ONLY GOVERNORS SHOULD BE PRESIDENTS:

Governors made a terrible showing in the Democratic presidential primaries this year. Montana Governor Steve Bullock quietly slipped into and out of the race without making much of an impression at all. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper followed the same course. And while the governor of my home state of Washington, Jay Inslee, managed to make climate change a major issue in the race, he too dropped out of the race long before a single ballot had been cast. At the time, pundits leveraged the failure of those campaigns into columns wondering if governors had lost all clout in national politics. 

Then came coronavirus, and governors who took swift and decisive action to lessen the impact of the pandemic on their states -- Republican and Democratic alike -- are now polling in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Even their worst partisan critics are largely praising governors for leading the way at a time when the federal response has been at best muddled and at worst actively harmful to the public health.

The lesson to be taken from this? People like it when their leaders lead. They want their leaders to explain and identify the problem, and then take decisive action to solve the problem. At a time when trust in federal government institutions are polling at all-time lows, it seems that the real frustration voters are expressing is not so much an ideological protest as it is an exasperation at the lack of leadership they've seen from Washington, D.C.

Tweet   @brothersjudd