Robert F. McDonnell has found his pots of gold. He even looks like a leprechaun.
An audit of the Virginia Department of Transportation shows more than $1 billion in unspent money, allowing the Republican governor to crow about government mismanagement and toss some dirt the way of his predecessor, Timothy Kaine, who happens to be head of the national Democratic Party on the eve of important midterm elections.
In announcing the results of a 150-page audit by the Richmond accounting firm of Cherry, Bekaert and Holland, McDonnell bemoaned that the money was sitting around while average Virginians were sitting around in congested traffic. Kaine responded that squirreling away nearly six months worth of rainy-day money reflects prudence, not incompetence, on his part.
Therein lies a curious flip-flop in values.
McDonnell very much wants to position himself for future office as a tight-spending, ultra-frugal, anti-government politician. He came into office with a script, written by Republican governors in states such as Michigan, as a streamliner, reformer and privatizer. But the VDOT audit shows a few inconsistencies:
- If Kaine put away that much — perhaps, too much — money, doesn’t that show that a Democrat can be frugal, too? Do the Republicans have a lock on budget discipline? They sure talk that way. Of course, that’s forgetting Bill Clinton’s surplus and George W. Bush’s free-spending ways.
- If there are more than a billion unspent bucks in VDOT’s budget, why is there such urgency in selling off the state’s ABC stores, presumably to get desperately needed money for the state’s roads? Or is the ABC plan, which has plenty of quirks and critics, just another complex effort to give McDonnell some kind of legacy?
- Where is the windfall going to go? It could be that it ends up as the state’s cash portion for a big privatization project to build a new superhighway from Interstate 95 in Petersburg along U.S. 460 to Tidewater. But shouldn’t it go to filling potholes and general maintenance that many of the state’s highways so badly need? U.S. 460 is McDonnell’s pet project and he needs state cash to make it work.
In any event, Kaine is drawing criticism for being too frugal. That’s a strange charge coming from a limited-government Republican.
But the entire investigatory nature of McDonnell’s campaign against government is somehow sounding a sour note. What it has turned up is that his Democratic predecessor may have put too much in a rainy day fund. The audit found no evidence of fraud.
Only nine months into his term, McDonnell has had his share of missteps, from offshore oil drilling to forgetting about slavery to being overshadowed by aggressive, hard-right attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli. He really wants to be seen as a reformer. Being inconsistent about his philosophy won’t help him.
This raises another point about McDonnell, given all the contradictions. It may very well be that the guy just isn’t that bright. He’s certainly not a very good politician. He never seems to be ahead of the curve. He’s always putting himself inadvertently in positions that he can’t control. Say what you want about Cuccinelli, but he does seem to be setting agendas rather than reacting to them.
Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling is trying to set himself up as McDonnell’s successor in the very Virginian traditional approach that dates back to the Byrd Organization days. In this, he has some support in some corners, such as the perennially out-of-touch Richmond Times-Dispatch that still is more than a half a century behind the times. Cuccinelli has made nosies he may challenge Bolling for the Republican nomination.
It could be that McDonnell has already become a has-been governor.
Peter Galuszka
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