PITTSBURGH (TNS) — It isn’t hard to imagine Gov. Josh Shapiro as one of those children who preferred “The McLaughlin Group” to “Sesame Street;” who told everyone he’d rather be a congressman than an astronaut; who collected campaign memorabilia instead of baseball cards or beanie babies.
After all, at the age of 6, he not only wrote letters to support persecuted Soviet Jews; he organized others to join him. At the University of Rochester, he became student body president as a freshman, then graduated in three years. Then he pursued a law degree at famously politically connected Georgetown while working on Capitol Hill. Three years later he was a state representative helping to pound out historic bipartisan compromises in Ed Rendell’s basement.
These youngsters, it must be said, are very annoying. I should know, because I was one of them. I went to a “camp” where high schoolers create their own Congress and spent hard money on a campaign management computer game. But I also collected beanie babies, which is probably why Josh Shapiro is the governor and I’m just writing about him.
Pocket aces
Ambitious children are particularly vexing because one suspects they are likely to hold real power someday, and probably should not. After all, the people least suited to power are generally those who want it most, such as those who organize their childhoods around running for office someday.
(Incidentally, this is a real problem with social media: If every person with a documented teenage indiscretion is disqualified, only people who have curated their personas from age 9 onwards will be eligible for office. And that will be very tedious.)
In this regard, however, Mr. Shapiro has been a pleasant surprise. He clearly has the competence to support his ambition, and the humility to surround himself with talented people who can execute his priorities better than he could on his own. Even Republicans, often in private but sometimes in public, have spoken with admiration of Mr. Shapiro’s raw ability to do the job he was elected to do.
And yet, one can’t help but notice the governor was dealt a pair of aces. While he had played them expertly until recently, his good fortune would have been hard to squander.
First, Mr. Shapiro had the easiest imaginable campaign for governor of Pennsylvania. He cleared the primary field and drew an opponent whom even Donald Trump surely thinks is a bit much. He hit every right note during the campaign, then sauntered into Harrisburg as something close to a consensus choice for the commonwealth’s chief executive.
Then, Mr. Shapiro inherited a state balance sheet with black numbers so large they would make even UPMC blush: a projected $6 billion surplus this year, plus a $5 billion “rainy day fund.” This allowed him to spread the wealth in his first budget address — which he delivered to the first Democratic House in over a decade. And his remaining antagonists, the Senate Republicans, have traditionally been more pliable than their lower-chamber colleagues.
In other words, Josh Shapiro applied his considerable talents to a game that was, as far as it can be, set to “easy.”
Beaten by the boss?
In the single-player video games popular when I was growing up, every level of play ended with a “boss.” Even if the rest of the round had been a breeze, the boss would usually ratchet up the difficulty considerably.
In Pennsylvania politics, the budget is the annual boss.
For a while, however, it looked like Mr. Shapiro would ace this test, as well. He had gotten the Senate Republicans on board with a school-choice proposal that also fulfilled a campaign promise and signaled openness to pragmatic cross-aisle solutions — the kind of triangulation trifecta the governor specializes in. All he needed to do was get his own team on side in the House, but he apparently miscalculated how toxic the $100 million scholarship program would be.
And so Mr. Shapiro double-crossed the Senate Republicans by agreeing to line-item veto the keystone of the compromise after the upper chamber had passed the bill. He then blamed that caucus for failing to reach an agreement with the House Democrats, a transparent attempt at blame-shifting: Surely the governor would have taken credit for the deal had it come through.
It was a moment where his cleverness crossed over into crassness, and he will pay for it for the rest of his term. The shadow of betrayal has been cast over every future negotiation with the governor’s office, whether about the budget or everyday legislation. His signature bipartisan accomplishments will be much, much harder to achieve.
And Mr. Shapiro’s insistence that only the competing caucuses can iron out their differences won’t cut it: He was elected as a dealmaker, not a passive ringleader. He can’t recede into his office now, at least without damaging the core of his credibility.
For their part, the Senate Republicans have no incentive to reconvene the chamber, a procedural necessity for the budget to become law, until the new session in September. The standoff has Harrisburg at a standstill until a new deal can be struck.
Josh Shapiro’s only choice now is to do what he has always done, from childhood through his fifth decade: Succeed. But every tick of the clock is a ratcheting of the difficulty of this test, the sternest he has yet faced. How he handles it will tell us if his talents really can match his ambition.
(Brandon McGinley is the deputy editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: bmcginley@post-gazette.com.)
