Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

It is a well-known fact that excrement runs down hill.

It is a well-known fact that excrement runs down hill.
If the mayors of Rhode Island’s cities and towns did not grasp that concept before, they certainly have a keener understanding of it now that Gov. Donald Carcieri has thrown open the floodgates of his supplemental budget for the current fiscal year.
With half the fiscal year already gone, the governor has lobbed a dung grenade directly into the finance offices of a significant number of municipalities, cutting 15.5 percent from General Revenue Sharing and 2 percent from the car tax reimbursement.
Overall, the state is keeping about $13 million that the cities and towns had been banking on, or in many cases, have already spent.
With a scant five and a half months to make up the difference, Pawtucket is losing a million from its budget in one scoop. Woonsocket takes a three-quarters of a million hit.
We’re used to seeing organized labor and poverty advocates rallying at the Statehouse during budget time. Well, don’t be surprised to see your mayor or town administrator lined up on the steps of the Rotunda holding a picket sign saying something like “Budget Cuts Unfair.”
Those are significant amounts of money to lose so late in the game, but Carcieri shrugs it off, saying he has little sympathy for the cities and towns since many of them are carrying big surpluses, and they could do things that the state is doing to save money, like reduce payrolls and restrict benefit and pensions for employees.
So workers will be taking it in the neck, not only at the state level but in the cities and towns as well. The poor will absorb another hit, and property taxpayers will be left to pick up the pieces.
But if that is what is going to happen. If the newly-imposed caps on increases in property taxes are going to be relaxed because cities and towns are losing state aid, then everything the governor says about Rhode Islanders being strained to the limit by high gas prices, home heating costs, housing and other expenses to be hit with more taxes is going to seem hollow. The money will still be coming from them; it will just be taken from a different pocket.
That will tell us if state officials are truly intent on solving the problem, or will be satisfied to make it somebody else’s problem.

Picking the winner
I’ve never really understood the concept of “momentum” as it applies to the way regular citizens vote in presidential primaries and election.
Momentum has been a pet concept of the national media ever since George Bush 41 declared he had “Big Mo’” after the Iowa caucuses in 1980 (Ronald Reagan went on to beat him like a borrowed mule almost immediately after that).
Anyway, why would one candidate’s  electoral victory in one place have any affect whatsoever on a subsequent election in a different state?
Just because a pack of pig farmers in Iowa gather together in someone’s living room to support one candidate, why on earth would any thinking person in any other state use that as any kind of a basis for deciding who he or she wants to lead the free world?
Same with New Hampshire. A bunch of old swamp Yankees mixed in with tax exiles from Massachusetts pick their favorite candidate and voters all across the country start tripping over themselves to follow suit?
Wassup with that? What could possibly be of less importance in choosing a chief executive?
I have been knocking this around in my head for a couple of weeks now and I keep returning to two inescapable conclusions:
1) American voters are lazy, and
2) American voters are stupid
Maybe I’m the one who has it all wrong, but the way I have always looked at elections is you cast your votes for the guy (yes, or the gal, but let’s face it, the choices up to now have been overwhelmingly male) who you want to see win, or to whom you want to give your support.
The idea is not to pick the eventual winner. Unless I have been cheated all these years of going to the polls, you don’t get any prize if you vote for the candidate who wins (besides, of course, personal satisfaction and the outside chance that they guy you voted for will govern the way he said he would when he was looking for your vote).
I have never understood why some people are so vested in voting for the candidate who is going to win, rather that the one they would want to win.
The most important lesson that the last seven years have taught us is that it matters who gets elected president. Voting is important. We have to have better reasons for selecting candidates than, “Hey, he’s leading coming out of New Hampshire.”
It is bad enough that too many voters artificially limit themselves to the false choice between the Democrat and the Republican. If more people would open their minds to third-party and independent candidates, it would throw wide open the possibilities of what could be achieved in politics. But that, alas, is apparently an argument for another decade.
For now we are stuck with that albatross of a two-party system around our necks so there is nothing to do but make the best of it. And voting for some empty-suit hair-do because he has “momentum” in the early primary states is doing the opposite of that.
I am talking now simply of momentum as it affects the way people in future primaries and the general election (many fools actually base their general election vote on the bogus momentum of who is gaining or receding in the public opinion polls).
But I am not politically naïve. I comprehend the principal importance of momentum in the early primaries: money. The poor schmuck who loses the first three or four primaries probably isn’t going to be president, so people who contribute money, particularly people who contribute BIG MONEY aren’t going to give him any.
That is understandable.
Money has no ideology and money doesn’t root for one candidate over the other. Money wants to go to the guy who is gong to win, so the people giving the money can get paid back in one way or another. Sure, there are some sentimental folk who give from the heart, but they are generally the ones with not much money and they are not who I am talking about here.
The money is important because it pays for the staff and it pays for the TV ads and it pays for the candidates and their entourages to go from place to place spreading the message.
But voters should be focusing on the message, not the momentum.
This election cycle, one way we might be able to tell whether they are doing that is Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani is defying momentum, having largely sat out the primary race until now, pushing all his chips onto the table in Florida and, a week or so later the Super Duper Tuesday of primaries in 24 states.
Can Giuliani make a credible showing to win a major primary after coming in behind Ron Paul in most of the races so far? Or will someone who was (and in some cases still is) the frontrunner in national polls going to wilt and die because his name wasn’t among the top finishers in national contests?
Of course, people could decide to vote for someone other than Giuliani because he is arrogant and abrasive and wrong on a lot of issues. But that will be an analysis for another day and another column.