In my cover story for this month's Prospect, I profiled three of the new governors swept into office atop 2006's wave. The piece was a little tricky to write, given that all had run relatively Rose Garden-esque campaigns, but I did my best to extrapolate forward. Ohio's Ted Strickland and Massachusetts's Deval Patrick lent themselves to relatively easy analysis, but Eliot Spitzer was harder. His public pronouncements in the months leading up to the election suggested he'd turn his crusader's eye on government itself, ending his laudable struggle against unbridled corporate capitalism. And his "No New Taxes" pledge seemed to forestall much in the way of affirmative progressivism. So the piece displayed some anxiety over whether he'd fulfill his promise. But happy day:
In his first annual address to the Legislature, Gov. Eliot Spitzer proposed to overhaul almost every corner of the state's operations and policies, saying he would move swiftly to guarantee health insurance for all children in the state, publicly finance state elections, rein in spending and draft a constitutional amendment to overhaul the state's courts.
He also said that he would seek to broadly overhaul the state's ethics and lobbying rules, to make pre-kindergarten available to all four-year-olds by the end of his four-year term, to overhaul the public authorities that control most of the state's debt and to make New York more palatable to business by changing the state's approach to policies, like workers' compensation.
Hell, even the unions are happy. It's a tad unclear how Spitzer pays for all these goodies if he can't raise taxes, but if this is the agenda, churlishness is out of order until better supported.
