Texas Is a Wonderland, Illinois is a Hellhole

A few weeks ago The Daily Beast ran a piece on Texas so obsequiously hagiographic that I joked that it had been paid for by the Texas Tourism Bureau. Today, the website-formerly-known-as-Newsweek continues its crusade to name and shame all of the Fifty Nifty. This time, however, one has to wonder who in Illinois stiffed writer David Frum on a paycheck. While Texas got the kid-glove treatment, Illinois is apparently governed so poorly that there should be a sign at the border that says — seriously — “Welcome to Botswana.” Frum writes:

Last week Standard & Poor’s downgraded Illinois’s credit rating to A-. Only California bears so low a rating, but S&P rates California’s future outlook as positive and Illinois’s as negative. The Moody’s (slightly different) rating system assesses Illinois at the same risk level it gives the African nation of Botswana.

It’s not easy to sum up all the aspects of the financial disaster that is Illinois: the fiasco has too many pieces, contributed by too many different politicians.

To be fair, this story at least has a news peg in the credit downgrade; the Texas love-fest, on the other hand, was apropos of nothing, materializing out of thin air as if commanded by the hand of Rick Perry. And Frum is not the same writer responsible for the Texas story. He’s a conservative — albeit a renegade, unorthodox one — and conservatives have been writing about the inevitable doom of blue states like California and Illinois for years. The Wall Street Journal editorial page recycles its withering let’s-mock-the-Dems criqitique of the Golden State at least every month. But Frum’s article is notable because it comes so close on the heels of the veritable advertisement for Texas. The Daily Beast should just throw in the towel on journalism and follow the U.S. News model, in which a once-comprehensive publication reduces itself to a yearly Best Colleges ranking. Next for Tina Brown: The Best Places in the Country to Live (Or Not), brought to you by the tax-phobes at the GOP.

And she’ll have plenty of opportunities to commission state-level comparisons. A recent Wall Street Journal highlighted the split between deep-red and deep-blue states, with the former moving to aggressively cut taxes (or even completely eliminate income taxes) and the latter seeking to raise them on upper-income earners. “The trend promises to create unusually stark divisions between conservative and liberal states,” the Journal reports.

Elections in November left all but 13 states with one-party control of both the legislature and the governor’s office, the most in decades. Fully half of all states now have veto-proof legislative majorities, making intraparty disagreements the chief potential threat to legislative agendas.

See, Beasties? Only 48 more one-sided, gratuitously nasty and/or laudatory state-of-the-state reviews to go!

I don’t disagree with David Frum simply on principle; he writes some intelligent, insightful things. And there’s no question that Illinois’ rising pension costs, history of political corruption (welcome to The Apprentice: Prison Break, Mr. Blagojevich!) and budget shortfall present the state with genuine problems. But the Beast’s laundry list of failings — from “the state can’t pay its bills in the here and now” to “Chicago’s O’Hare lost its ranking as the busiest airport in the country to Atlanta” — is untempered by any positive news. Yes, taxes may be high in Illinois, but isn’t possible that its liberal population actually enjoys getting something from government? That they don’t view Medicaid as a socialistic handout to moochers or public employees as, uh, mooching socialists?

Who knows. Frum doesn’t tell you, and unless Illinois can find enough pennies under Gov. Pat Quinn’s couch to send a Texas-style kickback the Beast’s way, the magazine’s readers will never find out.

The Daily Beast . . . or TourTexas.com?

Huh. It seems the website for The Daily Beast is redirecting to the Texas Tourism Bureau.*

Tina Brown’s newly digital-only rag publishes a lot of weird stuff — see Niall Ferguson’s much-ridiculed and fact-challenged critique of Obama, or this week’s even more bizarre anti-gun control rant from David Mamet, which descends into Tea Party capitalization of every word from “Government to “Left” to “Disarmament” — but the strangest thing I’ve read lately on the site comes courtesy Mark McKinnon, the No Labels founder who champions non-partisanship while providing cover to faux-intellecutal, Medicare-slashing deficit hawks. McKinnon has penned an article titled “If Washington Wants To Balance Its Books, Congress Could Learn Something from Texas.” It reads as a typical, Wall Street Journal-style paean to a low-tax, low-regulation state. While ostensibly trumpeting the budgetary genius of Comptroller Susan Combs, the Lone Star equivalent of No Labels favorite David Walker (a former U.S. comptroller touted as a “centrist” whose fulsome praise of Paul Ryan betrayed his true status as a conservative stalking horse), the article is really a big, fat unpaid advertisement for Texas. First McKinnon indulges in the delusion that the only way to evaluate a state is by a Club for Growth measure like “business climate”:

In Texas money goes further, with one of the lowest costs of living, one of the lightest tax burdens as a percent of income, and one of the lowest debt per capita ratios.

Well, wowser! I guess it doesn’t matter that the average wage is among the lowest in the nation, or that Texas leads all 50 states in the number of uninsured residents — a fact that Rick Perry, who has rejected the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, has no desire to remedy.

McKinnon maintains his obsession with the deficit, an issue that he has pursued with a relentlessness second only to the corporate-funded Fix the Debt folks, who would rather knock some dollars off the country’s Visa bill than tackle the unemployment problem or lend a hand to the financially stagnating middle class.

But the idea I find most interesting is requiring that every ballot measure in every bond election include the current amount of outstanding debt, the annual debt service payment, and how the proposed new debt will impact that figure. Here especially, information is power to the people.

“Power to the people” is a No Labels/Americans Elect catchphrase, but to McKinnon it apparently means the power to reject federal funding for women’s health care, slash funding for education, and set the income level for food stamps so low that a working parent can’t earn more than 27 percent of the poverty limit — Perry-era achievements, all.

But wait — it gets worse. There are plenty of conservative hacks praising states like Texas, where the minimum wage is rock-bottom and polluting companies are given get-out-of-jail-free cards. Unless the piece in question is an op-ed written by a governor or senator, however, the tone is usually more sober than laughably extravagant. Hyperbole is one thing; unhinged hyperbole is quite another. McKinnon’s boosterism is so lavish that he sounds as if he has come straight from the Visitors Information Bureau. He’s not content to dispense factoids like “Continually ranked the best state for businesses large or small, Texas added more than one-third of all new private-sector jobs from 2002 through 2012.” No, he takes it ten steps further, morphing into an official from the state’s tourism department. Texas isn’t just great at transparency, it is “leading the way.”

The piece de resistance:

Not immune to the challenges every state faces, the Texas Legislature, which meets only 140 days every other year, continues to focus on improving education outcomes, expanding healthcare options, and ensuring an adequate water supply to meet increasing population, agriculture and industry demands.

I can only assume this was copied verbatim from a Lone Star advertising brochure. Despite such huge challenges, Texas forges ahead! The legislature is such a model of efficiency that it only meets every other year! For 140 days! How it will tackle such nebulous problems as “expanding healthcare options” is beyond me, given that Perry has rejected the “option” of expanding coverage to his state’s poor. And if you’d like your healthcare options to include Planned Parenthood — well, you’re out of luck. Texas has stripped funding from those evil baby-killers, choosing instead to devote state funds to the sort of crisis pregnancy centers that counsel women about Jesus and promote discredited links between abortion and breast cancer.

The Madison Avenue language, the ad-ready copy . . . It’s enough to make you wonder whether the entire piece is a joke. Quick: The Daily Beast, or The Onion? Or perhaps just text cadged from TravelTex.com, where the motto is “It’s like a whole other country.” Wait — I’ve heard that somewhere before. Oh, right: the opening of McKinnon’s article:

Far more than 1,500 miles separate Austin, Texas, from Washington, D.C. The Lone Star State is really a whole ‘nother country.

Such sycophantic largesse can only be satire, right? If McKinnon isn’t on Rick Perry’s payroll, I’ll eat my Stetson. A few weeks back, The Atlantic caught a lot of flak for running a poorly labeled “paid content” advertorial for the Church of Scientology that painted a relentlessly positive picture of the controversial organization and its leader. The advertorial was eventually pulled, but its message was hardly any worse than McKinnon’s — and at least The Atlantic had the dignity not to attempt to pass the puff piece off as editorial content.

The Atlantic:

2012 was a milestone year for Scientology, with the religion expanding to more than 10,000 Churches, Missions and affiliated groups, spanning 167 nations–figures that represent a growth rate 20 times that of a decade ago.

McKinnon:

The state’s unemployment rate has fallen to a four-year low of 6.2 percent – even with its population explosion and the highest number of inbound moves from other states over the last 10 years.

The Atlantic:

The driving force behind this unparalleled era of growth is David Miscavige, ecclesiastical leader of the Scientology religion. Mr. Miscavige is unrelenting in his work for millions of parishioners and the cities served by Scientology Churches. …

McKinnon:

Combs tells taxpayers in Texas – and across the nation – that not only is the increasing debt burden theirs, so too is the power to do something about it . . . .Combs reflects the right kind of thinking in Texas, and is already leading the way to improve transparency and accountability.

All that’s missing is the requisite “Paid Content” disclaimer that even The Atlantic had the good sense to append to its Miscavige hagiography. I doubt a mea culpa like that put out by The Atlantic will be forthcoming from the Daily Beast. After all, McKinnon’s piece is supposedly editorial, not advertising. That’s a hard illusion to maintain, however, when you read such choice bits as these:

Here, Texas Comptroller Susan Combs is urging taxpayers to demand more – more answers, that is.

McKinnon surely has a career awaiting him at Young & Rubicam, J Walter Thompson, or BBDO. At McDonalds, you get more for your money — more burger, that is!

More junior-level ad copy:

And though the state may be mocked for its swagger, Texas has all the cattle to go with the hat.

Washington could learn a lesson or two (or even a few trillion) from the Texas model

Congress needs to look to the states – like Texas, where a balanced budget is constitutionally required, where spending decisions are tied directly to projected revenue, and where “power to the people” is actually the model of governance.

Self-proclaimed “pragmatists” like McKinnon come up with a lot of risible arguments to justify their all-encompassing desire to slash spending, but rarely do they make it so impossible for the reader to keep a straight face. McKinnon’s in-kind contribution to the Texas Tourism Bureau isn’t likely to go viral in the way of Tina Brown’s infamous “Dead Diana” cover or the asparagus-fellatio photo. But it does prove that, even without a print edition, The Daily Beast will maintain its Newsweek-era reputation for continually hitting new lows.

* Disclaimer: Not an actual screenshot from DTB. Duh.