I'm transfixed by the sudden competition among Republican governors to reject stimulus money. First Bobby Jindal decided his state didn't need the boost in unemployment benefits. Then Mark Sanford tossed out $42 million in funding for green buildings demonstrating his principled objection to both construction jobs and energy efficiency. "I just hope they give me their funding," said Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jindal and Sanford, of course, are running for president. But this is a very particular theory of the Republican primaries. They don't expect to be judged on whether they're successful governors. They expect to be judged on ideological purity. And the point they're making is that when the two conflict, they will side with ideology. The fact that rejecting the funds is obviously bad for the state is also why it's such a good political move: It shows they are ideologues rather than pragmatists. When you're dealing with a party that still thinks tax cuts raise revenues, that's an important point to prove. This also puts them in the mainstream of the broader Republican strategy: if the stimulus fails, they can claim to have opposed it. Not all of it, of course. Jindal and Sanford are forgoing a mere fraction of the total funding. But they're rejecting enough to run against its existence. It's a campaign strategy that amounts to a twin bet on the failure of the broader economy and the relentless anti-pragmatism of the GOP base. Try to imagine a Democratic governor denying his citizens a federally-passed tax holiday and you'll get an idea of the gamble. It's risky. The sure thing, however, is that it's going to be a crummy few years for low-income residents of states with ambitious GOP governors.
