nearly every day and know their names, while Congressmen, even those as prominent as Boehner, Cantor and Pelosi, are still from foreign districts. Consequently, when governors make drastic changes such as Scott's, they react genuinely. When the Republican Party emerges from its minority position, either by taking the White House or both houses of Congress next year, I think people will respond to national austerity the same way and reject it even more angrily than they have the stimulus bill.

Not surprisingly, the two governors who seem to be doing best these days, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo of New York, embody their state's personalities better than anyone else. Christie's brash conservatism doesn't fit New Jersey's traditional politics, but then, he's an archetypical New Jersey guy -- blunt, a bit overweight, loves Springsteen and wants to get it done, diplomacy be damned. Cuomo is much the same, but trimmer and with a greater love of working on his car. Governors can reflect their states, but federal politicians can't do this -- there are too many people to represent, so they can't win the day on charm.

Sufjan Stevens, he of the aborted 50-album cycle about each state, probably has greater insight into this than I do. He was right to recognize that each state has rich veins of the political and personal to mine. For now, I'll settle with the above video of his song "For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti."