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.
. . . So Well Read. . . 