THE VOTERS ALWAYS WELCOME IT...:

Janet Napolitano and the New Third Way: Arizona's governor has contained Republicans, reinvigorated Democrats, and provided a new model for progressive politics in the West. (Dana Goldstein | July 7, 2008, American Prospect)

Though Napolitano successfully turned a $1 billion deficit into a surplus during her first term, the state is back in the red this year, putting the conservative opposition in no mood to create new programs. Nevertheless, Napolitano is engaged in an ongoing battle with the state legislature to make more low- and middle-income children eligible for public health insurance. She is also trying to convince Arizonans to approve an increase in the sales tax in order to fund new transportation infrastructure, including a light rail line connecting Tucson, Phoenix, and Flagstaff. The balancing act between big policy proposals and stubborn budgetary restrictions is one with which Napolitano is familiar; her governing record is full of tit-for-tat deals that ensured many of her priorities were pushed through. By exempting developers from contributing to costs for new roads, for example, Napolitano has persuaded the homebuilder's association, Arizona's most powerful industry lobby and a traditional foe of mass transit, not only to support her transportation initiative but to kick in $100,000 toward advertisements convincing voters to approve it.

Napolitano has taken a similar tack on education. She managed to enact universal, full-day kindergarten in 2004 by pairing the program with conservative-friendly tax cuts. In order to secure a $100 million pay raise for K-12 teachers, she gave in to Republican demands for a $5 million private school voucher program for special-ed students, a deal she calls one of her biggest concessions. "I don't like vouchers," she says with typical bluntness.

But for every compromise, there are times when Napolitano put her foot down hard and fast. On the environment, she enrolled Arizona in a Western Climate Initiative that seeks to impose a regional cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. She has also exercised her veto power more often than any governor in Arizona's history; state Republicans have bestowed upon her the moniker "Governor No." She nixed legislation that would have made it a crime for day laborers to look for work on public streets, and in May she pulled $1.6 million that Maricopa County police were using to conduct immigration raids in the Latino community. Being the savvy operator and former attorney general that she is, Napolitano immediately announced she was reinvesting the funds in a program to track down at-large fugitives. And although she signed one of the most restrictive anti-immigration bills in the country, an employer sanctions law that enforces stiff penalties for hiring undocumented workers, she did so in large part to prevent Republicans from placing an even more punishing measure on the state's November ballot.

...but to get your partisans to accept the Third Way you always have to pretend that yours is new and different and not associated with those distasteful past compromises.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 8, 2008 8:29 PM